Criticism of Bowlby's theory of adaptedness

Abedi et al,¹ are enthusiastic about Bowlby's² ‘evolutionary understanding of human behaviour’. Bowlby's evolutionary psychology of the mind being a bundle of adaptations is severely criticised by the psychobiologist Henry Plotkin³ who points out that ‘the weakness of evolutionary adaptedness concept is tied to the problems encountered by adaptationist accounts of the mind of every kind … (and) insistence that the adaptations are to past environments and hence, their explanation, “lies completely in the past”, which, makes them empirically inaccessible which in effect takes them out of the realm of science and imprisons it within speculative narrative’. Perring⁴ is also correct that, ‘attachment theory is not a promising candidate for providing a universal basis for evolutionary designed relationships between infants and mothers’.