Imagine I’m a chimp, and some other chimp or even several other chimps decide I ought to be punished” I agree with the authors’ stance against the politicized “standard social science model” where nurture always trumps a non-existing nature. But WBPHMD goes a bit overboard with it and becomes slightly political in its own right. When I first started reading “ The Moral Animal,” I thought I had stumbled into the decryption code of the world. 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. One of the proposed answers is that it helps us take responsibility for our actions and gives us more self-confidence, because we see we’re having an effect on things. But it doesn’t make sense. If having self-confidence was a good thing, why not just have a module that tells you to be self-confident? It’d be crazy to have all this complexity concocting a whole other story just to convince yourself of something that could be done very simply. The illusion clearly requires a lot of specialised brainpower, so it’s doing something for us. The fact we don’t know what that is makes it the most fascinating of all questions, I think. That’s why I included it here. It has to have an evolutionary answer.

The SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology | Sage

As of now, I consider evolutionary psychology one of the fundamental disciplines to understand human nature.For example, the standard model of courtship communication was that animals (and humans) communicate about themselves to facilitate mating. However, Dawkins and Krebs realized that communication is sometimes cooperative and sometimes about the deception of one’s true fitness and intentions ( Dawkins & Krebs, 1978).

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

If you think that morality no longer proffers genetic advantages, does that indicate we will evolve to become less moral? 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. There’s something else that’s unusual about humans that we don’t often talk about: we’re the only animals that can kill at a distance” 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. 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.

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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 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. Your next evolutionary psychology book recommendation is Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s Homicide. This looks at the possible motives for murder as a product of the process of evolution. Is that a fair way to summarise it?

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

Evolutionary psychologists did at times go too far in denying the role of culture. In my opinion, that was to be expected. Some trailblazing and popular evolutionary psychologists like Buss, Moody, and Pinker took the gargantuan task of undoing decades of cultural determinism, a paradigm that Pinker correctly labeled “the denial of human nature”. And the tendency of correcting a previous (mistaken) paradigm is almost always to over-correct. 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 Can we just briefly hover over that point about learning and innateness, this being quite central to the field of evolutionary psychology. To put it in simple terms, could we picture this as software vs. hardware? Is that a good analogy?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” 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.