[statstutor]

I appreciate these points, which are well-considered.

> But it's interesting why this is the case. Why us, and not chimpanzees.

As you admit, we could ask about exceptional adaptations in other species, e.g. "why do birds rule the sky, and not other species?". This might be sometimes studied, but there is not nearly a comparable level of interest in that form of exceptionalism. I'd say there's so little interest, that we often fail to even observe such cases.

It strikes me that we are really just interested in ourselves. (I have no problem with that.)

I don't think we will learn very much as long as we start with the assumption we are primarily exceptional above all other species. I think it immediately leads to circular logic, where any and all differences become evidence supporting the assumption.

I accept what you say about natural selection having a bias. I remain doubtful that we are truthfully observing that bias over the noise of essential randomness. (Edit: on further consideration, I'd strengthen this and believe it is statistically impossible to distinguish evolutionary pressure from randomness, if you are considering N=1 runs of evolution).

[jjk166]

Evo-psych is certainly concerned with the psychology of other animals - why for example the peacock has its feathers. But we can't have a peacock say "I don't know, the feathers don't seem sexy to me, but if I were a tiger I think I'd be scared of them."

Humans have both much more complicated psychologies than most animals (whether we have true peers is debatable), and we certainly are much easier to collect data on. It makes sense that human evo-psych should dwarf animal evo-psych for the same reasons terrestrial-biology dwarfs astro-biology. I wouldn't interpret that to mean we don't consider the questions interesting.