Author: George Ellis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107053684
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
This book presents a compelling unifying theory of which aspects of the brain are innate and which are not.

Author: David J. Buller
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262261821
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
Was human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was—that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology—the paradigm popularized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire—and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided. Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "discoveries," including "discriminative parental solicitude" (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children). Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence. Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.

Author: Lance Workman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521888360
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Highly acclaimed, stand-alone textbook essential for every undergraduate studying introductory evolutionary psychology.

Author: Gillian Barker
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540396
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Beyond Biofatalism is a lively and penetrating response to the idea that evolutionary psychology reveals human beings to be incapable of building a more inclusive, cooperative, and egalitarian society. Considering the pressures of climate change, unsustainable population growth, increasing income inequality, and religious extremism, this attitude promises to stifle the creative action we require before we even try to meet these threats. Beyond Biofatalism provides the perspective we need to understand that better societies are not only possible but actively enabled by human nature. Gillian Barker appreciates the methods and findings of evolutionary psychologists, but she considers their work against a broader background to show human nature is surprisingly open to social change. Like other organisms, we possess an active plasticity that allows us to respond dramatically to certain kinds of environmental variation, and we engage in niche construction, modifying our environment to affect others and ourselves. Barker uses related research in social psychology, developmental biology, ecology, and economics to reinforce this view of evolved human nature, and philosophical exploration to reveal its broader implications. The result is an encouraging foundation on which to build better approaches to social, political, and other institutional changes that could enhance our well-being and chances for survival.

Author: David Buss
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317345746
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
This book examines human psychology and behavior through the lens of modern evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary Psychology: The Ne w Science of the Mind, 5/e provides students with the conceptual tools of evolutionary psychology, and applies them to empirical research on the human mind. Content topics are logically arrayed, starting with challenges of survival, mating, parenting, and kinship; and then progressing to challenges of group living, including cooperation, aggression, sexual conflict, and status, prestige, and social hierarchies. Students gain a deep understanding of applying evolutionary psychology to their own lives and all the people they interact with.

Author: Michael McCullough
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9780470262153
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Why is revenge such a pervasive and destructive problem? How can we create a future in which revenge is less common and forgiveness is more common? Psychologist Michael McCullough argues that the key to a more forgiving, less vengeful world is to understand the evolutionary forces that gave rise to these intimately human instincts and the social forces that activate them in human minds today. Drawing on exciting breakthroughs from the social and biological sciences, McCullough dispenses surprising and practical advice for making the world a more forgiving place. Michael E. McCullough (Miami, Florida), an internationally recognized expert on forgiveness and revenge, is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he directs the Laboratory for Social and Clinical Psychology.

Author: Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108470971
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 575

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Book Description
A complete account of evolutionary thought in the social, environmental and policy sciences, creating bridges with biology.

Author: Stephanie L. Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195388100
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Moving Beyond Self-Interest is an interdisciplinary volume that discusses cutting-edge developments in the science of caring for and helping others. In Part I, contributors raise foundational issues related to human caregiving. They present new theories and data to show how natural selection might have shaped a genuinely altruistic drive to benefit others, how this drive intersects with the attachment and caregiving systems, and how it emerges from a broader social engagement system made possible by symbiotic regulation of autonomic physiological states. In Part II, contributors propose a new neurophysiological model of the human caregiving system and present arguments and evidence to show how mammalian neural circuitry that supports parenting might be recruited to direct human cooperation and competition, human empathy, and parental and romantic love. Part III is devoted to the psychology of human caregiving. Some contributors in this section show how an evolutionary perspective helps us better understand parental investment in and empathic concern for children at risk for, or suffering from, various health, behavioral, and cognitive problems. Other contributors identify circumstances that differentially predict caregiver benefits and costs, and raise the question of whether extreme levels of compassion are actually pathological. The section concludes with a discussion of semantic and conceptual obstacles to the scientific investigation of caregiving. Part IV focuses on possible interfaces between new models of caregiving motivation and economics, political science, and social policy development. In this section, contributors show how the new theory and research discussed in this volume can inform our understanding of economic utility, policies for delivering social services (such as health care and education), and hypotheses concerning the origins and development of human society, including some of its more problematic features of nationalism, conflict, and war. The chapters in this volume help readers appreciate the human capacity for engaging in altruistic acts, on both a small and large scale.

Author: Louise Barrett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691165564
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world.

Author: Susan McKinnon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226500241
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
"This book mobilizes experts from several fields of anthropology - cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological - to offer a compelling challenge to the resurgence of reductive theories of human biological and social life. It presents evidence to contest such theories and to provide a multifaceted account of the complexity and variability of the human condition".--Back cover.