Sociolbiology Again (Was Re: [lbo-talk] Language of

[Luke Weiger]

Miles, "Evolutionary psychologists claim that the 'environment of
evolutionary adaptedness' is a relatively short period of time in human
prehistory, and like Luke, assert that this period played a 'particularly
huge role in our evolution'."

Actually we're not all of the same mind on the issue (of course anyone who
takes evolutionary psychology seriously would grant that there was no
_single_ environment of evolutionary adaptation--the EEA is a
simplification, but also a far more useful simplification than you seem to
think).  Obviously, though, there are some periods of our shared
evolutionary history that our more useful for generating ev psych hypotheses
than others--if the goal is to understand e.g. why human males behave
differently from human females, better to think about the problems cavemen
faced than those of the first fish to have crawled out of the sea.

-- Luke