Comment by guest2 on Evolutionary Psychology · 2007-11-12T19:38:46.000Z · LW · GW

"You can subject some atrocious things like infanticide and homicidal rampages to evolutionary explanations. I don't think anyone's closed the book on any of these, but in all these cases I think EP has an interesting perspective."

Huh? We know that group selection can lead to cannibalism, so analyzing infanticide and homicidal rampages would seem rather trivial. On the other hand, it's rather surprising that purely evolutionary mechanisms would lead to something as complex as our psychology and sense of morality. From a rational Bayesian perspective, how likely is it that an evolved adaptation executor would be able to formulate optimization criteria, while lacking an intuitive understanding of inclusive fitness?