Introduction: A Subtle but Fatal Mistake
In the previous post, we saw how evolutionary psychology secures its footing by defining itself against a caricature of the blank slate. That manoeuvre clears rhetorical space for biology to enter the scene as an explanatory authority.
But the deeper problem with evolutionary psychology is not rhetorical. It is ontological.
This post identifies the core error that quietly structures almost every evolutionary-psychological explanation:
the treatment of constraints as if they were causes, and of causes as if they constituted phenomena.
From a relational perspective, this is not a minor confusion. It is a category mistake that propagates through the entire framework.
1. Constraint Is Not Constitution
All serious theories of human behaviour accept constraint. Bodies constrain what can be done. Histories constrain what is likely. Evolution constrains what is possible.
What is at issue is not whether constraints exist, but what explanatory role they are allowed to play.
Evolutionary psychology repeatedly moves from the uncontroversial claim:
human behaviour is constrained by biological history,
to the much stronger and usually unargued claim:
human behaviour is constituted by biological history.
This slide is decisive.
A constraint limits the space of possible actualisations. A constitution specifies what something is.
Confusing the two produces an explanation that feels powerful while doing remarkably little work.
2. Selection History Is Not a Phenomenon
Evolutionary explanations appeal to selection histories: traits are said to exist because they were adaptive in ancestral environments.
From a relational ontology, such histories have a very specific status. They are theoretical reconstructions, not present phenomena.
They are:
abstract,
population-level,
historically conjectural.
Crucially, they are not experienced, enacted, or meaningful in the present.
Yet evolutionary psychology regularly treats selection history as if it were an operative psychological force—something that produces intentions, preferences, or norms here and now.
This is a mistake of ontological placement.
Selection history may describe the conditions under which certain capacities became possible. It does not, by itself, explain how any present phenomenon is constituted.
3. The Non‑Phenomenality of Evolutionary Causes
From a relational standpoint, a phenomenon is not simply something that exists. It is something that exists as construed.
There is no behaviour, intention, preference, or value that exists independently of the relations in which it is actualised.
Evolutionary history fails this test.
No agent encounters:
a selection pressure,
a fitness payoff,
or an ancestral adaptive problem
as a lived or meaningful phenomenon.
These belong to explanatory theory, not to experience.
When evolutionary psychology treats such abstractions as causes of present action, it substitutes a non-phenomenal explanation for a phenomenal one.
4. Why Nothing Exists Prior to Its Relational Actualisation
Relational ontology begins from a simple but demanding commitment:
there is no phenomenon prior to its actualisation in relation.
Systems are not containers of behaviour. They are theories of possible instances.
Instantiation is not a temporal pipeline from past to present. It is a perspectival cut—an act of construal that brings a phenomenon into being as what it is.
Evolutionary psychology inverts this logic. It treats past selection as if it were already the phenomenon, waiting to be expressed.
What this misses is precisely the present:
the social relations,
the symbolic structures,
the institutional contexts
through which any behaviour becomes intelligible at all.
5. How the Error Propagates
Once constraints are mistaken for constitutive causes, several things follow automatically:
present relations are downgraded to mere triggers,
social and symbolic systems become secondary overlays,
explanation runs backward rather than outward.
Behaviour is no longer something to be understood in context, but something to be traced back to an origin story.
The result is an account that explains behaviour everywhere except where it occurs.
Conclusion: Putting Explanation Back Where It Belongs
This critique does not deny biology. It repositions it.
Biology constrains what can be actualised. It does not constitute what is actualised.
Evolutionary psychology collapses this distinction, granting historical abstraction the ontological role of present explanation.
From a relational perspective, that move is illegitimate.
Until constraint and constitution are cleanly distinguished, evolutionary explanations will continue to feel intuitively satisfying while remaining ontologically misplaced.
In the next post, we will examine the most prominent device through which this misplacement is sustained: the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness and the myth of explanatory history.
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