The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Volume 1

Foundation

David M. Buss, David M. Buss

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118755976
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The indispensable reference tool for the groundbreaking science of evolutionary psychology

Why is the mind designed the way it is? How does input from the environment interact with the mind to produce behavior? These are the big, unanswered questions that the field of evolutionary psychology seeks to explore. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology is the seminal work in this vibrant, quickly-developing new discipline. In this thorough revision and expansion, luminaries in the field provide an in-depth exploration of the foundations of evolutionary psychology and explain the new empirical discoveries and theoretical developments that continue at a breathtaking pace.

Evolutionary psychologists posit that the mind has a specialized and complex structure, just as the body has a specialized and complex structure. From this important theoretical concept arises the vast array of possibilities that are at the core of the field, which seeks to examine such traits as perception, language, and memory from an evolutionary perspective. This examination is intended to determine the human psychological traits that are the products of sexual and natural selection and, as such, to chart and understand human nature.

• Join the discussion of the big questions addressed by the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology
• Explore the foundations of evolutionary psychology, from theory and methods to the thoughts of EP critics
• Discover the psychology of human survival, mating, parenting, cooperation and conflict, culture, and more
• Identify how evolutionary psychology is interwoven with other academic subjects and traditional psychological disciplines

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology is the definitive guide for every psychologist and student interested in keeping abreast of new ideas in this quickly-developing field.

Part I
Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology

David M.Buss

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have been true pioneers in developing the conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology, so it's fitting that they supply the first foundational chapter. They provide a fascinating tour of the discipline's intellectual origins, showing how a series of conceptual advances, from the cognitive revolution to evolutionary game theory, led to the emergence of evolutionary psychology. Tooby and Cosmides then discuss foundational premises on which the field rests. They explicate principles of organic design, the logic of reverse engineering, the nature of evidence for special design, and discuss how theories of good design provide powerful heuristics for psychological scientists. They describe how the framework of evolutionary psychology differs from that of traditional psychology. Finally, Tooby and Cosmides offer an intriguing novel framework for conceptualizing the functional architecture of cognition, motivation, and emotion. The original theoretical papers of Tooby and Cosmides over the past 30 years have informed virtually all work being conducted in the field of evolutionary psychology. This chapter, heavily revised from the first edition, consolidates and expands the conceptual foundations of the field.

Marco Del Giudice, Steven Gangestad, and Hillard Kaplan argue for the integration of life history theory and evolutionary psychology, suggesting that adaptations are designed to make different budget-allocation trade-offs over the lifespan. They begin with a presentation of the fundamentals of life history theory. All energy budgets of an organism are finite, so trade-offs are inevitable. They discuss the most important trade-offs—between present and future reproduction, quality and quantity of offspring, and mating effort and parental effort. They proceed to illuminate the important effects of ecological factors such as food supply and mortality hazards on optimal life history strategies. Del Giudice and coauthors then turn to humans specifically, showing how life history theory informs, and can be successfully integrated with, evolutionary psychology. Most intriguingly, they propose that these adaptations cannot be independent of each other in at least two ways. First, effort allocated to one (e.g., preventing cuckoldry) necessarily takes away effort allocated to others (e.g., foraging for food). Second, humans must possess coevolved bundles of psychological mechanisms, such as those for long-term mating linked with those for heavy-investment parenting. They make a persuasive argument that the integration of life history theory with evolutionary psychology provides a means for uncovering psychological adaptations designed to make important budget allocation trade-offs. This approach also promises to reveal how different psychological mechanisms are linked with each other, illuminated by an economic cost–benefit analysis of selection pressures.

Jeffrey Simpson and Lorne Campbell argue convincingly that programs of research in evolutionary psychology can and should be strengthened methodologically by using a wider array of methods and measurement techniques specifically tailored to testing “special design” predictions that follow from hypothesized psychological adaptations. They present a persuasive case for multiple research methods and multiple outcome measures, as well as increased attention to issues of the validity of these measures, in successfully illuminating the “special design” qualities of hypothesized psychological adaptations. Evolutionary psychology ultimately will convince the residue of remaining skeptics by empirical discoveries that cannot successfully be explained by more traditional competing “nonevolutionary” explanations. This chapter provides an informative and insightful guide for anyone conducting, or aspiring to conduct, empirical research in evolutionary psychology.

Edward Hagen provides an insightful analysis of recurrent controversies surrounding evolutionary psychology and the misconceptions that stubbornly persist. He makes a compelling case for a universal human nature with adaptations as the central pillars of that nature. Hagen incisively addresses misconceptions about evolutionary psychology that are tiresomely repeated by those critical of the enterprise, such as misconceptions about the concept of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (no, it is not a specific time or place, an error that seems a stubborn meme that resists attempts at correction). Hagen explores evolution before the Pleistocene era, as well as evolution within the past 10,000 years. He concludes by noting that most critics of evolutionary psychology essentially accept its basic premises.

Pascal Boyer and Clark Barrett offer an extended argument for domain specificity, using intuitive ontology—adaptations for different domains of information—as a vehicle for illuminating the tight integration of neural, developmental, and behavioral components of evolved psychological mechanisms. They describe evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience that strongly supports a key foundational premise of evolutionary psychology, namely that humans possess, in their words, “a federation of evolved competencies.” Boyer and Barrett outline the features that specific inference systems possess, including semantic knowledge, a specialized learning logic, a dedicated set of developmental pathways, and a close correspondence with specific adaptive problems solved. They then explore several broad evolved competencies in detail, such as the ability to read the minds of others (intuitive psychology) and the ability to grapple with the physical environment (intuitive physics). They argue persuasively that evolved competencies, in fact, are more fine-grained than these ontological categories imply. Indeed, adaptations cross these ontological categories. Boyer and Barrett provide an example par excellence of how evolutionary psychology dissolves traditional disciplinary boundaries by bringing developmental, cognitive, and neuroscience evidence to bear in illuminating evolved psychological mechanisms.

Chapter 1
The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides

The Emergence of Evolutionary Psychology: What is at Stake?

The theory of evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the human mind and brain, as Darwin himself was the first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural science capable of precision and rapid progress. Yet, more than a century and a half after On the Origin of Species was published, many of the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences continue to be grounded on assumptions that evolutionarily informed researchers know to be false; the rest have only in the past few decades set to work on the radical reformulations of their disciplines necessary to make them consistent with findings in the evolutionary sciences, information theory, computer science, physics, the neurosciences, molecular and cellular biology, genetics, behavioral ecology, hunter-gatherer studies, biological anthropology, primatology, and so on (Pinker, 1997, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences—a framework that not only incorporates the evolutionary sciences and information theory on a full and equal basis, but that systematically works out all the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).

The first long-term scientific goal toward which evolutionary psychologists are working is the mapping of our universal human nature. By mapping human nature, we mean the progressive construction and refinement of a set of empirically validated, high-resolution models of the evolved adaptations (genetic, developmental, anatomical, neural, information processing, etc.) that collectively constitute universal human nature. Because the focus in the behavioral and social sciences is on explaining mind, behavior, and social interactions, initially the emphasis has been placed on adaptations that are behavior-regulating, and which researchers may call a variety of names, such as evolved psychological (mental, cognitive) programs, neurocomputational prog-rams, behavior-regulatory programs, adaptive specializations, “modules,” information-processing mechanisms, and so on. However, because the architecture of the human species evolved as a set of functional interactions at all physical and temporal scales, it follows that genetic, cellular, developmental, anatomical, physiological, endocrinological, and life-historical processes are also considered as fully part of human nature, and, therefore, part of the systems of evolved interrelationships that evolutionary psychology needs to deal with. Because the evolved function of a regulatory mechanism is computational—to regulate behavior, development, and the body adaptively (over the short term and the long term) in response to informa-tional inputs—such a model consists of a description of the functional circuit logic or information-processing architecture of the mechanism, in a way that eventually should incorporate its physical implementation (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). More completely, these models must sooner or later include descriptions of the regulatory logic of the developmental programs that, in interaction with environments, lead to the unfolding succession of designs that constitute the organism's changing phenotype across its life history (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Tooby, Cosmides, & Barrett, 2003—see review in Del Giudice, Gangestad, & Kaplan, Chapter 2, this volume). As scientific knowledge grows in the longer term, these models will eventually come to incorporate descriptions of the neural and genetic implementations of these mechanisms.

The second long-term scientific goal toward which evolutionary psychologists and their allies are working is a comprehensive reconstruction of the social sciences (and many of the humanities) that an accurate, natural science–based model of human nature will both make possible and require. At present, the social sciences are a stew of mutually contradictory claims, with no theoretical unity or clear progressive direction. Major components of the social sciences are sufficiently incoherent to qualify—in Paul Dirac's phrase—as not even wrong. Genuine, detailed specifications of the circuit logics of the neuroregulatory programs that compose human nature are expected to become the theoretical centerpieces of a newly reconstituted set of social sciences. This is because each model of an evolved component of human nature (e.g., the human-language competence) makes predictions about (and explains) those sets of developmental, psychological, behavioral, and social phenomena that its circuits generate or regulate (e.g., the existence of and the patterns found in human language; Pinker, 1994; the existence of and patterns found in incest aversion and kin-directed altruism; Lieberman, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2007). The resulting changes to the social sciences are expected to be dramatic and far-reaching because the traditional conceptual framework for the social and behavioral sciences—what we have called the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM)—was built from defective assumptions about the nature of the human psychological and developmental architecture (for an analysis of the SSSM, see Pinker, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The most consequential assumption is that the human psychological architecture consists predominantly of learning and reasoning mechanisms that are general purpose, content independent, and equipotential (Pinker, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). That is, the mind is blank-slate–like, and lacks specialized circuits that were designed by natural selection to respond differentially to inputs by virtue of their evolved significance. This presumed psychology justifies a crucial foundational claim: Just as a blank piece of paper plays no causal role in determining the content that is inscribed on it, the blank-slate view of the mind rationalizes the belief that the evolved organization of the mind plays little causal role in generating the content of human social and mental l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: The Emergence and Maturation of Evolutionary Psychology
• Part I: Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
• Part II: Survival
• Part III: Mating
• Part IV: Parenting and Kinship
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement