I think this is a very worthwhile video to watch. Dawkins and Pinker (Dawkins in particular, of course) are part of a demimonde with something of a reputation f

I think this is a very worthwhile video to watch. Dawkins and Pinker (Dawkins in particular, of course) are part of a demimonde with something of a reputation for being uncompromising hardliners—no doubt because in their handling of theological questions they are uncompromising hardliners—but much of what Pinker's talking about here is teasing apart and deflecting the many superficial understandings of adaptationist and EvPsych-oriented thought that give it such a bad name. The fact is that many people who find EvPsych to be very attractive nevertheless have a pretty shallow notion of it and end up using it as a club, and offering cheaply Objectivist rationales for rape and looking at boobs at the like. Pinker establishes two things within the first ten minutes that make his perspective a lot more reasonable and considered: any adaptationist account of a behavior MUST begin with an a priori appraisal of that behavior on its own merits. As an 'engineering problem', he puts it. So it's not enough to look at some human behavior and then explain that it occurs because it is a natural function of some basic need, if there would be no half-way reasonable way for that function to emerge as useful without already existing. The second thing is that if you do establish or argue for some feature as an adaptation, you have only provided a possible account of its origin as an evolved behavior, and said nothing at all about its worth or appropriateness in the world. I think that questions of behavior as adaptive would encounter less immediate resistance—and explanations of behavior as adaptive would lose much of their unsavory panacean appeal—if these factors were better understood.