Editing Evolutionary psychology (section)

===Testability of hypotheses===
{{See also|Just-so story}}

A frequent critique of the discipline is that the hypotheses of evolutionary psychology are frequently arbitrary and difficult or impossible to adequately test, thus questioning its status as an actual scientific discipline, for example because many current traits probably evolved to serve different functions than they do now.<ref name=Psychology/><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Ryle |first1=Anthony |year=2005 |title=The Relevance of Evolutionary Psychology for Psychotherapy |journal=British Journal of Psychotherapy |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=375–88 |doi=10.1111/j.1752-0118.2005.tb00225.x }}</ref> Thus because there are a potentially infinite number of alternative explanations for why a trait evolved, critics contend that it is impossible to determine the exact explanation.<ref name="Murphy, Dominic pp. 161-184">Murphy, Dominic. "Adaptationism and psychological explanation." In Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 161-184. Springer, Boston, MA, 2003.</ref> While evolutionary psychology hypotheses are difficult to test, evolutionary psychologists assert that it is not impossible.<ref name=Buss-Haselton-2007-pp.26-7>"Testing ideas about the evolutionary origins of psychological phenomena is indeed a challenging task, but not an impossible one" (Buss et al. 1998; Pinker, 1997b).</ref> Part of the critique of the scientific base of evolutionary psychology includes a critique of the concept of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA). Some critics have argued that researchers know so little about the environment in which ''Homo sapiens'' evolved that explaining specific traits as an adaption to that environment becomes highly speculative.<ref name=Plotkin-Henry-p.149>Plotkin, Henry. 2004 Evolutionary thought in Psychology: A Brief History. Blackwell. p. 149.</ref> Evolutionary psychologists respond that they do know many things about this environment, including the facts that present day humans' ancestors were hunter-gatherers, that they generally lived in small tribes, etc.<ref>The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2005), David M. Buss, Chapter 1, pp. 5–67, Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides</ref> Edward Hagen argues that the human past environments were not radically different in the same sense as the Carboniferous or Jurassic periods and that the animal and plant taxa of the era were similar to those of the modern world, as was the geology and ecology. Hagen argues that few would deny that other organs evolved in the EEA (for example, lungs evolving in an oxygen rich atmosphere) yet critics question whether or not the brain's EEA is truly knowable, which he argues constitutes selective scepticism. Hagen also argues that most evolutionary psychology research is based on the fact that females can get pregnant and males cannot, which Hagen observes was also true in the EEA.<ref>Hagen, Edward H. [https://web.archive.org/web/20190222082923/http://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3c0a/00542025db83139099e0ce4f3c17b8369ab6.pdf ''Invariant world, invariant mind. Evolutionary psychology and its critics''.] (2014).</ref><ref>Hagen, Edward H. [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.375.5642&rep=rep1&type=pdf ''Controversial issues in evolutionary psychology''.] The handbook of evolutionary psychology (2005): 145-173.</ref>

John Alcock describes this as the "No Time Machine Argument", as critics are arguing that since it is not possible to travel back in time to the EEA, then it cannot be determined what was going on there and thus what was adaptive. Alcock argues that present-day evidence allows researchers to be reasonably confident about the conditions of the EEA and that the fact that so many human behaviours are adaptive in the ''current'' environment is evidence that the ancestral environment of humans had much in common with the present one, as these behaviours would have evolved in the ancestral environment. Thus Alcock concludes that researchers can make predictions on the adaptive value of traits.<ref>Maryanski, A., Machalek, R. and Turner, J.H., 2015. Handbook on evolution and society: Toward an evolutionary social science. Routledge. pp.161-163</ref> Similarly, [[Dominic Murphy]] argues that alternative explanations cannot just be forwarded but instead need their own evidence and predictions - if one explanation makes predictions that the others cannot, it is reasonable to have confidence in that explanation. In addition, Murphy argues that other historical sciences also make predictions about modern phenomena to come up with explanations about past phenomena, for example, cosmologists look for evidence for what we would expect to see in the modern-day if the Big Bang was true, while geologists make predictions about modern phenomena to determine if an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Murphy argues that if other historical disciplines can conduct tests without a time machine, then the onus is on the critics to show why evolutionary psychology is untestable if other historical disciplines are not, as "methods should be judged across the board, not singled out for ridicule in one context."<ref name="Murphy, Dominic pp. 161-184"/>