Evolutionary Psychology Volume II

Evolutionary approaches to the study of human beings have been able to explain the origin and maintenance of many of the features of our bodies. Many thinkers believe that an evolutionary approach will be equally fruitful when it comes to explaining the features of our minds. Since our behaviour is driven by our minds, our cognitive dispositions and processes are likely to have been a target of selection and adaptation. This volume collects recent prominent explorations of this theme, as well as the voices of dissenters who argue that our minds are far more significantly the product of culture than of evolution.

Contents: Introduction; Part I Theoretical Background: Evolutionary psychology: a new paradigm for psychological science, David M. Buss; A critique of Darwinian anthropology, Donald Symons; Human evolutionary psychology and animal behaviour, Martin Daly and Margo I. Wilson; Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences: a guide for the perplexed, Eric A. Smith, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Kim Hill. Part II The Massive Modularity Hypothesis: Domain-specific reasoning: social contracts, cheating and perspective change, Gerd Gigerenzer and Klaus Hug; Evolutionary psychology and the massive modularity hypothesis, Richard Samuels; Evolutionary psychology, meet developmental neurobiology: against promiscuous modularity, David J. Buller and Valerie Gray Hardcastle. Part III Adaptationism: Evolutionary psychology: the burdens of proof, Elisabeth A. Lloyd; The historical turn in the study of adaptation, Paul E. Griffiths; How to pursue the adaptationist program in psychology, Russil Durrant and Brian D. Haig; Methodology in evolutionary psychology, Sally Ferguson. Part IV The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness: The past explains the present: emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides; The adaptive legacy of human evolution: a search for the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, Robert Foley; Adaptively relevant environments versus the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, William Irons. Part V Cultural Universals: On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: the role of genetics and adaptation, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides; The odd couple: the compatibility of social construction and evolutionary psychology, Ron Mallon and Stephen P. Stich ; Evolutionary psychology, human universals, and the standard social science model, Neil Levy; Index.

Stefan Linquist, University of Guelph, Canada and Neil Levy, Florey Neuroscience Institutes, Australia and Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, UK