Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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It’s partly the fact it’s so beautifully written. It came out in 1994—I’d just become a teenager then, and was getting into all sorts of popular science, from Richard Dawkins to Stephen Hawking. Steven Pinker was one of those writers, although it’s hard to know if it had an influence on me later. Secondly, if you’re seeking a connection between why these different books excite me so much is when we predict how other people are going to behave and whether to punish them, we infer minds in them. I can’t see inside your brain, so I’ve got to create a mind for you based on your expressions, the things you say to me… that changes how I judge you and how I treat you. Yet, if you’re doing the same thing about me, it’s probably quite useful for me to be having a bit of my brain that’s working out what you’re inferring about me from my actions. That’s one way of explaining the evidence that Wegner pulled together, that we have this illusion of conscious will and we infer the causes of our action, not because we actually need to do this to work out why we did what we did— our brain probably doesn’t need that information and it could collect it from its own modules—but because in the way I’m building a model of your mind, reading your mind, it’s helpful for me to have some sense of what you’re thinking about me. Fascinating. In terms of understanding homicide as a psychological phenomenon, this is not to suggest that murderers are actually making evolutionary calculations in an explicit way, right? The “perfect designer fallacy”: the idea that evolution will always shape organisms to be the best possible adaptations for the environment

Best Evolutionary Psychology Books - Power Dynamics™ Best Evolutionary Psychology Books - Power Dynamics™

Buss fails to realize that a repressive force against women can materialize even while each man is pursuing individualistic goals as well as while they compete among themselves for sexual access to women. The problems begin when the authors start making up our past based on what they would have liked, instead of what the evidence supports.

This is a fantastic book. It’s a labour of love for him and Souza. They’ve gone across all sorts of different disciplines, looking at the dates that people started evolving to throw, which you can measure. And when we started being able to speak—there are changes in the bones of the throat, which they can time quite well. But there has not been any correction from the author, who preferred instead to focus on a “10th-anniversary edition” of a book that was based on a lie. Criticism of Evolutionary Psychology Shall we talk about the David Buss book first, given that it gives an overview of the field? Evolutionary Psychology was first published in 1998, when the publisher described it as an introduction to “a revolutionary new science, a true synthesis of modern principles of psychology and evolutionary biology.”

The SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology | Sage

And finally, even if that were true -which is most likely it’s not-, it has no predictive power as to how we should be. That is not to say that the “ Selfish Gene” was wrong, though. The idea that most of what we do is in service of the selfish gene’s reproductive goals still holds true. Today, most social sciences accept that selfish interests can sometimes be best achieved by cooperation. This is both in the list of “best evolutionary psychology books” and in the list of “worst evolutionary psychology books”. Well, Ghodsee discusses something you won’t find in any other book on this list: the power struggle between men and women as groups and not just as individuals.If you want to learn more about why the “ tabula rasa hypothesis“, behaviorism, and the “ standard social science model” are just plain wrong, this is your book. Until we can come up with a convincing, credible alternative explanation, the suspicion that racist genetic theories might be true will linger.

Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology | Oxford Academic

Over three volumes, the Handbook provides a rich overview of the most important theoretical and empirical work in the field. Chapters cover a broad range of topics, including theoretical foundations, the integration of evolutionary psychology with other life, social, and behavioral sciences, as well as with the arts and the humanities, and the increasing power of evolutionary psychology to inform applied fields, including medicine, psychiatry, law, and education. Each of the volumes has been carefully curated to have a strong thematic focus, covering:

That’s what we’re doing much of the time—coming up with externally plausible explanations for why we do what we do” The types of arguments that you’ve got to make in evolutionary psychology, Steven Pinker made them and made them brilliantly. You’ve got to break down people’s intuition that they already know how they do what they do—use language in his case—and they already know what it’s for, and how it works. People think, ‘I don’t need to be told why I talk. I already know: I talk to tell you stuff, I talk to get things I want…’ You’ve got to break that down first. The Illusion of Conscious Will is ostensibly a social psychology book, as opposed to an evolutionary psychology book. Wegner was at Harvard, and is one of the greatest ever psychologists. He argues that we are usually mistaken about this impression of conscious will; we usually infer an intention to do something from our actions, rather than from actually being able to consciously make something happen. The same name “evolution” can be misleading as it seems to imply that it’s a continuous march towards “better and stronger”.

David Buss - Evolutionary Psychology - Academia.edu David Buss - Evolutionary Psychology - Academia.edu

It’s on the evolution of morality. A bit like language, it’s one of those things where you’d say it seems really odd to say it evolved.In the same way that you’ve got Spanish speakers and Chinese speakers and English speakers, you have people who are Utilitarians, you’ve got duty ethics people, you’ve got people who say their morals come from religion. You’ve got people who think abortion is murder, and those who think it’s a right. But the mechanism for holding morals, and for acting upon them, and for judging people, can have and does seem to have evolved. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby Most often, it’s because the author is biased and is “bending” science to fit his narrative while still pretending to be a scientist. Language is a really good example. We’ll look at one of Steven Pinker’s books in a minute, but language is something that we’ve evolved very specialist brain mechanisms for: why? Is it to communicate about facts? Or is it gossip about other people a social thing? Or in some way is it to impress mates? Do more eloquent people get better mates? And, if my wife fell in love with me because I’m more eloquent, why on earth would she have done that? Might it be some combination? Maybe we started evolving language to communicate information—to show that we’re trustworthy—and then once you’ve got that in place, it became useful for gossiping, and then we become more specialized for gossiping.It’s Sapolsky’s Magnus opera, and the only reason it’s not higher than #9. is that “Behave” is not focused on evolutionary psychology but on human psychology and behavior in general. I think you can probably connect the different things. As I was hinting with Buss, we might have evolved language for one really important reason—communicating or telling people where the prey were—then once you’ve got these language skills, they come in useful for sweet talk and other more specialised things.