Evolutionary Psychology: Death or Transformative Crisis?

The concept of domain-specific information processing is central to early evolutionary psychology. On a classical view, mindreading, imitation and language are domain-specific mental adaptations, favoured by natural selection for the survival advantage brought to hominins during their evolutionary history. In contrast, contemporary evolutionary accounts of the human mind use the concept of domain-specificity in a more liberal way. Domain-specific mental mechanisms are not necessarily evolved by natural selection, but result from combinations of domain-general learning, culture, and hardwired processes. Consequently, the attribution of domain-specificity has lost predictive power because it cannot be used to make predictions on the evolutionary origin of mental traits. A series of considerations are made on the future of evolutionary psychology, and on what we can really obtain through an evolutionary study of the human mind.