The Importance of Evolutionary Psychology

The social sciences have a problem: they aren’t actually very scientific. Much of what we encounter in a social sciences curriculum is based merely on assertion and has been passed down on the grounds that “if someone important said it, then it must be worth repeating.” This is why we’ve seen enormous progress in the “hard” sciences of physics, mathematics, engineering, biology, chemistry, and so on but very little tangible progress in the social sciences.

Here’s why: in the “hard” sciences, assertion is without merit. What matters is demonstrable proof.

There are several ways to get to proof. Often, there’s an existing theory. Then one or more repeated observations reveal a phenomenon that isn’t predicted by and therefore isn’t explained by the existing theory. An example of this is the apparent retrograde motion of Mercury around our Sun; it doesn’t correspond to the prediction of its orbit made by the mathematics of Newtonian theory. So we realize we need a different theory that not only explains everything in Newtonian mechanics but also accounts for the observed behavior of Mercury. Along comes an unknown young man called Albert Einstein with the idea that spacetime is a unified entity and that it is distorted by mass; his equations not only account for Mercury’s movement around our Sun but also make important predictions that can be tested…