Introduction: The Return of Essence
When evolutionary psychology runs up against the limits of its explanatory resources—when history can no longer account for meaning, and biology can no longer explain normativity—it reaches for a familiar refuge: human nature.
Invoked carefully, the term appears modest and commonsensical. Surely there must be something stable about humans, something shared, something enduring.
But in evolutionary psychology, “human nature” performs a far more ambitious role. It becomes an inner explanatory essence: a set of traits, dispositions, or modules that are said to produce behaviour across contexts.
From a relational-ontological perspective, this move marks another decisive error: the conversion of stabilised relational regularities into reified inner properties.
1. From Populations to Persons
Evolutionary psychology draws heavily on population-level patterns. Statistical regularities are identified across groups, cultures, or experimental conditions, and these regularities are then attributed to features of human nature.
This step is rarely scrutinised.
But population statistics are not ontological facts about individuals. They are abstractions over distributions of behaviour under particular conditions.
To move from:
many people often behave in this way under these circumstances
to:
humans have a trait that causes this behaviour
is not inference but reification.
From a relational perspective, individuals do not instantiate population averages. They actualise possibilities within specific relational configurations.
2. Regularity Is Not Necessity
Stability in behaviour is often treated as evidence of necessity. If a pattern recurs, it is taken to reveal an underlying essence.
But regularity does not imply inevitability.
A behaviour may be:
statistically frequent,
culturally widespread,
historically persistent,
without being necessary, universal, or internally specified.
Relational systems stabilise. Practices sediment. Institutions endure.
These stabilisations generate regularities without invoking inner essences. Evolutionary psychology, however, routinely treats regularity as proof of necessity.
This mistake makes the world appear more fixed than it is.
3. The Appeal of Reification
Reification feels explanatory because it simplifies.
Once a pattern is located inside the individual—as a trait, module, or disposition—it appears to travel with the person across contexts. Complexity is reduced to transportable cause.
But this explanatory feeling is illusory.
What has been explained is not the phenomenon, but our discomfort with contingency.
By relocating explanation inward, evolutionary psychology avoids the harder task of tracing how behaviour is constituted across relations, contexts, and meanings.
4. Human Nature as Sedimented Relation
From a relational ontology, what is called “human nature” is better understood as sedimented regularity of relation.
Humans are born into:
social structures,
symbolic systems,
institutional arrangements,
biological constraints.
Over time, certain ways of acting, valuing, and relating stabilise. They recur not because they are written inside us, but because the relations that support them persist.
To call this sedimentation “nature” is to mistake durability for essence.
5. Why the Error Matters
Reifying stabilised relations into traits has predictable consequences:
it individualises what is relational,
it naturalises what is contingent,
it limits what can be imagined as otherwise.
Once labelled “human nature”, a pattern becomes resistant to critique. What might have been examined as institutional, cultural, or symbolic is instead treated as inevitable.
The move does not explain behaviour. It insulates it.
Conclusion: Essence Without Ontology
Evolutionary psychology’s appeal to human nature is not the discovery of a deep truth, but the reappearance of an old metaphysical habit.
Faced with complex, stabilised patterns of relation, it posits inner essences to hold them together.
From a relational perspective:
what appears as human nature is a history of relations that has forgotten itself.
In the next post, we will examine how this reification feeds directly into a final problem: the premature closure of inquiry, and the sense that explanation has already been delivered.
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