Contrary to the received view on the left, it's not crazy to think that the fact that we are biological organisms, specifically primate with the central nervous systems of hunter-gatherers, is likely to do some explanatory work in accounting for our behavior.
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Yup.
Who can sensibly argue with this?
Things are as smooth and useful as a newly paved stretch of highway when evo psych practitioners (or populizers) remember the **some explanatory work** scope of their field and exercise extreme caution in going for the human behavior explanatory sweepstakes.
Let's listen in on a Wikipedia entry:
Evolutionary psychology (or EP) proposes that human and primate cognition and behavior could be better understood by examining them in light of human and primate evolutionary history. Specifically, EP proposes that the primate brain comprises a large number of functional mechanisms, called Evolved Psychological Mechanisms (EPM's) that evolved by natural selection to effect or facilitate the reproduction of the organism. These mechanisms are universal in the species, with the exception that some will be specific to one sex or to individuals of a certain age. Uncontroversial examples of psychological adaptations include vision, hearing, memory, and motor control. More controversial examples include differences in male and female mating preferences and strategies, temperaments and cognitive abilities, incest avoidance mechanisms, cheater detection mechanisms and capture-bonding.
[...]
full at --
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology >
...
Note the pleasingly logical division between **uncontroversial** and **more controversial** examples -- vision and motor control adaptations as opposed to ripping yarns about why we mate as we do, and how faithful (or unfaithful) we are to those mates.
It's this second category of theory -- generator of ambitious popularizations like this:
<http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-0679763996-25 >
or this...
<http://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/otherbooks/mr_redqueen.html >
that I raise a skeptical eyebrow to.
.d.