Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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There are a number of textbooks on evolutionary psychology now. In my opinion, this is the best—I suppose different people have different preferences. In some ways, I included it as a correction to some of the bias in my list, which is obviously jumping to the bits of evolutionary psychology that excite me most personally. 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. After the fact. This is a bit like what we were saying about whether the true motives for murder are explicitly understood by the murderer. 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.

Evolutionary Psychology The New Science of the Mind - Routledge

Evolutionary Psychology features a wealth of student-friendly pedagogy including critical-thinking questions and case study boxes designed to show how to apply evolutionary psychology to real-life situations. It is an invaluable resource for undergraduates studying psychology, biology and anthropology. As many observers have pointed out, evolutionary psychology is largely based on assumptions rather than evidence, and as such it is debatable whether it should be referred to as a 'science' (since its hypotheses are generally unfalsifiable). 3. What is the best book on evolution? 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

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Imagine I’m a chimp, and some other chimp or even several other chimps decide I ought to be punished” 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. 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: 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. What he does very well, though, is putting together all the evolutionary psychology findings in a consistent, overarching narrative.

Essential Evolutionary Psychology | SAGE Publications Ltd Essential Evolutionary Psychology | SAGE Publications Ltd

When I look at the discipline as a whole, good evolutionary psychology correctly predicts behavior in a way that has been observed across cultures, as well as measured with different scientific methodologies, and replicated across time and samples.Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount.

Evolutionary Psychology Books of 2023 - FindThisBest Best Evolutionary Psychology Books of 2023 - FindThisBest

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.When I first started reading “ The Moral Animal,” I thought I had stumbled into the decryption code of the world. If you are looking for how evolutionary psychology wisdom more practically translates into human dating and mating, but still have that “scientific rigor”, then look no further. 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”. The “coordinate group effect” -the famous “patriarchy”- happens because most men who cluster around the average share the same fears and needs. Most average men, struggling to secure a high-power, successful woman, rationally seek to limit the power of the women in their lives -not necessarily of all women and certainly not in a concerted effort with other men-.

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

Of course, with that comes the moralizing implication that we should all be more like the hippie communes we used to be, instead of the nasty, selfish, and jealous humans we are. Yes. I think it does. This is going to sound very abstract, but when I was a physicist, one of the things that frustrated me was that, as a child, I’d imagined you’d study physics and learn how the universe is. And actually science is never like that. It’s always getting closer and closer approximations to the truth. It’s adding an extra term to the series, a mathematical series. The real truth is probably something that humans can’t comprehend very well. So I think science as an endeavour, once you get deep enough into it, is always frustrating. 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. But even if they act as individuals, the net result of many selfish and individual actions is similar to a homogenous, concerted group-level effort to keep women down. 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.The “perfect designer fallacy”: the idea that evolution will always shape organisms to be the best possible adaptations for the environment Even if we half-accept the original thesis, such as that some time in our past a good chunk of men didn’t care about paternity, there are obvious evolutionary reasons why those ancestors who didn’t care about paternity are not well represented today. Yes. For example, Herb Gintis has suggested that Bingham and Souza underplay the importance of child-rearing, the role of culture and the invention of fire in their analysis. Fathers who didn’t care about paternity were out-reproduced by those who did, and they left fewer and fewer copies of their genes. And of course, once you can gang up on people and punish them, all sorts of things become possible. If you start to trust people—because there’s this ultimate punishment—things like language become a lot more plausible, because you’ve got a reason to tell the truth. People can punish you if you don’t. If you look at animals, most animals, when they’re in groups they’re quite well connected. Wolves, chimps… there are odd exceptions, but mostly they’re groups of kin. In humans, that’s not how tribes work. And it’s not the way companies work.