关于进化心理学的意见分歧之大令人惊讶。一些非常优秀的哲学家和认知科学家非常喜欢这种类型。其他同样优秀的哲学家和认知科学家似乎认为它没有什么价值。The philosopher of biology John Dupre, who was a guest on our show a few weeks back talking about genetic determinism, says the following about the evolutionary psychology of sex and gender:

... [it] offers us mainly simplifications and banalities about human behavior with little convincing illumination of how they came to be banal. It offers no account of the great differences in behavior across cultures, which is exactly what we want to know if we were interested in exercising any measure of of control over changes in these phenomena. It offers no account of why different people develop such diverse sexual proclivities (notoriously, it has nothing to but the most absurd evolutionary fantasies to offer in explanation of homosexuality). And it offers no account of how complex motivations underlying sexual behavior interact with the pursuit of many other goals that inform the lives of most humans. In fact it offers us nothing, unless perhaps a spurious sense of the immutability of the behaviours that happen to characterize our own contemporary societies. This is scarcely the revolution in our undertanding of human behaviorus so enthusiastically advertized by the exponents and camp-followers of evolutionary psychology.

Though Dupre is perhaps more extreme than many others, he certainly isn't alone in heaping at least some degree of scorn on evolutionary psychology. But I don't think evolutionary psychology is nearly as bad off as its worst critics think.

Some criticisms of evolutionary psychology aren't really criticisms of the research program itself, but are really criticisms of the misappropriation of the results of evolutionary psychology. For example, some people, especially on the political right, think that biology determines appropriate gender roles in some direct and inflexible way. They probably don't think this directly because of evolutionary psychology, but someone with a merely passing acquaintance with the results of evolutionary psychology might think that those results somehow justify such a view. But nothing in evolutionary psychology suggest that biology directly and inflexibly determines gender roles. Certainly nothing in evolutionary psychology suggests anything about what the distribution of gender rolesoughtto be in twenty-first century cultures.

另一方面，一些左派倾向的人倾向于认为，性别是“一路向下”由社会构建的。’”有时，这些人似乎认为文化不受生理因素的影响。进化心理学确实表明，这种将生物和文化视为两种截然不同的事物、仅以最低限度的方式联系在一起的观点是不可持续的。在这一点上，我认为进化心理学家实际上比批评他们的人更有说服力。

I'll use the example of gender roles to illustrate what I mean. Think about it this way. There is a massive three way gender-coordination problem faced by ours and any other species that reproduces sexually. Males have to coordinate with males, so that they don't kill each other over the potential female partners. Females have to coordinate with females so that they don't kill each other over potential male partners. And females and males have to coordinate with each other so that mate selection strategies and preferences are convergent rather than divergent.

There are certainly lots of solutions to the set of coordination problems that sexually reproducing species face. Some of them are probably not very cognitively or computationally "demanding" to use not quite the right word. But in creatures like us who have the capacity for a complex form of social life, who remain immature and dependent on parental support for a comparatively long period of our lives, any "solution" to the three way coordination problem is going to be massively tied up with all sorts of social structures, including facts about the distinctive biological structure of a characteristically human reproductive life. I mean by that that we spend a comparatively long time as prepubescent youth, during which we have a whole lot of socialization and cultural knowledge to acquire.

Now even if you think, as I do, that both our capacity for a distinctive form of social life and the general structure of an individual human life are the result of some sort of evolutionary process, it certainly doesn't follow that evolution gave us a single solution to the three way coordination problem in the sense of giving us a fixed set of gender roles once and for all. But it wouldn't be surprising, it seems to me, if it turned out that evolution supplied us with cognitive and emotive make ups that in some way more or less tightly constrain the possible solutions to the three way coordination problems. How tightly? I can't say. But obviously not so tightly that gender roles are fixed across cultures. I suspect that not so loosely that just anything goes. Right now that's just a hunch in need of evidence and argument.

然而，这并不是说目前没有证据。例如，埃莉诺·麦考比(Eleanor Macoby)关于儿童游戏小组结构和性别社会化动态的研究，至少对我来说，表明性别角色的分配可能存在一些进化上的限制。例如，事实证明，在世界各地，在几乎所有的人类文化中，都存在着我们可能称之为性别角色的划分。此外，性别角色的划分很早就开始了，似乎孩子本身在性别角色的划分中起着主要作用。我的意思是说，大约从他们进入学前班或其他一些与他们年龄相仿的孩子第一次接触的时候起，孩子们就开始把自己分成男孩和女孩的游戏小组。女生游戏团体与男生游戏团体有不同的游戏风格。总的来说，女孩更喜欢在女孩游戏群中玩耍，而男孩更喜欢在男孩游戏群中玩耍。即使教师和其他成年人尽最大努力促进性别融合，这种情况仍然发生。此外，女孩和男孩“警察”的性别角色不同。女孩显然比男孩更能容忍想要加入女子团体的男孩和想要加入男子团体的女孩。 Boys, on the other hand, are much more severe gender police. Certainly styles of play, for both girls and boys, vary from culture to culture. But the apparent high level regularity, at least as I understand the work, is that in many cultures boys and girls will segregate themselves in this way.

我现在不想把这类事情搞得太复杂。我当然不认为有任何规范性的主张可以建立在这种关于什么是适当的性别角色划分的基础上。但我确实认为，通过尝试从“社会动态”的角度来思考我们的三向协调问题，以及从进化的角度来思考，自然选择教会了我们什么，如果有的话，什么限制了性别协调问题的解决方案，而这些问题是真正可能的社会/文化秩序可以“安顿”的，这是非常值得做的。当然，历史、文化和权力分配是约束的来源，但可能有些约束来自于逐渐灌输的关于男性/女性认知/情感构成的一般结构的事实。

这种方法的一个真正深刻的问题是，我们不能轻易地分离出各种限制因素的贡献。但这并不意味着不值得尝试找出各种约束是什么，它们约束有多紧密，以及为什么只有这些约束因素而不是其他因素。当然，如果我们要在这些问题上取得进展，我们需要实证(和其他)方法和一些真实的数据。有人可能会担心，我们既没有数据，也没有方法。我认为，这种担忧是有原因的。在某种程度上，这是因为我们只完成了在文化可能性空间中的一次实际行走的一部分。我们事先不知道那个空间到底有多大，也不知道我们自己在那个可能性空间中的行走有多“古怪”和特别。

If we could more freely employ the method of hypothesis testing and generation, we would certainly be a lot better off. Since history provides us with some alternative arrangements and since social experimentation -- especially in an age like ours -- happens relatively constantly, it is not as though we have no clue about the space of possibilities. But it's admittedly hard to separate out the contributions of the different possible constraining sources when you can't freely manipulate the data and experiment to your heart's content. Not to say it's hopeless. Just hard.

In spite of these limitatins, I guess I still think that one of the really cool things about evolutionary psychology is that it is pretty much a brand new style of hypothesis generator for some really hard problems. I think people underestimate the importance of simply having a new source of hypotheses on the table. It's that underestimation that leads many to curtly dismiss as yet unconfirmed evolutionary hypotheses as so many "just so" stories.

诚然，我们目前正处于探索阶段，在这个阶段，产生进化假说要比测试和确认它们容易得多。部分原因是自然选择大多是过去的事情，因为没有原始人类认知结构的化石记录，测试关于思维结构的进化假说注定是一件非常困难的事情。我欣然承认这一点。我甚至不能完全确定它能做到。

Since testing evolutionary hypotheses is relatively hard, and generating them is relatively easy, one might be tempted to think that we should just set such hypotheses to one side as more trouble than the are theoretically worth. That would be a mistake. What really is required is just a little modesty -- well, maybe a lot of modesty -- about what you can and can't actually establish at this stage in the history of inquiry.

Of course, culture formation doesn't always wait on scientific progress. So we will go on trying to construct our culture, even if science can't tell us anything terribly deep about the possibility space we are walking through or the constraint we will bump up against, in the attempt. But that happens all the time. Unfortunately, lots of time when science "catches up" it turns out that we attempting to construct a culture on a foundation that wouldn't support it. But we're pretty good at living for generation in castles built on sand.