Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

Product Information

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. In “How the Mind Works”, Pinker draws from both evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He sets out to explain the intricacies of the human mind, from cognition to categorization, to social intelligence. Got it. Now, I’m very intrigued about your fourth evolutionary psychology book recommendation. This is Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe by Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza. Could you give us an overview of the argument this book is making? Bust most of the basic tenets of evolutionary psychology are still the same, and they are well represented in “The Moral Animal”. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology | Wiley Online Books

Imagine I’m a chimp, and some other chimp or even several other chimps decide I ought to be punished” I’m not a linguist so it may be that some of the content isn’t as current as it was. The version I have now was published in 2007, and in it Pinker says things hadn’t changed too much. That’s consistent with what Buss said about Pinker’s theories still being current. But a bit of a warning there. Sure, it came out in 1994 and since then much new research has been performed and led to further advances in the field. 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. And from the same author, but slightly more focused on “ sexual conflict“, also see “ When Men Behave Badly“.What Buss fails to realize is that some of those workers will go home and tell their wives “go to the kitchen, woman”. 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. 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. Genetic mutations are not always an “evolution” of the past in the sense of “being better” but they develop as simple variations that can either be helpful, harmful, or neutral.

Evolutionary Psychology - Wiley Online Library The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology - Wiley Online Library

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. The second reason is that it sets up an enormous question for evolutionary psychologists. Most of what’s studied are the obvious questions: When will you kill somebody? When will you feud over something? What will your mating strategies be? They’re sort of obvious, because biologists have already studied them in animals. A lot of it is really saying: how do these theories apply to humans? The best books on Evolution. On the Origin of Species. by Charles Darwin.Charles Darwin: Voyaging. by Janet Browne.The Blind Watchmaker. by Richard Dawkins.The Mismeasure of Man. by Stephen Jay Gould.Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters. by Donald Prothero. 4. Is evolutionary psychology a school of psychology?It wasn’t obvious that language evolved, because languages look so very different. But he goes through the underlying structure and it’s very similar” 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. Still today, mounds of data and evidence notwithstanding, plenty of people still deny the presence of innate human drives, the importance of genes in shaping character and behavior, and the inborn psychological toolkit we all come equipped with. That’s why Daly and Wilson’s book is so great. We can run the stats and say, oh, actually, it looks remarkably similar in many ways. But here’s the question: if we’ve only got the illusion of conscious will, why do we have that illusion? I’m not sure Wegner’s answers are really coherent. It’s still a big question. Essential Evolutionary Psychology introduces students to the core theories, approaches, and findings that are the necessary foundations for developing an understanding of the evolutionary psychology.

The SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology | SAGE

You can see this interview between Peterson and Buss to realize how little thought they’ve given to the possibility that there might be something true about the patriarchy. The author holds a master's degree from La Sapienza, department of communication and sociological research, and is a member of the American Psychology Association (APA). 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. That being said, it’s a wonderful primer for beginners and younger folks who are just starting out on their path to enlightenment. WBPHMD is beginner-friendly because it presents key evolutionary tenets in a fun and entertaining Q&A format.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. Until we can come up with a convincing, credible alternative explanation, the suspicion that racist genetic theories might be true will linger.

Evolutionary Psychology The New Science of the Mind - Routledge

Some male evolutionary psychologists not only fail to understand this point, but they fail to take it seriously enough to even be worthy of serious consideration. 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”.If you’re frightened of controversy, evolutionary psychology is not the subject you should be studying” Evolutionary psychology is an important and rapidly expanding area in the life, social, and behavioral sciences, and this Handbook represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference text in the field today. This is an intriguing thing. If you look at rich people, and more creative people, they both seem to have fewer morals. You can measure this. Who speeds through traffic lights, who doesn’t stop at traffic lights, it’s the people in the nice cars. Who takes more money? It’s the people in the higher social class. This seems to cut across the idea of morality altogether, because morality would never have evolved unless you’re more successful by being moral. So something’s gone wrong today, which means it’s inverted. Human traits are a product of natural selection—and the story of how we have evolved explains many of our psychological quirks today. Chris Paley, author of Unthink and Beyond Bad, recommends five of the best evolutionary psychology books—and explains how experimental data might finally get to the bottom of the question of free will.