Introducing the New Evolutionary Paradigm in Anthropology

Résumé

As any other approach in the social sciences, evolutionary psychology and/or cognitive science have developed in many directions, and are thus hard to introduce briefly. Therefore, the papers in this issue have been selected so as to reflect, to a certain extent, the variety of the paradigm (or paradigms). For this reason, the reader may at first even find it hard to extract a single theo­retical, epistemological, or methodological framework subsuming them all. There may even be no such framework.

Why evolutionary psychology now? There is a number of answers to this question. The first and the most obvious one is that this approach is, and, for some years now, has consistently been, gaining prominence in the anthropo­logical circles. Of course, I am not talking about "evolutionary" approaches in any classical sense: not the once canonical writings of Tylor and Fraser; not the Social Darwinism that was at times (wrongly) inferred from them; much less even the sociobiological radicalization of the arguments.

Herein lies the second reason for the choice of this paradigm: I believe there is a general lack of understanding as to what "evolutionary psychology" actually means, and this can be a source of many misunderstandings and conflicts between its supporters and opponents.