What are some of the weaknesses of the evolutionary perspective on mate selection? For one thing, critics contend that evolutionary psychologists make too many “hindsight” explanations. That is, they start with the behaviors of today’s men and women and reason backward to what must have happened in our evolutionary past, rather than making testable predictions about future events, which is the standard scientific approach.
Other critics point out that these evolutionary explanations reinforce the current male-female stereotypes and legitimize them by suggesting that nothing can be done about them because “it’s in our genes.” Finally, these explanations have been challenged because they ignore other research showing that our culture or social environment influences sexual behavior and judgments of attractiveness.
In fairness, evolutionary psychologists do not consider humans to be mindless robots controlled by rigid genetic forces. Humans are the most flexible of creatures, so even if millions of years of sexual selection have shaped our mating preferences and our strategies for obtaining a mate, we should still expect a wide range of human behavior that adapts itself to new situations.