Psychology: An Evolutionary Approach (Paperback)

~ (Author), Donald McBurney (Author)

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For use in introductory psychology courses. *This is the first text to show the relevance of evolutionary thinking to the entire range of psychological phenomena, and it does so at a level appropriate for introductory students. *The authors-representing the disciplines of both psychology and anthropology-have taken special care to present their material in a way that parallels the organization of a standard introductory text. After they lay out the fundamentals of modern evolutionary theory, they systematically apply this theory to questions from every domain of psychology: learning, cognition, perception, emotion, development, pathology and more. *Appropriate as a core text or supplement for any introductory or upper-division psychology course with an emphasis on evolution.

From the Inside Flap

Preface "Is it not reasonable to anticipate that our understanding of the human mind
would be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed?"
(Williams 1966, p. 16).

In one important way this book is very different from other introductory psychology texts. Traditional psychology largely ignores the question of what the mind is for. This oversight puts traditional psychology seriously out of step with the rest of the life sciences, where design-for-a-function is recognized as the normal result of evolution by natural selection. The reader may hesitate but there's little room for doubt: Psychology is a life science. It studies the behavior of living things, not rocks or stars or electrons. The theory of evolution has inspired countless thousands of discoveries throughout the life sciences—in physiology, ecology, medicine, and the like. It's time to consider what this theory can offer to psychology.

In a sentence, natural selection shapes organisms by preserving those chance genetic variants that aid survival and reproduction. Contemporary biologists are convinced that every single species, including our own, owes its present form to a long history of natural selection. And their conclusion applies with equal force to every organ system; the mind and the behaviors it fosters are in no way exempt from this process. Thus our working assumption is that human psychology was designed by evolution, over millions of years, to solve the various challenges that faced our ancestors in their struggles to survive and reproduce.

We have chosen to write an introductory textbook for one simple reason. Evolutionary psychology is not a specialized subfield of psychology, such as personality psychology or abnormal psychology. Instead, it is a different way of thinking about the entire field. Its insights and methods should be the groundwork for the study of psychology, not an afterthought. Our goal is that, after reading this text, students will be able to think like evolutionists, not only about human behavior but also about a wide range of related matters.

But what of traditional psychology? Let us be clear. Traditional psychology it is a rich and vital field. But we have two general criticisms of it. First, because traditional psychology has no overarching theory of what we call "mind design," it can only take a trial-and-error approach to discovering the mind's operating principles. Unfortunately, trial and error is slow and inefficient, and it has led to some spectacular blind alleys, such as Freudian theory. Second, most of traditional psychology's reliable findings, about perception, thought, learning, motivation, social behavior and the like are more sensible and more informative when they are interpreted in an evolutionary framework. For example, long-standing debates such as the one over nature versus nurture, are illuminated and usefully resolved by evolutionary thinking.

Thus we begin in Chapter 1 by mapping the differences between evolutionary psychology and the more traditional non-evolutionary approach. Evolutionary psychologists and traditional psychologists often differ in how they develop their theories, in the kinds of questions they pose, and in the sorts of statements they accept as valid answers. There is an old saying that you can't understand what a person is saying unless you know who he's arguing against. Let's be explicit then; in a real sense we are arguing against many of the assumptions and interpretations (but few of the findings) of traditional psychology.

Studying psychology from an evolutionary viewpoint requires a clear understanding of the theory of evolution. Thus, one of our key missions is to explain what evolution is (and isn't), and what it can (and can not) do. These matters are the focus of Chapters 2, 3 and 4. There may be a temptation on the part of both students and professors to skip or deal briefly with these chapters in order to get on to the "meat" of the course—psychology. We beg you not to yield to the temptation! Every high-school graduate "knows what evolution is." But most harbor serious misconceptions: Evolution always fosters what is good for the species; because of their basis in genes, evolved traits are fixed and unresponsive to experience; species can usefully be arranged on a ladder from lower to higher. Wrong; wrong; and wrong again! According to a large majority of modern evolutionists all three of these ideas are dangerously off the mark. And there are many other pitfalls and misconceptions that must be discussed before evolutionary theory can be productively applied, to the study of psychology or to any other set of questions. Thus, a thorough grasp of the basics of modern evolutionary theory, especially as it relates to behavior, is essential to a full appreciation of the argument and evidence in this book.

The remaining chapters, 5 through 16, each treat one of the central topics of modern psychology. The topics include sensation and perception, development, learning, cognition, social psychology, abnormal psychology, motivation, individual differences and several others. In each of these chapters, our focus is not on reviewing the entire literature, either from a traditional or an evolutionary perspective. Instead, by discussing eight or ten examples in each chapter, we try to show what evolutionary psychology is, how it reorients the study of mind and behavior and how genuinely novel its conclusions can be. Our goal in exemplifying the evolutionary approach over such a wide range of topics is two-fold. Of course we intend that each reader will take away a richer understanding of human behavior and the psychological mechanisms that underlie it. But we also hope to demonstrate the considerable power of Darwin's theory. For any question about living things—from the sensory abilities of moths to the complexities of human cognition—an approach that neglects evolution is unlikely to produce full and satisfying answers. Charles Darwin explained the fundamental logic at the core of all living things. If we wish to understand our own, our friends', our mates' or our children's behavior, we'd be foolish to ignore the insights afforded by an evolutionary perspective.

As will be obvious from our citations and bibliography, we are not the first to imagine the outlines of an evolutionary psychology. Many students of human behavior, not only from the field of psychology, but also from biology, anthropology, economics and the other social sciences have contributed to the emergence of this field. Our primary debt, then, is to these colleagues, who had both the vision to foresee a synthesis between the evolutionary and behavioral sciences, and the interdisciplinary knowledge to build it. We hope that we have portrayed your pioneering efforts as clearly as you would have, and that many others will be encouraged to follow you down the Darwinian path.

In particular we thank our colleagues, Liz Cashdan, Martin Daly, Denys deCatanzaro, Jack Demarest, Jennifer Higa-King, L. Scott Johnson, Bruce MacDonald, Janet Mann, B. Kent Parker, Kathleen Ross, Kenneth Wildman, David Sloan Wilson, Matthew Window, and Thomas Zentall who offered frank, thorough and genuinely useful criticisms of parts, or in some cases all, of the book manuscript. You were (nearly) always right, and we have done our best to implement the various improvements you suggested while keeping in mind the kind of book we wanted to produce.

Indispensable editorial and organizational advice and support was generously provided by Cynthia and Claire Gaulin, Deborah Fenster, Frances Russello, Sharon Cosgrove, and especially our editor, Bill Webber. Bruce Hobart, our production supervisor, was the model of organization and good humor. We thank you all; it was a pleasure working with you.

Steven J.C. Gaulin
Donald H. McBurney

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (May 23, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0137599943
• ISBN-13: 978-0137599943
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #937,661 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The first of a new generation of texts for teaching psych, April 10, 2001

By	ReptileMind (Philadelphia, Pa.) - See all my reviews

Is human nature infinitely variable from culture to culture, relatively unconstrained by our biology, or is there a single basic human biological nature that just varies in certain particulars from environment to environment ? We care about this not only from a scientific perspective, but even a political one, since our view of human nature is one of the foundations of political philosophy as well.

The evolutionary psychology (EP) approach is here. Rather than adding yet another field to the growing list of social psychology, personality psychology, biological psychology, depth psychology, behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, gestalt psychology, narrative psychology, transpersonal psychology, and so on endlessly, EP comes with the slogan that it can unify the whole mess.

Simply put, by understanding the process nature uses to design organisms, and applying that to human evolution, we discover what the mind is designed to do and how. It's the scientific equivalent of asking God for our original blueprints. Except that we have to infer the design from very imperfect information.

There have been several other good introductory EP texts, such as the excellent one by David Buss, a specialist in human mating patterns. There is also one by Cosmides and Tooby, authors of a landmark scholarly text in the field which contains a manifesto for distinguishing evolutionary psychology from the social sciences. There is even a reasonably good cartoon version of an overview of the field, by Evans and Zarate.

What is very special about *this* new text by Gaulin and McBurney is that they have NOT just issued another manifesto against social science or another highly focused text on human mating and explanations for altruism. They seem to have actually begun a new era in the field, its implied agenda all along, to provide a unified framework for studying all of psychology, from sensation and perception to cognition, social behavior, and culture. As if all of human behavioral variety can be explained from the start in terms of where we came from.

How does this potentially change psychology in general ? That's the main strength of this book. The authors make very clear that thinking in terms of the history of our species and the history of life in general; rather than isolated findings from loosely related experimental conditions; leads to very different conclusions at times. Like other fields, EP gives us a specific set of tools and protocols for investigating patterns in nature. But unlike other fields, it gives us a pegboard for hanging all those experimental results and investigating their relationship and what it tells us about ourselves and even our relationship to the rest of nature.

The question is of course whether it succeeds. Is evolutionary psychology really to the point yet where it is no longer a protoscience, but a central way to understand human behavior ? There remain some dedicated opponents of the field, like Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and Steve Rose ("Alas, Poor Darwin.") Their main and strongest objection seems to remain that it is too seductively easy to tell evolutionary stories about human behavior, stories that can't be tested empirically. Do the authors address this sufficiently to offer EP as a "new psychology ?"

Surprisingly, yes, I think they do. Gaulin and McBurney address the real technical issues raised by the youthful status of the field. They don't offer a strongly deterministic account of human beings blindly following the programming of their genes, they clearly communicate a biologically informed perspective on human behavior. Our behavior not only has a very real and explorable relationship to animal behavior, but it has a discernable relationship to evolutionary process.

Most importantly of all, the authors make clear that EP does not have to, and does not, stand on its own from vague untestable evolutionary theories, or "just so stories." It truly does provide a new way of making sense of what we already know from existing psychological experiments, and shedding new light on them with additional testable predictions.

This is not only a milestone text in psychology teaching, but also an exemplary text in general. It is exceptionally clearly written, with crisp prose with outstandingly good organization.

I had one quibble with the text, which is the annoying tradition, seemingly taken from Cosmides and Tooby's maifesto "The Adapted Mind," of spending a lot of time attacking the "standard social science model" of infinitely mutable human nature. The "SSSM" probably seems more a worthy target for its political implications than its role in social science. If human nature is infinitely mutable, it is also infinitely perfectable, and therefore suggests "utopian" goals and certain kinds of solutions to social problems. This is where tempers really flare, and we start getting the usual accusations of people being fascists or marxists or racists or supporters of eugenics or supporters of unrealistic social engineering. I think the tradition of attacking the "SSSM" it just a more veiled way of playing politics the way Wilson, Lewontin, and Gould did in the early days of sociobiology.

Since leading figures in most other fields have also attacked the blank slate view of human nature, this casts such rhetoric as a bit of a strawman rather than really distinguishing EP from realistic portrayals of modern social scientists and anthropologists. I suppose this sort of rhetoric is attributable somewhat to the followers of the field trying to create its niche in academia. But it is a distraction that for me takes away from an otherwise wonderful text. It's time to "just say no" to the silly idea of suppressing evolutionary thinking, the most important principle in life sciences, just to keep extremists happy. It's time to take the implications of a wondrous evolving natural world more seriously and begin a new era of learning about ourselves from those implications. It's time to start teaching psychology as if we took our own biological science seriously, and begin to study human nature in earnest. This is an exceptional first step.