What is the deal with Evolutionary Psychology?
I like the idea, but I cant find much on it that doesn't seem obviously politically motivated. I just want to get closer to the truth goddamnit! On one hand, we have right-wing personalities making it look bad because they're trying to use it to justify and push their shitty agendas. On the other, it seems that most people who are sympathetic to EP are working in Cognitive Science, Moral Psychology and Evolutionary Biology, while most of its critics are working in Philosophy of Science (especially Philosophy of Biology) and Philosophy of Mind. So there already seems to be a big division in the kinds of approaches being employed, and I?m worried that these divisions in knowledge are already implicitly political in first place (kind of like how analytics and conties don't usually get on well because they have entirely different methods).
Anyway, what we end up with is a whole bunch of pop-science books by people like Haidt, Pinker, Dawkins, (Dennett?) and Saad -- with Saad and Pinker, in one way or another, being associated with the alt-right movement.
It seems like EP, at heart, is a political tool that seeks to legitimise some disturbing political assumptions. But then I wonder if this apparent fact has led to a kind of overreaction to anything related to EP, and so it's dismissed at face value. There appears to be some wholesome discussion once you delve deeper. For example, according to SEP article on EP, many philosophers critical of it are "unabashedly enthusiastic about efforts to apply evolutionary theory to human psychology." And instead of being sceptical of the project more generally, the disagreement surrounds the nature of adaption and the extent to which the mind is modular, and so on. Everything points to evolutionary psychology being new on block, and so there?s understandably a lot of ongoing debate that might take some time to settle.
Are there any good articles that further diagnose the issues raised above? Do you think Evolutionary Psychology is total sophistry, or are there good kinds of EP and bad kinds? Can you get behind any of the researchers in the area?