For the past few decades, evolutionary psychology has been one of the hottest fields in science. Every time you read a newspaper, a magazine or listen to the radio, there’s a good chance you will run across a story purporting to explain modern human behavior in Darwinian terms.
The “Holy Grail” of such explanations is the attempt to explain human altruism. When the late philosopher Michael Stove called evolution a “ridiculous slander to human beings,” he had our capacity for kindness, generosity, and other moral conduct in mind. It’s Darwinism’s commitment to survival of the fittest that can’t explain this most essential part of being human—caring for others.
Earlier this month, Harvard’s Standing Committee on Professional Conduct found professor Marc Hauser, a leader in the field of evolutionary psychology, guilty of “scientific misconduct.”
The finding followed a three-year investigation into allegations Hauser had fudged his data on the cognitive abilities of cotton-top tamarins. Those are monkeys. That may sound obscure, but the goal of Hauser’s research was to develop a “science of morality” or, more accurately, a philosophy masquerading as a science.
In short, evolutionary psychology is a philosophy in search of data. And without actual evidence, all that people like Hauser are left with are unsubstantiated propositions that are contradicted by millennia of human experience.
The discrediting of Hauser’s work leaves Darwinism and evolutionary psychology without an explanation for altruism and self-sacrifice–the very qualities that distinguish us from the rest of creation.
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