Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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The methodology of some studies, for example, is inherently limited when all we have to go by is a bunch of surveys. But that applies to all studies using surveys, not just evolutionary psychology, and does not constitute a rebuttal against the whole field. While natural selection is the primary factor in evolution, Buss states that other causes of evolutionary change are sexual selection (mate preferences) and genetic drift (the favoring of a subset of the gene pool due to unique circumstances). Buss does not discuss the (neutral) mutations that survive because they do no harm even if they provide no benefit.

David Buss is really good on the mating bits. So there are two really obvious things that can affect the success of your genes above all else: not dying, and having children. David Buss’s research field is all about the mating selection stuff. So it’s very good on that. Women's long term mating strategies (WLTMS): Preference for good financial prospects in a marriage partner Challenges of sex and mating (e.g. the theory behind evolved mate preferences and short/long-term sexual strategies) Yes. And when murder is more likely to happen. When it was recommended to me, I read it and thought it was fantastic. I thought it must be quite obscure, so I was almost disappointed to find that lots of evolutionary psychologists love this book.To begin with, remember that genetic mutations don’t develop with a predisposition towards helping the individual survive or reproduce, but they first evolve out of total randomness. But it deserves a spot here because it peddles “what I wish it should be” with science, which is the ultimate sin for a scientist. The Third Chimpanzee 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. More than two decades after the book has been written there is still no evidence for the “killer sperm” the author lucidly describes and presents as a scientific fact. I had a slightly strange route in. I was always interested in different subjects. I used to go to different lectures, I used to go to maths lectures and anthropology lectures, and biology lectures, and so on. I studied physics as an undergraduate at Cambridge, and physics was absolutely fantastic. I really enjoyed it. But quite a lot of it was sewn up before I was born. And the questions that were left were either incredibly hard—too hard—or very detailed. I used to wonder what it would have been like to be alive when Newton was alive, or Galileo was alive and things were radically changing. Psychology is at that position. It’s just as messy as I imagined physics was in the past, with different experiments and theories being thrown out all over the place.

This is really important for evolutionary psychologists to know, for two reasons. Firstly, I think evolutionary psychologists sometimes cut a corner. For example, looking at mating strategies, they might interview 1,000 men and show them pairs of pictures and say: ‘which of these images do you prefer?’ Or, they might interview 1,000 women and say: ‘Would you be willing to have an affair or not?’ Then they’ll infer differences. Which is all very sensible if what they say, and what they are aware of, directly influences what they would actually do. Because it’s the doing that’s important—actually having sex and producing children, not saying who you would be more attracted to. If you want to understand evolutionary psychology, like truly understanding evolutionary psychology, then you need to read this one right after you read Buss’ textbook. This edition contains expanded coverage of cultural evolution, with a new section on culture–gene co-evolution, additional studies discussing interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals, expanded discussions of evolutionary hypotheses that have been empirically disconfirmed, and much more! Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. The primary topics of his research include mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, social status, social reputation, prestige, the emotion of jealousy, homicide, anti-homicide defenses, and—most recently—stalking. All of these are approached from an evolutionary perspective. Buss is the author of more than 200 scientific articles and has won many awards, including an APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in 1988 and an APA G. Stanley Hall Lectureship in 1990.

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Cooperation and mutual assistance can flourish even in a basically selfish world (…) we can see how even nice guys can finish first. 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. This is known as Lanchester’s square law. It was discovered in the First World War. It’s about the use of bullets, but it applies more broadly and means that the cost of punishing people, when you are in agreement that someone should be punished, are dramatically lower for humans than for other animals. And if the costs are lower, it’s more likely to evolve. Other academics have done some of the numerical simulations and, again, show what he predicted from that basic premise. So that’s the central idea.

Serotonin :"when alpha males were overthrown, their serotonin levels plummeted. When a lower-ranking male ascended to power, his serotonin level rose." When I first started reading “ The Moral Animal,” I thought I had stumbled into the decryption code of the world.

Indeed, most other evolutionary psychologists on this list either deny, misunderstand, or choose to ignore that men can sometimes and do sometimes share similar interests in repressing and disempowering women. Another chunk of the criticism applies to “pop evolutionary psychology”, such as the evolutionary psychology that people who read one or two books on the topic engage in. That’s the typical “after-the-facts storytelling”. Or, as Nassim Taleb said, “people who love a nice narrative but have no evidence”. You’ve got to remember that words are a way of changing what other people do. If I spoke, but no one else changed what they did as a result of me saying them, I would never have evolved language. And that makes another pressure: I learn to say things, but others have also got to evolve to respond to that, because if everybody just did what I told them to do all the time, then fantastic for me—but clearly not so good for their genes. So that creates a sort of arms race, and maybe that explains why there’s such a gulf between us and other animals. Once you start on that race, things proceed very fast. Only after the variations developed they can be selected for or against by the environment and by the interaction with the other members of the same species.