Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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The “perfect designer fallacy”: the idea that evolution will always shape organisms to be the best possible adaptations for the environment Only after the variations developed they can be selected for or against by the environment and by the interaction with the other members of the same species. Diamond thinks that the public, you and I, need his convincing. Or you might never know that we espouse one of those ugly racist theories daring to say that genes matter and that different people might differ.

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology | Wiley Online Books

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. What Buss fails to realize is that some of those workers will go home and tell their wives “go to the kitchen, woman”.

You’ve got to remember that words are a way of changing what other people do. If I spoke, but no one else changed what they did as a result of me saying them, I would never have evolved language. And that makes another pressure: I learn to say things, but others have also got to evolve to respond to that, because if everybody just did what I told them to do all the time, then fantastic for me—but clearly not so good for their genes. So that creates a sort of arms race, and maybe that explains why there’s such a gulf between us and other animals. Once you start on that race, things proceed very fast. That being said, it’s a wonderful primer for beginners and younger folks who are just starting out on their path to enlightenment. WBPHMD is beginner-friendly because it presents key evolutionary tenets in a fun and entertaining Q&A format. When I first started reading “ The Moral Animal,” I thought I had stumbled into the decryption code of the world. 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”

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

Fathers who didn’t care about paternity were out-reproduced by those who did, and they left fewer and fewer copies of their genes. Well, Ghodsee discusses something you won’t find in any other book on this list: the power struggle between men and women as groups and not just as individuals. It’s all quite horrible stuff—you’re more likely to kill very young children, for example. But if you stripped away what everybody says about morality and how they would behave, how they care about their stepchildren, it’s a little bit like what you’d expect. Lions, when they take over a pride, kill the cubs. It happens to a much, much lesser extent in humans. But it’s still measurable. It’s the young cubs that get killed, and they get killed by stepparents. The data allows us to ask questions: Why do men kill more than women? When do they kill more? Under what circumstances? Is it rich people or poor people? And what are they killing for? It’s generally not to get rich. It’s often to do with new partners, relationships, and so on.

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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. These are the evolutionary books that should come with the scarlet letter of “anti-science”: Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism 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. 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. The Illusion of Conscious Will is ostensibly a social psychology book, as opposed to an evolutionary psychology book. Wegner was at Harvard, and is one of the greatest ever psychologists. He argues that we are usually mistaken about this impression of conscious will; we usually infer an intention to do something from our actions, rather than from actually being able to consciously make something happen.