Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature
Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books) David J. Buller,
Publisher: The MIT Press
ISBN: 0262524600
DDC: 153
Edition: Paperback; 2006-04-01
Summary:
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.
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