Me
Why did you pick this course? What do you want to get out of this course?
Human Nature –> Evolutionary Psychology? What is it? What do you know about it?
Seminar format. Blackboard. Assessment.
Embodied cognition (Dr. Larry Taylor).
Larry
A look at the module handbook.
Seminar: discussion / hands-on experience.
Readings: 3 things you noticed. Springboard to discussion.
Topics vs. books.
Potential topics.
Potential candidate books.
Second part, hands-on (Literature search, a method used, guest lecture). These will feed into your assessment. Last bit is prep. for next week.
Evolutionary Psychology1 Cosmides & Tooby (1997) / Human Behavioral Ecology2 Cronk (1991) / Cultural evolution.3 Boyd & Richerson (1985)
Different views reviewed in.4 Smith et al. (2001);Sear et al. (2007);Laland & Brown (2011)
Adaptation.
Vestige.5 Examples in your body
Exaptation.
Spandrel.
Spandrel
‘Selfish gene’.6 An explanation by Richard Dawkins
Natural selection vs. sexual selection.
‘Mismatch’.
‘Blank slatism’
Book by Pinker
A model for the mind
Just so stories
Evironment of Evolutionary Adaptedness7 Foley (1995)
“Stone age brain in the fast lane.”
Nobel Prize winner Niko Tinbergen:8 Tinbergen (1963);Bateson & Laland (2013)
Mechanism
Ontogeny
Phylogeny
Function
Nature vs. Nurture.
Naturalistic fallacy.
Genetic determinism.
Human uniqueness.
Bad science… .
“Just so story”
“WEIRD” populations.9 Henrich et al. (2010)
Bateson, P., & Laland, K. N. (2013). Tinbergen’s four questions: an appreciation and an update. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 28(12), 712–718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2013.09.013
Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. University of Chicago Press.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1997). Evolutionary psychology: A primer. http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html
Cronk, L. (1991). Human Behavioral Ecology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 20(1), 25–53. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.20.100191.000325
Foley, R. (1995). The adaptive legacy of human evolution: A search for the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 4(6), 194–203. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.1360040603
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X0999152X
Laland, K. N., & Brown, G. (2011). Sense and nonsense: Evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Sear, R., Lawson, D. W., & Dickins, T. E. (2007). Synthesis in the human evolutionary behavioural sciences. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 5(1), 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1556/JEP.2007.1019
Smith, E. A., Mulder, M. B., & Hill, K. (2001). Controversies in the evolutionary social sciences: A guide for the perplexed. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 16(3), 128–135. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5347(00)02077-2
Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift Für Tierpsychologie, 20(4), 410–433. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1963.tb01161.x