Over at Libertarianism.org, Sharon Presley has a new piece critizing evolutionary psychology in which I am listed first among libertarians and others who have “criticized [evolutionary psychology] for serious flaws in its research.”  To support that claim about me and enlist my work in her cause, she links to my BHL post “Explanation is not Justification.” If you read that post carefully, you can see several things that suggest it does not support the claim that I am either anti-EP or that I find serious flaws in its research. Because I think that is an inaccurate portrayal of my views on EP, I want to take a minute to set the record straight.

Here is the relevant passage in the BHL post, so you can judge for yourself if Sharon’s description of my views is accurate:

Let me start by saying that I like evolutionary psychology a lot. It’s a way of understanding behavior that is very congenial to economists, with its emphasis on explaining the functionality of certain behaviors in terms of evolutionary costs and benefits, and its broad spontaneous order orientation. As an explanation of a variety of human behaviors and attitudes, I think it can be very useful, though one has to watch out for “just so” stories. However…

There’s a lot of bad evolutionary psychology out there, particularly in the hands of popularizers. It can easily be turned from an explanation of why we do the things we do into a justification for all kinds of behaviors that we might like to discourage. As a very simple example, it’s easy enough to provide an evolutionary explanation for why men might like polygyny. Just because men have evolved to desire a large number partners to spread their genetic material, however, that is not a justification for adopting polygyny as a social institution. But to read some of the comments about the gender and rape issues, there seems to be a subset of libertarians who think that because we evolved behavior or disposition X, then engaging in that behavior or acting on that disposition is just fine. (Side note: I suspect many of these folks are on the paleo diet for similar reasons!)

What seems clear to me, and I think any reader, are four things:

1. I am not criticizing EP for “serious flaws in its research.”
2. I am mostly criticizing popularizations of EP, especially those that are unable to distinguish between the use of EP to explain a phenomenon and its use to justify a phenomenon.
3. In fact, I find much that is useful in EP when used with caution. I have a discussion of it in my book, and that discussion is favorable.
4. And most clearly of all, I explicitly say in that post that I like EP “a lot.”

Any post that contains a sentence where I say “I like evolutionary psychology a lot” does not seem a good source to support the claim that I am a critic of serious flaws in its research or to create the impression that I don’t find much of value in it.

For the record, I still like evolutionary psychology a lot.

And I like Steven Pinker’s book a lot too.

[The first paragraph has been edited for clarity to indicate that Sharon’s piece is critical of EP and inappropriately enlists my work in her cause.]