How does Rob Kurzban respond to the claim that evolutionary psychology is just-so stories?

Rob Kurzban said he has heard the just-so story critique since entering academia in 1993 and finds it silly. Every hypothesis in science is a story, he argued, and evolutionary psychology makes claims about the design of mechanisms, not about events millions of years ago. Just as the eye's lens and retina show it is built for seeing, hunger's measurements show what it is for. Evolutionary history only guides which hypotheses get tested against data, and his book puts its sources online.

• Chris Williamson said evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics have held up well in the replication crisis.
• Kurzban said stereotype threat and implicit-bias research, once used to dismiss his field, has since fallen apart.

▸In their words

“the fact of the matter is that every hypothesis is a story.” Rob Kurzban · at 1:28:06 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Modern Wisdom (2026-10-29). Read the whole episode summary →

▸More from this episode