The Evolution Files

If you search the Epstein dump, you’ll get 2,2023 results for “evolution”. Granted many of the documents are duplicated. But what do we find if we narrow our search? 

Evolutionary psychology appears 44 times. And that doesn’t include all of Epstein’s interlocutors who take that perspective.  Epstein was a fan of evolutionary psychology and of anything adjacent to it, like “cultural evolution”, “the evolution of cooperation“, and sociobiology.  

One correspondence in the Epstein dump stood out to me (even more than what different stars of the field, like Trivers, were writing to him) was the communication with the head of Nautilus magazine. 

I’ve noticed over the years something about Nautilus that I just don’t see in, say, Scientific American or American Scientist as much: evolutionary psychology. Here’s an example: Nurture Alone Can’t Explain Male Aggression.

What was alarming about that exchange between Epstein and Nautilus was the goal to get the magazine into high schools. Maybe they succeeded. I have no idea. And the interest in schools was not isolated to the Nautilus exchanges: Epstein and his friends were intent on improving science, and especially evolution, education. Given their “view of life” and their powerful wealth, well, that’s just another horrifying facet to uncover in this horror story. 

An evolutionary view of life rooted in sociobiology and/or evolutionary psychology is far more likely to be sexist and racist. What evidence do I have? I’m alive right now. I live in this world. I live in these dominant myths that people believe and enact. Evolution is true, but evolutionary psychology is not a necessary part of that truth. Not even close.

Sociobiology/ evolutionary psychology is the only evolutionary perspective that can offer up evolutionary explanations for old men’s attraction to girls under eighteen. And people believe it as “just how humans evolved… whatdya gonna do? It’s science. And science doesn’t care about what you think.” 

Unfortunately evolutionary psychology is the mainstream view of human evolution in the zeitgeist. And that’s not just because of magazines like Nautilus. Who do you think thought it all up in the first place? Who do you think gives it its enduring authority? Professors. And they attract thousands upon thousands to their lecture halls each year.

You don’t have to react against any of evolutionary psychology’s racist, sexist, or pedophilia-related outcomes that I listed above to reject it as an evolutionary view. You just have to dig a little into what is known in biology and what is unknown. Once you do, then you can appreciate just how “theorized” evolutionary psychology is. 

It has the same problem that less politically salient aspects of evolutionary biology have: adaptationism. Evo psych can also be essentialist. And out here in the zeitgeist adaptationism, combined with all kinds of outdated impressions of evolution, continue to trick so many people into believing that what has been completely made-up about the human evolutionary past is, instead, the facts derived from the laws of nature. 

I have yet to see evolutionary psychology make good scientific sense to my mind. And that’s why I absolutely loved this paper by Subrena E. Smith: Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible? Her answer is no. 

Over the years that I spent working with the physical remains of our evolutionary history, I have come to see that so much evolutionary thinking as it pertains to behavioral and psychological evolution is not verifiable, testable, or falsifiable, and falls prey to the temptation/habit to reduce complex phenomena to simplistic, imaginary, or all-out black-boxed biology. And that problem extends to the simple act of theorizing natural selection and sexual selection in the past, both of which involve so much imaginary behavior that can never ever be known. 

If you really want to know how evolution works, and what we are capable of knowing about how it occurred in the distant past, you’ve got to read some difficult things that are no where near as scintillating as a book on evolutionary psychology!

Source: http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-evolution-files.html