Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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A few of the “leftist” and “blank slate” biases that most evolutionary psychologists complain about are present here. Sex At Dawn

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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? Buss: There’s an interesting photo that I think got captioned, but it’s two very elegant women with designer handbags and they’re walking by a guy who’s fixing the tar in the street and as they walk by this guy who’s groveling on the ground they say “stop oppressing me” 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. Sure, it came out in 1994 and since then much new research has been performed and led to further advances in the field. 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.That’s what we’re doing much of the time—coming up with externally plausible explanations for why we do what we do”

6 Important Evolutionary Psychology Books | Psychology Today 6 Important Evolutionary Psychology Books | Psychology Today

So, if you’re altogether frightened of controversy, evolutionary psychology is not the subject you should be studying. It’s exciting that way. It’s Sapolsky’s Magnus opera, and the only reason it’s not higher than #9. is that “Behave” is not focused on evolutionary psychology but on human psychology and behavior in general. He aligns with the zeitgeist and says that I quote: “ Ecological differences among existing humans are entirely the product of childhood and education“. Language is a really good example. We’ll look at one of Steven Pinker’s books in a minute, but language is something that we’ve evolved very specialist brain mechanisms for: why? Is it to communicate about facts? Or is it gossip about other people a social thing? Or in some way is it to impress mates? Do more eloquent people get better mates? And, if my wife fell in love with me because I’m more eloquent, why on earth would she have done that? Might it be some combination? Maybe we started evolving language to communicate information—to show that we’re trustworthy—and then once you’ve got that in place, it became useful for gossiping, and then we become more specialized for gossiping.

It’s on the evolution of morality. A bit like language, it’s one of those things where you’d say it seems really odd to say it evolved.In the same way that you’ve got Spanish speakers and Chinese speakers and English speakers, you have people who are Utilitarians, you’ve got duty ethics people, you’ve got people who say their morals come from religion. You’ve got people who think abortion is murder, and those who think it’s a right. But the mechanism for holding morals, and for acting upon them, and for judging people, can have and does seem to have evolved. 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. And still live in a world where the truth must be defended tooth and claw -ironic since the leftist blank slate dogma denies humans have any inherent drive towards conflict and competition-. 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. 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).

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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. But there are loads of these experiments. There are split-brain experiments; in the past, epileptics sometimes have the corpus callosum chopped. The corpus callosum is a bundle of nerve fibres that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. After the operation, the two halves of the brain can’t communicate as freely as yours and mine can. Your right half of the brain tends to control your left visual field, your left arm, and vice versa. And most of the generation of language takes place in the left brain. So if you do something with your left brain, using your right side, it’s easy to explain why you did it. But with these people who’ve had the corpus callossum cut, you can show things to the left side of their field of vision, and get them to respond to it with the same side of their body, then explain why they did it, they’ll invent explanations which seem entirely plausible, but are obviously wrong. It feels to me like this argument is a little more heated than the debates around language, because it’s more nuanced. But I didn’t hesitate to include a controversial book because I think much of evolutionary psychology is. It’s not like studying 19th century physics; my physics lecturer told me, ‘this is how water pressure works and we know it is because we’ve known about it for 200 years and tested it.’ This is a new discipline, and by nature that means its got lots of theories. Over time they’ll be weeded down and we’ll have more confidence.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. 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.

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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.

That’s the ultimate manipulation to me: science is our best weapon for progress, and it must remain neutral (see: “ Enlightenment Now“).