Evolutionary Psychology

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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How does everyone here feel about Evolutionary Psychology? I’m just starting to get into it, so I hope the more knowledgeable members here will forgive (and correct) me if I’ve misunderstood anything here.

In the book Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature, David Buller describes two different definitions of the phrase “evolutionary psychology”. First, this phrase can be used to refer to a broad “field of inquiry”, which is simply the quest to understand the human mind from the perspective of evolution. Second, it can be used to refer to a specific set of dogmas held by a leading group of researchers within this field of inquiry. The latter, the “paradigm” of Evolutionary Psychology, is what I am referring to.

Basically, for those who don’t know, the paradigm of Evolutionary Psychology holds that the human mind consists of “modules”, programs evolved as adaptations to specific problems in survival and reproduction experienced by the human species during the Pleistocene epoch, the time period ranging from 2.5 million years ago to 12,000 million years ago.

Examples of these modules include basic behavior (social interaction frameworks, emotions, etc.) and more specific behavioral trends such as incest avoidance or mate selection (males preferring nubile females as mates, and females preferring high-status males as mates).

The Evolutionary Psychology paradigm challenges the concept of the human mind as a “blank slate”; it holds that, rather than our personalities simply being shaped by our experiences, the effects of our experiences on us are categorized by a basic framework of “human nature” consisting of the aforementioned modules.

So, is this a realistic set of views? Are we all built on a framework of modules which make up human nature, or do we have enough phenotypic behavioral variation (shaped by genetic variation and by different experiences) to be considered to be “different” from the vast majority of other animals, in which behavior is shaped by the same instincts across the species?

For an introduction to Evolutionary Psychology, I recommend http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html

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Our minds are evolved products to ancesteral environments, evolutionary psycholgy, within decades has unveiled more about the human mind than hundreds of years of traditional psycholgy.

We have incest-avoidance adaptations, adaptations influencing our moral perception of right and wrong, we have facial detection, folkphysics, folkbiology and folkpsycholgy, men even have adaptations to determine the liklihood of parenthood based on facial resembelence, the list is endless and for many the evidence overwhelming with the neuromachinery responsible mapped out.

Theres some other good books: The Adapted Mind, FolkBiology, Evolutionary cognitive neuroscience, etc

BULLER is an idiot: he denies trends like the cinderella effect. psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/buller08.htm
criticisms of IDIOT BULLER.

Seriously Bullers claims are horse shit

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google.ca/search?hl=en&sourc … arch&meta=

  • Daly/Wilson

Margo Wilson and Martin Daly are some of the most pronounced and well respected researchers in the ENTIRE WORLD, their research and adherence to SCIENCE mind-numbing, they have made MORE CONTRIBUTION to understanding homicide than ANY OTHER researchers TO DATE.

They discovered infanticide risks correlate with certain ages of the mother, they’ve explored and discovered where lesser people didn’t even THINK to question.

To see Buller drag yhem through the mud for a clear agenda bothers me.

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Its simply a question of: What evidence is there that humans have innate adaptations, it seems obvious we do, the evidence is overwhelming. The Fusiform Gyrus specializes in facial detection, we can surmise the importance of facial detection by looking to the poor people which can’t. You can have brain damage that leaves you 100% normal EXCEPT facial detection OR language OR moral ability, you can damage SPECIAL networks in the brain, specialized to tasks.

Obviously taste, sight, smell, touch and hearing requires specialized functional neuromachinery, why wouldn’t cheater detection, facial detection, fight/flight or sexual jealousy (all just as common and complex) require the same? People underestimate the specialization required to not eat poison or get eaten, or etc.

Theres trillions of ways to die a few possible choices for even brief survival, we live in environments far too dangerous for “learning” everything. Plus LEARNING requires specialized adaptations itself. Rocks don’t learn, biology, when properly specialized DOES.

If I learn anything its cuz my brain is arranged in a way productive to learning, as in theres direct neuromachinery that allows for it, even still THATS TOO GENERALIZED, humans don’t learn to fear predators through experience or learning, at least fight/flight will kick in with or without it.

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I’ve always thought so. I’ve always thought that there have to be at least a few elements of the human way of experiencing and thinking of the world that are there from birth (though still needing to be developed). I’ve wondered if this can be said of some of the basic concepts that we all share in common - like space and time, objects, self, awareness. It would be advantageous if we had a few of these under our belts from the start.

Though I also think that no concept, or module, could develop without the cooperation of the subject’s encounters with the world. Even something as simple as color perception needs to be nurtured by way of the subject’s experiences with world, but this is not quite the same as saying the subject learns about colors the same way he might learn that (say) bees sting. The latter is learnt from a contingent experience. A child who lives in an environment where there are no bees could quite possibly never learn that there are such insects, let alone that they sting. But something like color perception is not ‘learnt’ in this way. It is not a contingency. It is an inevitable result of an organism genetically predisposed to see colors living in an environment that inevitably nurtures this predisposition to fruition (i.e. there is no such thing as a colorless environment).