Rethinking Evolutionary Psychology

By: Andrew Goldfinch

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Synopsis: In Rethinking Evolutionary Psychology, Andrew Goldfinch dramatically reframes the way we think about evolutionary psychology. Rather than follow the standard way of thinking about evolutionary psychology as a paradigm and a pretender metatheory of the evolutionary behavioural sciences, Goldfinch argues that evolutionary psychology is better thought of as a heuristic research programme within the evolutionary behavioural sciences. Elucidating evolutionary psychology as a heuristic illuminates those aspects of adaptationist methodology in psychology that deserve serious attention. It reveals evolutionary psychology to be a unique set of concepts, research strategies and recipes for generating new and bold discoveries in psychology; a searchlight that can identify and chart plausible and unexplored research trajectories; a constrained yet creative way to win new facts that would otherwise be lost to the infinite space of random trial and error.