Evolutionary psychology cannot explain how learning and culture produce novel, useful and complex invention-solutions to novel problems, demands and challenges in the course of significantly constrained time-scales

Evolutionary psychology (EP) sees learning and culture as produced overwhelmingly top-down by phylogenetically evolved mechanisms. The co-founder of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby, has called for the outright elimination of learning and culture as explanatory concepts; suggesting instead that those concepts are non-explanations that themselves need to be explained by underlying mechanisms. This confirms my assertion that evolutionary psychology confines learning and culture to proximate, mechanistic causation. It treats neurocognitive mechanisms as the full proximate explanation for learning and culture; and the biological evolutionary process as the full ultimate explanation for these mechanisms. The role of environmental input in ontogeny seems confined to Aristotelian efficient causes, catering to ontogenetic and cultural mechanism. This causes immediate explanatory problems for EP. It fundamentally fails to account for how humans can function successfully in novel environments posing genuinely new, complex problems. It unsuccessfully explains how various “mental modules” adapted to the Pleistocene happen to coordinate in a manner that produces largely successful and adaptive behavioral output in environments to which adaptation by natural selection alone cannot possibly have occured (amounting to "trivial mismatch”). It lacks a naturalistic explanation for various cultural developments that cannot have been shaped by natural selection directly and explicitly, like modern science, statesmanship and modern technology. I argue that EP covertly and largely unknowingly relies on naive notions of free will and human creativity, which is summarily written off as accounted for by natural selection as a catch-all explanation. In other words, natural selection gives false and alluring naturalistic ultimate explanatory support to essentially supernatural proximate (or even “first cause” style ultimate) explanations for human behavior. (Abstract updated March 30. For clarification: "New things" and "new knowledge" in the old abstract title, present in the printed seminar program, refer specifically to instances of novel useful/adaptive complexity, or my proposed "OCEAN" standard – Orderly, Complex, Effective, Adaptive, Novel.)