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Vladimir_M comments on Evolutionary psychology: evolving three eyed monsters - Less Wrong
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This is one of those issues in science where the controversies are ideological in origin, so one should not put too much trust in the prevailing opinions in the academic establishment (especially publicly expressed ones).
Basically, the problem is that application of evolutionary theory to human behavior (i.e. human sociobiology) quickly leads into territory that is, from today's predominant ideological perspective, too frightful to contemplate. Some 30-40 years ago, there was a raging controversy over whether human sociobiology is a legitimate field of inquiry. Its proponents argued that it's just a regular application of evolutionary theory, while its opponents maintained that it's epistemologically flawed and at the same time motivated by evil and dangerous ideology. The former, of course, claimed in return that the latter were themselves motivated by fear of their own ideology being falsified.
As the outcome of this controversy, around two decades ago a compromise was struck. The field would be recognized as a legitimate academic discipline, but under a tacit agreement to remain limited to questions with relatively low ideological impact, and insofar as ideological spin is put on the results, it would be in a respectable direction. (The opening essay in The Adapted Mind has a pretty explicit statement of these founding principles.) Moreover, the field would be rebranded as "evolutionary psychology," abandoning the "sociobiology" moniker, which had, as a result of the prior controversies, acquired sinister connotations.
This new field has been successful in building a good public image, and some of its practitioners have become prominent and respectable public intellectuals. On the other hand, as may be expected, the more hard-line anti-sociobiology ideologues have continued to be its harsh critics, and to this day, discussion about its fundamental epistemological validity has remained an ideological battleground.
Other issue is that the evolutionary psychology escapes into describing every single behaviour as evolved, instead of considering the politically loaded option that e.g. some races can be more regulated for violence than others, as result of selective pressure, instead of evolving some nice sounding cognitive module that resolves their problems in non-violent way, or only leads to some fine grained violence. In the evolutionary psychology there's little talk of adjustment of basic pre-existing emotions.
That's more because evolutionary psychologists are more concerned with describing behavior than the details of the mechanism by which that behavior comes about.
The gazelle sees backwards by moving eyes to the sides rather than by evolving eye on back of the head.
Ignoring the mechanisms is very foolish. edit: also many of the evolutionary psychologists propose a large number of domain specific modules as a mechanism, which is akin to proposing back eye as the means by which gazelle sees backwards. The gazelle ain't going to evolve the eye on back of the head, it got 2 eyes which it can move around gradually.
Not when most of your evidence is in the form of observations of behavior rather than counting number of eyes.
then don't be making claims about number of eyes, that's the point about evo-psych and the cognitive modules of theirs.