Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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And many of those who don’t say that, still secretly prefer their wives to remain simple-minded, ignorant, and largely at home. There’s something else that’s unusual about humans that we don’t often talk about: we’re the only animals that can kill at a distance” Indeed, most other evolutionary psychologists on this list either deny, misunderstand, or choose to ignore that men can sometimes and do sometimes share similar interests in repressing and disempowering women. Benefit to men from commitment and marriage: 1) increase in the quality of the woman given that there is a wider range of women to choose from with this attitude, 2) men who failed to commit might have failed to attract any women at all, 3) increase in odds that the man is the father of the children a woman bears by repeated sex, 4) increase in the survival of the children with two parents, 5) increase in status 6) added coalitional allies 7) increased reproductive success of children

Got it. Now, I’m very intrigued about your fourth evolutionary psychology book recommendation. This is Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe by Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza. Could you give us an overview of the argument this book is making? That’s why Daly and Wilson’s book is so great. We can run the stats and say, oh, actually, it looks remarkably similar in many ways. But here’s the question: if we’ve only got the illusion of conscious will, why do we have that illusion? I’m not sure Wegner’s answers are really coherent. It’s still a big question.

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Importantly, Buss clarifies that while evolution itself is not intentional, the life it has created is. Life is goal-seeking and this is the foundation for the cross-cutting discipline of evolutionary psychology. Buss’s discussion of motivation (specifically, “Evolved Psychological Mechanisms”) suggests that behavior begins only with input from the outside. How that matches up with the picture of us – and life – as goal seeking beings is not clear. For example, we seek to love because of internal need; we seek to merge with our group because we care and care is internal need. Buss does not discuss an interactive model of behavior that begins and ends with ourselves as self-interested beings. We act because of need. We react because we don’t need or want. In both respects, we have a relationship with the other as object where it reacts to our action or we react to its action. MLTMS: Youth, evolved standards of physical beauty (cues: full lips, clear skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, long hair, facial femininity, feminine voice, low WHR etc.) When I first started reading “ The Moral Animal,” I thought I had stumbled into the decryption code of the world. Buss is the author of a number of publications and books, including The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion, and The Murderer Next Door, which introduces a new theory of homicide from an evolutionary perspective. He is also the author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, whose fourth edition was released in 2011. In 2005, Buss edited a reference volume, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. His latest book is Why Women Have Sex, which he coauthored with Cindy Meston.

The “coordinate group effect” -the famous “patriarchy”- happens because most men who cluster around the average share the same fears and needs. Most average men, struggling to secure a high-power, successful woman, rationally seek to limit the power of the women in their lives -not necessarily of all women and certainly not in a concerted effort with other men-. I agree with the basics and more. Natural selection has three basics: variation, inheritance and differential reproductive success. Intrasexual competition – competition between members of one sex. Intersexual selection – preferential mate choice or female choice. Inclusive fitness: including the gene’s eye thinking. If you were a gene, what would facilitate your replication? First survive, then replicate then protect your offspring. The milestones in the origins of modern humans etc. Evolutionary Psychology” is an excellent summary of the evolutionary foundations for human behavior. The picture that emerges is straightforward. We have strong social tendencies. We are aggressive in promoting and defending our interests; we can be and are brutal toward our kind (“Among the more than 4,000 species of mammals, only two have been observed to form coalitions that kill conspecifics: chimpanzees and humans,” Buss writes); and sex and social dominance pervades our lives. We are, in other words, good animals in these ways. Where we differ with the rest of the animal kingdom is that we have the capacity to regulate – to formulate rules of behavior – those tendencies that are destructive for self or others. After the fact. This is a bit like what we were saying about whether the true motives for murder are explicitly understood by the murderer. It’s on the evolution of morality. A bit like language, it’s one of those things where you’d say it seems really odd to say it evolved.In the same way that you’ve got Spanish speakers and Chinese speakers and English speakers, you have people who are Utilitarians, you’ve got duty ethics people, you’ve got people who say their morals come from religion. You’ve got people who think abortion is murder, and those who think it’s a right. But the mechanism for holding morals, and for acting upon them, and for judging people, can have and does seem to have evolved.This is really important for evolutionary psychologists to know, for two reasons. Firstly, I think evolutionary psychologists sometimes cut a corner. For example, looking at mating strategies, they might interview 1,000 men and show them pairs of pictures and say: ‘which of these images do you prefer?’ Or, they might interview 1,000 women and say: ‘Would you be willing to have an affair or not?’ Then they’ll infer differences. Which is all very sensible if what they say, and what they are aware of, directly influences what they would actually do. Because it’s the doing that’s important—actually having sex and producing children, not saying who you would be more attracted to. Even if we half-accept the original thesis, such as that some time in our past a good chunk of men didn’t care about paternity, there are obvious evolutionary reasons why those ancestors who didn’t care about paternity are not well represented today.

To begin with, remember that genetic mutations don’t develop with a predisposition towards helping the individual survive or reproduce, but they first evolve out of total randomness. Secondly, if you’re seeking a connection between why these different books excite me so much is when we predict how other people are going to behave and whether to punish them, we infer minds in them. I can’t see inside your brain, so I’ve got to create a mind for you based on your expressions, the things you say to me… that changes how I judge you and how I treat you. Yet, if you’re doing the same thing about me, it’s probably quite useful for me to be having a bit of my brain that’s working out what you’re inferring about me from my actions. That’s one way of explaining the evidence that Wegner pulled together, that we have this illusion of conscious will and we infer the causes of our action, not because we actually need to do this to work out why we did what we did— our brain probably doesn’t need that information and it could collect it from its own modules—but because in the way I’m building a model of your mind, reading your mind, it’s helpful for me to have some sense of what you’re thinking about me. There are, I suppose, there are a couple of issues. The first is: does being mistaken about morality actually harm us? Our mechanisms for holding morals happened long before Utilitarianism, or any of the modern religions. Tens of thousands of years ago, as did language. Having language is still a good thing in modern society. Having a mechanism for holding morality we might think, on balance, there are some good things about it. But there might be some quirks. I argue there are some quirks in morality, that actually make life a bit harder. It’s something that caused you to bond into groups, when you lived in tribes. That’s not so helpful in modern cities, that we’re all bunched into political groups, or racial groups, or so on.When I look at the discipline as a whole, good evolutionary psychology correctly predicts behavior in a way that has been observed across cultures, as well as measured with different scientific methodologies, and replicated across time and samples. A few of the “leftist” and “blank slate” biases that most evolutionary psychologists complain about are present here. Sex At Dawn