Evolutionary psychology has one major gap: It derives all it's assumptions from current culture. From everything I've seen on the subject, they project our current society onto the past and make their judgments from that starting point.
Here's the problem: For a huge portion of our evolution, our current societies did not exist. They see our current women, who seek marriage and monogamy, and project that onto the past... forgetting that tribal humans hunted and gathered as groups, and were largely socialist, sharing the gains among the entire tribe. This leads them to conclusions such as "women aren't sexual" or "women seek a provider" when in fact they are ignoring the deeper biological drives.
Frankly, I think evolutionary psychology is almost completely bogus.
This is simply untrue. I encourage you to study evolutionary psychology and read the books cited in my original article. Evolutionary psychology is anchored in the findings of anthropology, archaeology, biology, etc. it seeks to explain the behavior of humans throughout all ages, even prehistoric times, and it does so quite well.
Yeah, that above comment is only a limited perception with nothing to back it up. Mere speculation, uninformed opinion at best.
OK then explain something to me. I readily admit that I'm no expert on evolutionary psych... yet whenever I hear monogamy discussed, evolutionary psych is used to point out that women seek out a "good provider."
Yet, whenever I read/watch anything in anthropology about tribal culture... the men all hunt as a group, and the women all gather as a group. Food is shared more or less equally among the tribe while elders actually teach and watch over the children.
So why would a woman care specifically about "a good provider?" That idea seems rooted in modern day societies (or at least post-agrarian ones) where a man earns a living to support his family. It's a fundamentally different model for families than we would have had during most of our actual evolution.
Side note: New to steem... do you not get notifications on replies to comments? I just happened to see these looking through my wallet trying to figure things out.
Great point! I get where you're coming from now.
There are two schools of thought among evolutionary psychologists. I'll call them the orthodox view and the minority view. To your point, the orthodox view has indeed been influenced in many ways by modern customs. The minority view (which is gaining) is critical of the orthodox view for this reason and others.
The minority view, which I think answers your question directly, is best laid out in the book Sex at Dawn. It explains communal/tribal living quite well and contradicts the orthodox view.
Currently there's not built-in notification on replies, though that's coming. For now you can at least see all your replies in one place. Just tap the circle at the top right of your web browser page and select "Recent Replies".
Fair enough, I guess put me down for the minority view then!