The problem with evolutionary psychology lies not with what is probably an over-simplified view of evolution, but with what is certainly an over-simplified view of psychology, and, above all, a naive sense of the inevitability of contemporary Western values. Stephen Prickett, Narrative, p.233..
In the West, evolutionism is the dominant cosmology. It has developed, if you would excuse the pun, into the proposition that mankind is ever spiralling upward into bigger, better, and higher stages of development or being. Man, we are told, has now taken of his own evolutionary development, so that he is no longer subject to chaos or brute chance. As the highest evolved being, man is now self-determining. Along with this goes the naive assumption referred to by Prickett. Vaunted Western values are superior and higher than even the value of other human beings.
A more sober evolutionist would entertain the possibility--even the probability--that dominant Western values may, in fact, lead to its extinction. Not being sufficiently fit-for-purpose, so to speak, the West may well self-destruct. Given demographic population decline it is almost inevitable. In any event, a consistent evolutionist, particularly the common garden-variety type who posits billions upon billions of years for the process to have got to where we are today, would seriously entertain the prospect that mankind as a whole will not survive, being not sufficiently fit. The more consistent evolutionist would acknowledge that no-one could ever know.
The priggish self-satisfied populists of evolutionism in the West, who put themselves and Western values forward as exemplars of human sophistication and advancement, are engaged in naive question-begging on a grand scale.
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