About a year ago, Richard Chappell highlighted the SEP article on evolutionary psychology, which claims “There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise…” I posted some criticisms at the time, and more recently, I’ve been checking some of the author’s (Stephen Downes’) sources, and it looks even weirder than it did initially. The article stresses a distinction between evolutionary psychology and Evolutionary Psychology, the capital-letter version are the bad guys, the equivalent of “liberals” in Ann Coulter’s rants. And as far as I can tell, most of the supposedly anti-EP articles cited in the SEP article criticize some of what’s gone on in evolutionary psychology, but they don’t go for a grand distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. The only other person who I can see that makes this is David Buller.

Buller’s book _Adapting Minds_ got a fairly harsh critique Edouard Machery and H. Clark Barrett in _Philosophy of Science_. They argued that the ep/EP distinction is a false one. Most notably, Buller claims that information processing mechanisms in the brain “weren’t shaped by selection over our species’ evolutionary history” and “there is no such thing as human nature.” These ideas, however, are accepted by thinkers who fall outside Buller’s official definition of EP. The overall effect of the ep?EP distinction, I think, is to make Downes and Buller’s criticisms to have much broader significance than they do.

As far as the SEP goes, the effect on the SEP is that an influential resource for students of philosophy uses an approach to presenting an issue which is not only not used by most philosophers, but has been severely criticized by some, and the criticisms aren’t addressed (other criticisms of Machery and Barrett *are* addressed, but their criticisms of the overall approach–which they claimed were their most important criticisms–were ignored). And it’s going to be very easy for these sort of skewed perspectives to get into the SEP as long as articles are given to one or two people. This makes the question of who gets picked to write articles important, and to some extent a political question. Does anyone know how authors are, in fact, chosen?

A good point of comparison is Alvin Plantinga’s article on Religion and Science. This article is noticeably more pro-religion than an atheist probably would have made it, and there are places where the focus seems to have been dictated by what Plantinga happens to be interested in. In general, lots of people dislike Plantinga. This, however, is a place where the slightly skewed perspective isn’t a big deal: in spite of all the people who dislike Plantinga, he’s also widely respected by atheists and theists alike, in fact has the highest Hirsh index of any living philosopher of religion. His favorite issues may not be anyone else’s favorite issues, but he’s influential enough that reading him gives you a fairly good idea of where philosophy of religion is today. In contrast, I don’t think the SEP article on evolutionary psychology gives a good idea of where the literature on evolutionary psychology (dropping the capital letter nonsense) is today. That’s what matters.

Given that, though, what can be done to get better articles in the SEP?