...............EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY.............: A Brief Note About Comment Moderation

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

A Brief Note About Comment Moderation

Due to the behavior of certain unnamed and unscrupulous individuals, I have found it necessary to return to full-time comment moderation at EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY. This means that comments will not appear here until they have been emailed to me and I have approved them for posting to the comment threads following each post. Please bear this in mind when you comment here. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
--Allen MacNeill

"I had at last got a theory by which to work"
-The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: I just happened on that post about the history of evolution.
Great post, lot of work well done.
Thanks.; February 19, 2010 at 10:39 AM

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A Brief Note About Comment Moderation

ABOUT EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

This series of blog posts, taken as a whole, constitutes an introductory online text on the subject of evolutionary psychology. I have written it and posted it publicly here for two reasons:

• I want to make the information contained in it available to my students at Cornell and to students of human behavior and psychology, and

• I believe that most textbooks on the subject of evolutionary psychology are deficient in several ways.

This online text consists of three major sections, which are divided into six parts, each of which consists of several individual blog posts, as follows:

SECTION ONE: THEORY AND REALITY

Part One: Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology

The science of evolutionary biology and its relationship with the emerging science of evolutionary psychology.

1.1: Evolutionary Psychology: A Conceptual History
A brief overview of the history and science of evolutionary psychology.

1.2: Doing Science: Observation & Inference
An examination of how scientists “do science” using observations to infer explanations about how nature works.

1.3: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
A brief introduction to what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has called “Darwin’s dangerous idea:” the theory of evolution by natural selection.

1.4: Natural Selection and Evolutionary Adaptations
An examination of the concept of evolutionary adaptation, and what it means for the concepts of intentionality and purpose in nature.

1.5: Darwin on Instincts and the Expression of Emotions
An examination of Darwin’s lesser-known work on the expression of emotions in men and animals, including some of the basic concepts that guide evolutionary psychologists today.

1.6: The "Modern Evolutionary Synthesis"
A brief overview of the history of evolutionary theory in the 20th century, which points directly to the theories that underlie evolutionary psychology today.

Part Two: Psychology, Ethology, and Sociobiology

The rise of behaviorism in the United States, the rise of ethology in Europe, and the rise of sociobiology in the United States.

2.1: The Rise & Fall of Behaviorism
A brief historical analysis of the rise of behaviorism, concentrating on the work of Ivan Pavlov, Edward Lee Thorndike, John Watson, and B. F. Skinner

2.2: Ethology: The Science of Animal Behavior
A contrasting historical analysis of the rise of ethology, concentrating on the work of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch.

2.3: Group Selection vs. Individual Selection
A brief historical analysis of the the arguments that raged over group selection versus individual selection during the latter half of the 20th century.

2.4: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
A conceptual analysis of the science of sociobiology, concentrating on the work of William D. Hamilton, Robert L. Trivers, and Edward O. Wilson.

2.5: Group Selection Redux
A brief historical analysis of the re-emergence of the theory of group selection, concentrating on the work of George Price, Elliot Sober, and David Sloan Wilson.

2.6: The Golden Age of Natural History
A brief expedition into the world of the field ethologist during the 20th century, the “golden age” of behavioral ecology and evolution.

SECTION TWO: THE SOCIAL MIND – WITHIN-GROUP DYNAMICS

Part Three: The Adapted Mind

The basic principles of evolutionary psychology and how they are applied to the study of animal and human behavior.

3.1: Investigating the Unmentionable
Why we need to talk about all of those subjects one is supposed to avoid in “polite company:” politics, sex, religion, violence, and (most of all) the mind.

3.2: Evolved Psychological Mechanisms
The recent development of a model of the “adapted mind” – that is, the human mind that has been shaped by our evolutionary past.

3.3: Deconstructing the Blank Slate
The concept of our "adapted mind" fundamentally undermines the “blank slate” model of the mind that has dominated much of the social sciences for the past century.

3.4: Food, Clothing, Shelter, & Health
A brief investigation of how our pursuit of the "basics" – food, clothing, shelter, and health – has shaped our behavior over our evolutionary past.

Part Four: Sex, Love, and Families

How evolutionary psychologists view sex, mating, and family life.

4.1: Gender & Sex Differences
How evolutionary biologists think about sex and gender differences and how they have shaped our behavior, for good and ill.

4.2: Sex Lives of the Vertebrates
How animals mate and produce offspring, and especially how many animals they do it with during their lives.

4.3: The Evolution of Human Sexuality
How people mate, produce offspring, and care for them, and how the differences between female and male investment in offspring have profoundly shaped our mating behavior.

4.4: Monogamy & Polygamy
The answer to the question “Are we monogamous?” and the discovery that the answer is more obvious (and more complicated) than most of us think.

4.5: Attraction, Courtship, & Mating
What we find attractive in a potential mate, and that there are at least two ways of “being in love,” with very different causes and consequences.

4.6: The Natural History of Rape
The biological theory of rape, in which sex and producing offspring are central to an understanding of the circumstances in which forcible copulation takes place among animals, including humans.

4.7: Love, Attachment, & Childrearing
Patterns of love, attachment, and childrearing depend on the resources that female and male parents invest in their offspring, and on how those offspring react to such investment.

4.8: Parents, Offspring, & Families
How understanding the dynamics of mating and family life among other species can shed light on our own families and the changes they are currently undergoing.

SECTION THREE: ENEMIES & FRIENDS – BETWEEN-GROUP DYNAMICS

Part Five: War and Religion

The evolutionary connections between two perennial human activities: religion and warfare.

5.1: Primate Politics
The ecological roots of warfare and see how it has come down to us from our primate ancestors.

5.2: Warfare as a Behavioral Adaptation
Why animals (including people) fight wars, and how the capacity for warfare evolves over time in response to changing ecological pressures.

5.3: Guns, Germs, & Steel
A brief examination of Jared Diamond's theory of human warfare, in which ecology, geography, and history combine to produce patterns of political dominance and submission as the result of war.

5.4: Religion as a Neurological Adaptation
How new discoveries in neurobiology have provided a biological explanation for the capacity for religious experience.

5.5: Religion as Epiphenomenon
The "standard model" for the evolution of the capacity for religion, concentrating on the work of Dan Sperber and Pascal Boyer.

5.6: Religion as Social Glue
An elaboration of the "standard model" for the evolution of the capacity for religion, concentrating on the work of Scott Atran and David Sloan Wilson.

5.7: Religion & War: A Coevolutionary Arms Race
A consideration of the possibility that humans have the capacity for religious experience primarily because “religion facilitates warfare, which facilitates religion.”

Part Six: Brave New Futures

A brief examination of how evolutionary psychology alters our view of both psychopathology and psychological health.

6.1: Adaptive Pathologies
Recent experimental evidence indicates that such apparently pathological conditions as autism, depression, and schizophrenia may be adaptive under certain conditions, and how knowledge of our neurochemistry can lead us to a deeper understanding of why we do what we do.

6.2: My Brain Made Me Do It
The emerging theory of "evolutionary criminology", in which an understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of criminal behavior points to new ways of dealing with some perennial social problems.

6.3: Toward An Evolutionary Aesthetics
The emerging theory of "biopoetics", which is based on evidence that our aesthetic tastes – in art, cuisine, and even music – rather than being purely arbitrary, are at least in part a result of our evolutionary heritage.

6.4: Free Will, Design, War, & Other Boojums
More perennial questions: Do we have free will? Is there design in nature? Is war (like death and taxes) inevitable? and the evolutionary dimensions to some answers to these questions.

6.5: Chance, Necessity, & Freedom
Finally, that most ancient, and yet most pressing of questions: “What does this evolving understanding of ourselves tell us about chance, necessity, and the possibility of human freedom?”

CURRICULUM VITAE

You can download or view my curriculum vitae here.

The Answer... Now, What Was The Question?

...............EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY.............

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

A Brief Note About Comment Moderation

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