Book Review: Can Ideology Save the Angry Caveman?

University. In The Caveman Mystique, McCaughey questions the scientific utility of evolutionary theories for generating workable explanations of human male psychology. She condemns evolutionary science for producing and maintaining modern men’s self-indulgent, sexually aggressive “caveman ” identity. According to McCaughey, evolutionary science, in general, and evolutionary psychology, in particular, is a hodge-podge of ideologies built on a biased selection of and reliance on published literature. And yet McCaughey concludes with an ideological definition of a “new manhood ” (“Homo textual”) to which all men should aspire. According to McCaughey, “Men can take a great leap forward and become new kinds of men…This new man [Homo textual] understands identity as socially constructed and consequential ” (p. 140). McCaughey’s criticisms of evolutionary explanations of human male psychology do not differ from the well-worn “criticisms ” leveled by practitioners of standard social science (see Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, for a review and debunking of these criticisms). The standard social science model assumes that the human mind is a product of the social world and that the mind consists of a few general-purpose mechanisms. McCaughey’s

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