Introduction: A History That Explains Too Much
Evolutionary psychology leans heavily on a deceptively simple idea: that many features of the modern human mind can be explained by reference to an ancestral Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA). Behaviours, preferences, and cognitive patterns are said to make sense once we see them as adaptations to problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors.
At first glance, this looks like a perfectly reasonable scientific move. History, after all, matters.
But from a relational-ontological perspective, the EEA plays a far more problematic role. It does not merely contextualise explanation; it stands in for it.
This post argues that the EEA functions as a speculative placeholder that masquerades as causal explanation — and in doing so, prematurely closes inquiry into how present phenomena are actually constituted.
1. The EEA Is Reconstructed, Not Discovered
The first thing to note about the EEA is that it is not an empirical object in the ordinary sense. No one observes an EEA. No one measures it directly. No one encounters it as a phenomenon.
Instead, EEAs are reconstructed retrospectively.
Researchers begin with present-day behaviours or traits, assume these are adaptations, and then infer a plausible ancestral environment in which those traits would have been advantageous. The environment is tailored to the trait, not the other way around.
This reverses the usual direction of explanation.
What is presented as historical discovery is, in fact, theoretical backfilling.
2. The Elasticity of Ancestral Environments
One reason the EEA remains so attractive is its extraordinary flexibility.
Because ancestral environments are only loosely specified, they can be adjusted to accommodate almost any behavioural regularity. Aggression? Scarcity and competition. Cooperation? Kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Risk aversion? Variable resources. Risk seeking? High-reward uncertainty.
The EEA stretches to fit the story.
This elasticity gives evolutionary explanations a distinctive rhetorical power: they appear deep, naturalistic, and unavoidable. But scientifically, it signals a lack of constraint.
An explanation that can account for everything in principle explains very little in practice.
3. Post Hoc Adaptation Stories
Once the EEA is in place, adaptationist narratives follow easily. Traits are reverse‑engineered as solutions to ancestral problems, regardless of whether alternative explanations have been exhausted.
From a relational perspective, this is not explanation but retrospective sense‑making.
The story is built backward from the phenomenon, not outward from its present constitution. Historical plausibility substitutes for ontological clarity.
The question quietly shifts from:
How is this behaviour presently produced and understood?
to:
What past problem could this behaviour have solved?
The former opens inquiry. The latter closes it.
4. History Versus Intelligibility
Relational ontology draws a sharp distinction between historical condition and present intelligibility.
History may constrain what is possible. It does not, by itself, render anything intelligible.
To understand a phenomenon is not merely to trace its lineage, but to grasp how it is constituted now: in relation, in context, in meaning.
The EEA trades on a confusion between these levels. It treats historical conjecture as if it were a sufficient account of present sense‑making.
These are all present, relational phenomena.
5. The Closure Effect
Perhaps the most damaging feature of the EEA is not its speculative nature, but its closure effect.
Once a behaviour is assigned to an ancestral environment, further questions appear unnecessary. Social, cultural, symbolic, and institutional analyses are relegated to surface variation.
Explanation has already been delivered — in the deep past.
From a relational standpoint, this is precisely backwards. Explanation should move toward the relations that constitute a phenomenon, not retreat into conjectural history.
Conclusion: History Is Not an Answer
The problem with the EEA is not that it appeals to history, but that it treats history as if it were explanatory in itself.
Evolutionary psychology repeatedly substitutes reconstructed ancestral environments for present‑oriented analysis. In doing so, it replaces the hard work of understanding relational constitution with the comfort of origin stories.
From a relational ontology:
History constrains the space of possibility; it does not explain the actuality of meaning.
In the next post, we will turn to the most consequential consequence of this move: the attempt to explain reasons, norms, and intentions using resources that are not themselves meaningful.
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