Are there enough genes to build psychological adaptations?
“People don’t have enough genes to program all the behaviors some evolutionary psychologists, for example, believe that genes control.” “Evolutionary psychology is dead but doesn’t seem to know it yet.” Paul Ehrlich, presumably referring to the announcement that the human genome contains only 30,000 genes (an estimate that is in flux) — Some critics of evolutionary psychology claim that there simply arent enough genes to code for a large number of innate cognitive adaptations (Ehrlich and Feldman 2003). Curiously, they dont suggest that there arent enough genes to build the thousands of anatomical adaptations that have already been discovered, they havent suggested the theory of natural selection is wrong, nor have they called for an immediate halt to the billions of dollars of research aimed at furthering the functional understanding of cells, tissues and organs, research that, if the critics were right, would be useless given that there arent enough genes to build all those adaptat
