Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven't thought of evolution in the same way since. A bit like language, it’s one of those things where you’d say it seems really odd to say it evolved. If what we are now saying is that what we genuinely believe is inferred more from the outside in, you would expect people’s answers to tend towards what they think culture expects them to say. Drawing fascinating examples from every field of biology, he paved the way for a serious re-evaluation of evolution.

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? She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture.

And when we started being able to speak—there are changes in the bones of the throat, which they can time quite well.

In this case, it may be that coalitional punishment—the thing that Bingham and Souza describe so brilliantly—first made co-operation in non-family groups possible. We’ve also had Suzana Herculano-Houzel on our site, who pointed to cooking as the key turning point in human evolutionary history. 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. People say, oh well, you need a social environment to make soldiers march and don’t hang around the back, so you need morals for welfare, and killing is to do with welfare, so the two must go together somehow.Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology).

So, if you’re altogether frightened of controversy, evolutionary psychology is not the subject you should be studying.By examining the prehistoric origins of human sexual behavior the authors are able to expose the fallacies and weaknesses of standard theories proposed by most experts. Witty, powerfully argued, and continually thought-provoking, The Mating Mind is a landmark in our understanding of our own species. Human traits are a product of natural selection—and the story of how we have evolved explains many of our psychological quirks today. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. That’s something you might think is obvious—if you’ve read the Grimm Fairy Tales, there’s always an evil stepmother.

The author of more than 200 scientific articles and 6 books, Buss has won numerous awards including the American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (1988), the APA G. 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. It also offers a thoughtful, balanced approach to such controversies in EP as the issues of genetic determinism, racism, and sexism. Buss explores these intriguing quandaries with his vision of psychology in the new millennium as a new science of the mind.

Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others.