Here’s what a evolutionary psychologist says about EP as a field:
Evolutionary psychology (EP) has made a bold claim: the human brain comprises a large set of complex psychological mechanisms whose designs are invariant (i.e., universal in the species). These designs evolved by natural selection in response to a limited set of invariant properties of ancestral environments that were relevant to human reproduction, which EP dubs the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). The designs are grounded in the invariant DNA all humans share. Individuals, as I will explain here, are unique states of invariant complex designs, plus a small dollop of genetic noise (e.g., Tooby and Cosmides, 1990a; Hagen and Hammerstein, 2005).
He then gives the example of “object recognition”-- humans can effortless recognize an object and classify it within 300 ms. It’s not something that is learned, but rather something that is innate to all humans.
According to EP, much of human cognition will be similarly complex and universal, a proposition that is the brain-specific version of the more general, and much more widely accepted, claim that the human organism comprises a large set of complex evolved mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and kidneys, that are invariant in the species.
