Introduction: When Explanation Stops Thinking
At this point in the series, a pattern has emerged with some clarity. Evolutionary psychology does not merely offer explanations that are contestable; it offers explanations that end inquiry.
This post names that pattern directly. Its focus is not a single concept—blank slates, EEAs, human nature—but a deeper methodological disposition: adaptationism as premature closure.
The central claim is this:
By answering “why” questions too quickly, evolutionary psychology forecloses the relational investigation through which meaning actually becomes intelligible.
Its explanations feel satisfying precisely because they stop the questions that matter most.
1. Adaptationism and the Illusion of Depth
Adaptationist explanation follows a familiar rhythm:
Identify a behavioural pattern.
Propose an ancestral problem it might have solved.
Infer a trait or disposition shaped by selection.
Once this story is told, explanation appears complete. The phenomenon is said to be “accounted for”.
But what has actually happened?
The behaviour has been displaced from its present relational conditions and relocated to a speculative past. The explanation feels deep because it reaches far back in time, but it does so at the cost of explanatory traction now.
Depth here is temporal, not ontological.
2. Why Questions Asked Too Soon
From a relational perspective, “why” questions must be asked carefully. There is a crucial difference between:
Why does this phenomenon make sense here?
Why might something like this ever have existed?
Evolutionary psychology habitually answers the second question while pretending to address the first.
In doing so, it short-circuits inquiry. Once an adaptive story is offered, further investigation into meaning, normativity, and situational intelligibility appears redundant.
The explanation closes the space in which explanation should operate.
3. The Loss of Present-Oriented Explanation
Meaning-bearing phenomena are constituted in the present: in relations among agents, symbols, institutions, and contexts.
Evolutionary explanations, however, are not present-oriented. They trade intelligibility for ancestry.
As a result, they offer no account of:
how a reason functions as a reason now,
how a norm binds in this situation,
how an intention is recognised and responded to here.
What is lost is not historical truth, but explanatory relevance.
4. Systems as Theories of Possible Instances
A relational ontology offers a different conception of explanation altogether.
Systems are not repositories of hidden causes. They are theories of possible instances: structured fields of potential that specify what can count as an intelligible phenomenon.
Explanation, on this view, does not terminate inquiry. It orients it.
To explain a phenomenon is to show:
what relations make it possible,
what distinctions it presupposes,
what alternatives it excludes.
This kind of explanation opens space rather than closing it.
5. Why Over-Closure Feels Like Understanding
Over-closure is attractive because it offers relief. Complexity is reduced. Contingency is domesticated. Uncertainty is replaced with narrative.
Adaptationist stories are especially effective at producing this feeling. They combine scientific authority with mythic coherence: this is how it came to be.
But feeling understood is not the same as understanding.
Where inquiry ends too soon, meaning has been bypassed rather than explained.
Conclusion: Explanation That Makes Room
The problem with evolutionary psychology is not that it asks evolutionary questions. It is that it lets those questions do work they cannot do.
By treating adaptationist stories as answers rather than prompts, it closes inquiry precisely where relational explanation should begin.
From a relational perspective:
An explanation that cannot be re-entered is not an explanation of meaning.
In the final post of this series, we will draw these threads together and ask what a genuinely relational alternative to evolutionary psychology might look like—not as a replacement theory, but as a different orientation to explanation itself.
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