Customer Reviews

The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a massive tome on evolutionary factors that influence human behavior. It begins with clarification of the kind of Darwinism the authors appeal to, so that everyone is on the same page, and considers the general psychological foundations of Darwinism on culture.

The book then moves on to discuss cognitive adaptations for social exchange, citing human and non-human examples. The book also includes the evolutionary psychology of mating and sex, examining preferences for mate selection and competition, mechanisms for sexual attraction, and the evolutionary use of women as chattel (something any Old Testament and Quran reader can relate to).

A significant portion of the book is devoted to parental care and children, examining how pregnancy sickness, patterns between twins, maternal-infant vocalizations, and child play in the form of chasing each other are all evolutionary mechanisms that continue to be featured.

Steven Pinker adds an essay on natural language and natural selection; Roger Shepard contributes an essay on the man's perceptual adaptation to the natural world; both of which demonstrate the interconnectedness between perception, language, and adaptation.

The book concludes with some of its most esoteric issues: environmental aesthetics, intrapsychic processes, and the theoretical implications of culural phenomena.

The whole book, while not necessarily over-academic, is ultimately dense reading. Most of the concepts and conceptualizations require mental work to apprehend, while the statistics and empirical evidence are clearly described. While drawing from many disparate areas of evolutionary biology, all the essays find their ultimate significance in how the mind, in particular, has adapted to environmental forces. A demanding, but facinating, read.

The argument - and it is an argument - is that human behaviour is strongly influenced by evolved psychological mechanisms, and that those mechanisms are numerous and specific, rather than just one general learning mechanism - ie a human baby comes with an installed operating system and quite a lot of free software, and is definitely not a blank slate. What makes the argument persuasive is the attempt to import the scientific method - hypotheses falsifiable by experiment - to an area previously characterised by mumbojumbo and pseudoscience. Not all the attempts are successful, but as they say it's a start. 100 years late (for psychology) it is saying (a) the brain is an organ so it must have evolved too - let's think about it in a Darwinian fashion and (b) let's try to make pyschology a science not a humanity. It is potentially very offensive to existing psychology practitioners, because it implies that most existing psychologists are witch doctors. It is also very offensive to large bodies of public policy wonks (let's not beat about the bush here - in American speak this book is very offensive to liberal Democrats), essentially saying that most of the "science" behind social and educational policy has no foundation. And because it is polemical - it is shooting at a century of vested interests after all - it overstates its case in some places, although the writers are usually very careful to stress that while behavioural programmes may be partly pre installed, behaviour itself is not hardwired.

It was the start for me of looking at the way we think in a completely different light and led me to later, more detailed, more balanced statements of the case.

It is pretty hard going in places, particularly as they do rather tiresomely go out of their way trying to avoid giving direct offence, but they're not fooling anyone (not mss67 for a start.)But in reality they are yelling that the Emperor ("learning/nurture is all") has no clothes. For all its faults it's the book that has most influenced my thinking in the last 10 years, and definitely a five star performance.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance and uniqueness of this work. It is without question, the most comprehensive, most authoritative, most timely, most compelling, most interdisciplinary book ever written on the topic of evolutionary psychology. Practically all the major exponents of this new science are presented and accounted for (Buss, Symons, Daly & Wilson, Tooby & Cosmides, Barkow and Kaplan). In addition, many qualified and distinguished experts in other fields have made valuable supporting contributions (McGrew, Shepard and Fernald). It already stands as a classic in the field of evolutionary psychology and is destined to be a watershed in the development of psychological thought. However, readers beware: this book is not a light, bedside read. It is dense, scholarly reading. Although enjoyable, it is not appropriate for a lay audience looking for pop-psychology. But if you are a social scientists or serious reader who wishes to know what evolutionary psychology is about, there is simply no other book to read. My only question is when can we look forward to a second volume?

Noticing that such few people wrote a review, I felt impelled to write one to the best of my ability. While I have several philosophical differences and while the field has changed since the initial publication, the book still remains in my mind as one of the most important books to date.

In a nutshell, it presents for the first time, a new Social Science paradigm, one they call: Evolutionary Psychology. Whether one disagrees or not, their critique and attacks of the standard social science model which has dominated our thinking for years now is both convincing and inspiring. While disappointed by their largely nativist or innatist stance on almost everything, I remain confident that evolutionary psychology is sure to change many fields like psychology, linguistics, and I hope, anthropology.

I highly recommend that you read this book but be sure to do so with great caution, keeping in mind that "what is simple is not always true and the truth is no simple maatter"...

This is one of the earliest texts in the field called Evolutionary Psychology (EP). This specialization evolved from what Edward O. Wilson termed "Sociobiology" in the mid-1970s. EP applies the logic of sociobiology to human psychology. That is, how has natural selection shaped how humans think and make decisions? As editors Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jerome Barkow put it (page 7): "Evolutionary psychology is psychology informed by the fact that the inherited architecture of the human mind is the product of the evolutionary process." The book, in their conceptualization, has two goals (page 3): "The first is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology to a wider audience. . .The second goal of this volume is to clarify how this new field. . .supplies the necessary connection between evolutionary biology and the complex, irreducible social and cultural phenomena studied by anthropologists, economists, and historians."

They locate their perspective by juxtaposing evolutionary psychology with what the term "the standard social scientific model." The chapter by Tooby and Cosmides (Chapter 1) outlines this model in much more detail.
As we know, the SSSM insists that, for all practical purposes, human nature - and thus human behavior - is shaped by culture. Put less laconically, the SSSM rests on three cardinal tenets - two of them explicit, the third usually implicit. These are: (1) that humans have no innate behavioral tendencies; (2) that, consequently, human nature is solely the product of learning and socialization (in short, of "nurture"); from which it follows (3) that human nature (and consequently human behavior) is essentially quite malleable (my rendering of the perspective). Of course, evolutionary psychology moves in a different direction, emphasizing the effects of the evolutionary process on human behavior and thinking.

This edited volume includes a series of chapters exploring different aspects of human behavior. The section titles illustrate the variety of topics covered: Section II focuses on cooperation and social exchange, noting that these have evolutionary bases; III examines the psychology of mating and sex; IV looks at parental care and children; V considers perception and language as evolutionary adaptations; VI takes a look at environmental aesthetics (such as evolved responses to landscapes); VII has only one chapter--looking at the evolution of psychodynamic mechanisms. The volume closes with an essay by Jerome Barkow.

Not all readers will be convinced by the arguments raised in this volume. However, it serves an important purpose by unapologetically claiming that we cannot understand much of human psychology (and other social behaviors) without considering human evolution. Indeed, it is hard to complain about this overarching perspective. However, readers may well dispute specific applications of the perspective. In the end, this is a rich volume and will prod the reader to think differently about "human nature."

What can I say? This is THE book, the apolitical manifesto, the thing that made me choose to get a PhD at Santa Barbara. Unfortunately, everything but the first chapter is illustration and example of the larger point, but if you want to debate evolutionary psychology with someone I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect your opponent to have read and understood Psychological Foundations of Culture (chapter 1).

I read this book in my last semester as a psych major. I was extremely dissapointed with all the theories that I had learned relating to human behavior, until I read this book. This book provides explantions for humnan behavior, that in my opnion, are the "real thing". All the ariticles are well written and based on sound, scientific research. It is not easy reading, but it is well worth it. I think that anyone studying or interested in human behavior should read this book.

One of the first and most thorough as well as perhaps the most serious treatment of the (then) new and fledgling field of Evolutionary Psychology (EP).

Primarily as a result of this book (and certainly as a result of the research of its contributors, beyond just their contributions here in this volume), I have become a firm believer in the EP cultural worldview. Today, it is seen as a natural, and further elaboration of the Darwinian paradigm: that explains the connection between evolutionary biology and evolutionary developments in human behavior, including developments in cognitive processes.

The key hypothesis allowing this connection to flow rather seamlessly is of course the central idea introduced in the book: that brain architecture is inherited and thus is too (like everything else biological) a product of Darwinian processes. In particular, the brain too has evolved through Darwinian specialization or natural selection. (Why it has taken us so long to accept this rather obvious biological fact says a lot about how we ourselves have been socialized culturally.)

Thus, what these authors do here is set the EP ship upright by basically showcasing what they have learned in the EP laboratory since Dawkins' first two trail blazing books "The Selfish Gene," and "Sociobiology." Both of which were controversial -- not just because of what they implied about human behavior -- but also and most especially, for the fear many felt that social planners might do as a consequence of the content of Dawkins' new Socio-biological paradigm and framework.

Thus this book, along with others that subsequently leaned on it (such as Robert Wright's "Moral Man," and Marc D. Hauser's "Moral Minds"), proves that Dawkins' framework and paradigm are robust and durable and are likely to endure since as this book so aptly demonstrates, they have also survived the rigors of the scientific method -- as well as the doubts of potential social policy makers and armchair social scientists. That is why this book is so important and is THE seminal work in the field of EP. For my work on race and racism, it is an invaluable resource, especially the section on mate selection and its impact on cultural development. An easy Five Stars

No, it isn't light reading. And I can't say I understand every word of it. But it's the book I've found myself quoting from more often than any other book in the last five years as I've attempted to share my insight and experiences with my colleagues. I'm not a psychologist or social worker: but I deal with people who are addressing (or not) life's greatest issues (money, death, children, philanthropy). Read it a chapter at a time, and you will be rewarded with a greater understanding of the human race-and yourself.

Excellent scholarship that completely re-oriented my approach to psychology. When I completed my BS in psychology I felt as if I knew next to nothing and couldn't seem to make a coherent framework of it all in my mind. On to my MS in both clinical and organizational psychology and I felt somewhat capable. Thanks to the efforts of these and other evolutionary psychologists, now I can see the forest for the trees. Finally an overarching theoretical framework that allows psychology to fall in line with the biological sciences and become unified. It seems too good to be true...makes you ask why it had never occurred to yourself.....or my professors.....or etc.