Evolutionary psychology
18 Jun 2024 09:55
Someday we'll live on Venus
And men will walk on Mars
But we will still be monkeys
Down deep inside
The study of how our minds have evolved, and the traces left by that evolution. The most important seems to be that we don't have a general, content-neutral intelligence, but a gang or collection of specialized intelligences bent and stretched into unnatural poses for things like math. Logically, all this is quite separate from the question of whether or not we use evolutionary processes in our thinking, whether the mind is a Darwin machine, but I think all the advocates of the latter support evolutionary psychology as well.
It should be obvious that, if we have inherited a tendency or bias towards Q from our ancestors, this doesn't mean we should Q, and everyone accepts this without question when it comes to logic and reasoning. Certain popularizers (e.g. Gazzaniga, and especially Wright) forget this when it comes to things like the relations between the sexes: predictable, but depressing nonetheless. (Finding an evolutionary explanation for this bias is left as an exercise for the student.) Fortunately Blaffer Hrdy is an excellent corrective to this.
Methodological issues/problems: Conflating observed range of variation in human behavior with range of possible behavior. Restricted cultural background of most experimental psychology subjects. Lack of knowledge of ancestral environments and their range of variability. Degree to which contemporary foraging societies can serve as proxies for ancestral ones is unclear. (Modern foragers tend to live in environments which agrarian or industrial societies didn't want; also, many foragers are more or less economically, i.e., ecologically, integrated with nearby settled communities.) Difficulties of distinguishing between direct adaptations and by-products of adaptations. (Real, but often exaggerated, I think.) — All of these seem like reasons for caution, but not for abandoning the project, and many of them are of a piece with the difficulties of any kind of social science.
See also: Adaptation; Archaeology; Noam Chomsky; Cognitive Science; Developmental Biology; Ethics, Game Theory and Biology; Evolution; Human Evolution; Judgment and Decision-Making; Memes and Related Ideas about the Evolution of Culture; Methodology for the Social Sciences; Neuroscience; Social Neuroscience; Sociology; Universal Images and Cultural Universals
- Recommended:
- The Evolutionary Psychology section of CogPrints
- Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture [An important early collection of papers. Like most edited volumes, the quality of the work is highly variable.]
- Jung-Kyoo Choi and Samuel Bowles, "The Coevolution of Parochial Altruism and War", Science 318 (2007): 636--640 [A possible evolutionary explanation for why humans would have war]
- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea [Review by Danny Yee]
- Reuven Dukas (ed.), Cognitive Ecology: The Evolutionary Ecology of Information Processing and Decision Making
- Barbara Ehrenreich
- Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War [review in process]
- (with Janet McIntosh) "The New Creationism: Biology Under Attack"
- Robert H. Frank, Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions
- Jeremy Freese and Sheri Meland, "Seven-Tenths Incorrect: Heterogeneity and Change in Waist-to-Hip Ratios of Playboy Centerfold Models and Miss America Pageant Winners", The Journal of Sex Research 39 (2002): 133--138 [This is, believe it or not, the main evidence behind some of the claims about universal evolved male preferences for women with physical attributes indicative of fertility; sadly, the original data by no means support the conclusions drawn (and drawn and drawn). PDF]
- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy [Feminist
sociobiology]
- The Langurs of Abu
- The Woman That Never Evolved
- Mother Nature
- Ray Jackendoff, Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution [Review: The Object-Oriented Turn in Generative Grammar]
- Philip Kitcher, "Developmental Decomposition and the Future of Human Behavioral Ecology", Philosophy of Science 57 (1990): 96--117 [JSTOR. Reprinted in Kitcher's essay collection, In Mendel's Mirror]
- Melvin Konner, "Darwin's Truth, Jefferson's Vision: Sociobiology and the Politics of Human Nature," The American Prospect, vol. 10, no. 45 (July 1999) [Repeats the myth about Marx wanting to dedicate Capital to Darwin, but otherwise on-target. Online.]
- G. E. R. Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind
- Gary Marcus
- Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexity of Human Thought [This book avoids the usual arguments about adaption and the like to focus on the question of whether the genome has sufficient power to reliable specify details of mental strcuture. (This is a more basic question, because if the answer is "no", then the questions about adaptation, etc., are moot, and if the answer is "yes", knowing the nature and limits of that power will tightly constrain our evolutionary hypotheses.) Marcus's answer is "yes", and I think both his answer and his argument for it are definitely correct. Biological development, whether of the brain or the body, is intricately but flexibly and responsively regulated by genes, and in fact a large part of the genome exists simply to control gene expression and metabolic activity. These mechanisms are very good at effectively producing highly specific functional structures (e.g., ribs, arteries), especially when those take a nice, cleanly recursive form (e.g., ribs, arteries), though they do this by directly producing self-organizing mechanisms sensitive to positional information. Moreover it is important to recognize that the degree to which brains are plastic is almost entirely a separate question from the degree to which some of their aspects are innate, just as, e.g., muscular development due to exercise, or wound healing, is separate from normal developmental formation. One thing Marcus rightly emphasizes is that one expects, on general biological grounds, that a single gene will participate in the development of many different structures, and that new functions will be effected through re-using old components. So it is not at all surprising if more recently evolved functions (e.g. language) have a similar architecture and genetic basis to older ones (e.g. control of rapid sequential motion). Similarly, one need not expect modular functions to be implemented by distinct brain regions. (There are interesting parallels here to Soviet neuropsychology, of the Luria-Vygotsky type.) --- Marcus has clearly put a huge amount of time into mastering the primary literature in developmental biology, and is thoroughly up-to-date on it, as well as extremely good at cutting through conceptual confusions. Moreover he writes very well, and I really do think this book should be completely accessible to reasonably-educated nonscientists. It's a great trick and highly recommended. Marcus's book website.]
- "Making the Mind: Why We've Misunderstood the Nature-Nurture Debate", Boston Review 28.6 (2004) [Online. Brief and even more popular summary of his book.]
- Linda Mealey, "The Sociobiology of Sociopathy: An Integrated Evolutionary Model", Behavioral and Brain Sciences [Preprint]
- Steven Pinker
- How the Mind Works [Review: On Seeing the Computational Forest for the Cultural Trees]
- The Language Instinct [Review by Danny Yee]
- Robert C. Richardson, Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology
- Sara Shettleworth, Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior
- Eric A. Smith, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Kim Hill, "Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences: a guide for the perplexed", Trends in Ecology and Evolution 16 (2001): 128--134
- Janet Radcliffe Richards, Human Nature After Darwin
- Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: The Naturalistic Approach [Review: How to Catch Insanity from Your Kids (Among Others); or, Histoire naturelle de l'infame]
- Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny
- Not exactly recommended:
- Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan H. Turner, The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society [Discussed under Modernity]
- To read:
- Riadh T. Abed and Karel W. de Pauw, "An Evolutionary Hypothesis for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Psychological Immune System?", Behavioural Neurology 11 (1999):245--250 [online]
- Michael L. Anderson, "Massive redeployment, exaptation, and the functional integration of cognitive operations", Synthese 159 (2007): 329--345
- Jerome Barkow (ed.), Darwin, Sex and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture
- H. Clark Barrett, "On the functional origins of essentialism" [online]
- Marc Bekoff et al. (eds.), The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition
- Radu J. Bogdan
- Brown, Human Universals [The Postal Service stole my copy; I'd like to get it back someday...]
- Martine Brune, "Schizophrenia---an evolutionary engima?", Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 28 (2004): 41--53
- David Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature
- Raffaele Calabretta, Andrea Di Ferdinando, Günter P. Wagner and Domenico Parisi, "What does it take to evolve behaviorally complex organisms?" [online]
- Anne Campbell, Staying Alive: Evolution, Culture and Women's Intra-Sexual Aggression (target article in BBS)
- Angelo Cangelosi and Domenico Parisi, "How nouns and verbs differentially affect the behavior of artificial organisms" [online]
- Angelo Cangelosi and Steven Harnad, "The adaptive advantage of symbolic theft over sensorimotor toil: Grounding language in perceptual categories" [online]
- Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory [Review by John Constable]
- C. Sue Carter et al. (eds.), The Integrative Neurobiology of Affiliation
- Steve W. C. Chang, Lauren J. N. Brent, Geoffrey K. Adams, Jeffrey T. Klein, John M. Pearson, Karli K. Watson, and Michael L. Platt, "Neuroethology of primate social behavior", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 110 10387--10394
- Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth
- Murray Clarke, Reconstructing Reason and Representation
- John Constable
- Holk Cruse, "The Evolution of Cognition --- A Hypothesis," Cognitive Science 27 (2003): 135--155
- Darwin
- The Descent of Man
- The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man
- Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence
- Frans B. M. de Waal and Peter L. Tyack (eds.), Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies [Review by Danny Yee]
- Todd E. Feinberg and Jon M. Mallatt, The Ancient Origins of Consciousness: How the Brain Created Experience
- Richard C. Francis, Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology
- Jeremy
Freese
- What Should Sociology Do About Darwin?: Evaluating Some Potential Contributions of Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology to Sociology [Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University, 2000; PDF]
- "The Problem of Predictive Promiscuity in Deductive Applications of Evolutionary Reasoning to Intergenerational Transfers: Three Cautionary Tales" [PDF]
- JF, Jui-Chung Allen Li, and Lisa D. Wade, "The Potential Relevances of Biology to Social Inquiry", Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 233--256 [PDF reprint]
- and Brian Powell, "Rebel without a Cause or Effect: Birth Order and Social Attitudes", American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 207--231 [PDF reprint. Sulloway's ideas never made much sense to me anyway...]
- Peter Gardenfors, How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking
- Michael S. Gazzaniga
- The Mind's Past
- Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language and Intelligence
- Paul Glimcher, Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain: Science of Neuroeconomics
- Paul E. Griffiths, "Evo-Devo Meets the Mind: Towards a Developmental Evolutionary Psychology" [online]
- Esther Herrmann, Josep Call, María Victoria Hernàndez-Lloreda, Brian Hare and Michael Tomasello, "Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis", Science 317 (2007): 1360--1366
- Nicole C. Hess and Edward H. Hagen, "Informational Warfare" [online]
- Cecilia Heyes, "Born Pupils? Natural Pedagogy and Cultural Pedagogy", Perspectives on Psychological Science 11 (2016): 280--295
- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
- Nicholas Humphrey, "The Social Function of Intellect" [online]
- Alison Jolly, Lucy's Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human evolution
- Kaplan and Kaplan, Cognition and Environment: Functioning in an Uncertain World
- Peter M. Kappeler and Michael E. Pereira (eds.), Primate Life Histories and Socioecology
- Chris Knight et al. (eds.), The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Social Function and the Origins of Linguistic Form
- Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit
- William D. Lassek, Steven J. C. Gaulin, "Do the Low WHRs and BMIs Judged Most Attractive Indicate Higher Fertility?" Evolutionary Psychology October-December 2018: 1--16
- Gregory C. Leavitt, "The incest taboo? A reconsideration of Westermarck", Anthropological Theory 7 (2007): 393--419
- P. C. Lee (ed.), Comparative Primate Socioecology
- Philip Lieberman, The Unpredictable Species: What Makes Humans Unique
- Elisabeth A. Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution
- Konrad Lorenz
- Evolution and the Modification of Behavior
- The Natural Science of the Human Species
- Bobbi Low, Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior
- Edouard Machery, "Massive Modularity and Brain Evolution", phil-sci/2972
- Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science
- Sue Taylor Parker and Michael L. McKinney, Origins of Intelligence: The Evolution of Cognitive Development in Monkeys, Apes and Humans [review by Clive D. L. Wynne in American Scientist]
- Derek C. Penn, Keith J. Holyoak and dAniel J. Povinelli, "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds", Behavioral and Brain Sceinces 31 (2008): 109--130 + commentary (pp. 130--153) and response (pp. 153--178) [PDF preprint; remarks at Mixing Memory]
- Pinker, The Blank Slate [Review by Steven Johnson in, of all places, The Nation: Sociobiology and You]
- Henry Plotkin
- Evolution in Mind
- Necessary Knowledge
- Paul H. Rubin, Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom
- Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life
- Rebecca Sear and Frank W. Marlowe, "How universal are human mate choices? Size does not matter when Hadza foragers are choosing a mate", Biology Letters 5 (2009): 606--609 [PDF reprint]
- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology
- Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain
- Kim Sterelny
- Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition
- The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique [Not clear, from the description, how this is at all a new theory]
- Georg F. Striedter, "Precis of Principles of Brain Evolution", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (2006): 1--12 [With extensive peer commentary following]
- Karen B. Strier, Primate Behavioral Ecology
- Jean Suplizio, "Evolutionary Psychology: The Academic Debate", Science in Context 19 (2006): 269--293 ["the evolutionary psychologists shortchange practitioners from the fields of biological anthropology, empirical linguistics, and developmental psychology. By doing so, they miss the opportunity to benefit from work that could contribute to an enhanced, albeit modified evolutionary psychology"]
- Michael Tomasello
- The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition [Some reading notes at the excellent blog Mixing Memory: introduction, chapter 1, 2a, 2b]
- Why We Cooperate (with contributions by Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, rian Skyrms, and Elizabeth Spelke)
- A Natural History of Human Thinking
- A Natural History of Human Morality
- The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans
- John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, "Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology" [PDF preprint]
- Griet Vandermassen, Who's Afraid of Charles Darwin? Debating Feminism and Evolutionary Theory
- Thomas W. Volscho, "Money and Sex, the Illusory Universal Sex Difference: Comment on Kanazawa", The Sociological Quarterly 46 (2005): 719--736 [PDF reprint]
- Dennis Werner, Darwinist Epistemology and Anthropology: An Evolutionary Look at How Animals, Humans and Intellectuals Think
- Harvey Whitehouse (ed.), The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography [Actually, the back cover at least promises something more productive than mere "versus"]
- Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations
- Arthur P. Wolf and William H. Durham (eds.), Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State of Knowledge at the Turn of the Century [i.e., 2004]
- Marlene Zuk
