Whenever I read an evolutionary argument in a philosophy paper--either to defend moral realism, moral anti-realism, to defend epistemic realism or whatever, I basically roll my eyes and say "Evidence, please!" Evolutionary arguments seem to me like one of those "proofs that p":
It's plausible that P being true would confer on humans some sort of evolutionary advantage.
Therefore P.
Sometimes, if the reader is lucky, we get some sort of acknowledgment that phenomena such as genetic drift and the linking of non-adaptive phenotypes with advantageous phenotypes can lead to the former being selected for. Having acknowledged that, the author then has full intellectual permission to wildly speculate over empirical reality.
Unless I'm missing something, this seems grossly unscientific. We need evidence for claims, folks! Especially since we have evidence that just because we can imagine something being advantageous/not advantageous has no bearing on what occurs in reality. In 50 years, won't people be laughing at our evolutionary arguments the way students now laugh at Descartes' speculations about the pineal gland?
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