Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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In the most famous example, scientists showed a picture of a snow scene to the left visual field—so, right brain—and a chicken’s claw to the right visual field. Alison Gopnik She makes the very interesting argument that our particular evolutionary niche is such that we can’t just depend on mothers to provide care.

In terms of understanding homicide as a psychological phenomenon, this is not to suggest that murderers are actually making evolutionary calculations in an explicit way, right? Key studies and theories are explored in an accessible way, with the work of key evolutionary and behavioural scientists from Darwin to Dawkins examined and explained.Psychology is often a lot of very separate pieces of experimental work about how a mind does this or that. Buss examines human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, providing students with the conceptual tools needed to study evolutionary.

We’d only evolve to be less moral if the people who society saw as successful, the more creative people and the rich people, were also having more children. So it’s very important that you don’t do things which cause other people to punish you, and that you choose the right side to be on when you’re ganging up with your rocks to punish someone else. Like Steven Pinker had to get rid of people’s idea that they already knew what language was about, I had to get rid of this idea that everybody knows what morality is about—that it’s about being nice to each other, nothing to do with evolution at all. Evolutionary Psychology was first published in 1998, when the publisher described it as an introduction to “a revolutionary new science, a true synthesis of modern principles of psychology and evolutionary biology.They’ve shown you can explain an awful lot—an astonishing amount—just by looking at the dynamics of group punishment—but I don’t think they believe that’s the end of the story.

The scholar argues that people are wired to see patterns in chaos while remaining blind to unpredictable events, with massive consequences. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting. 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. This book, filled with a broad array of fascinating topics, is bound to further whet the appetite of a growing number of students who have been inspired by this provocative, yet eminently testable approach to human behavior.

By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Because it’s the doing that’s important—actually having sex and producing children, not saying who you would be more attracted to. These, in turn, lead to whole new evolutionary pressures which change us in some other way and those changes introduce further pressures which we adapt to and so on.

Esther Perel [Esther Perel recommended this book as an answer to "What are some [resources] for couples who want to explore having a more “monogamish” relationship? But I didn’t hesitate to include a controversial book because I think much of evolutionary psychology is.Who speeds through traffic lights, who doesn’t stop at traffic lights, it’s the people in the nice cars. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.