Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

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If you think that morality no longer proffers genetic advantages, does that indicate we will evolve to become less moral? This is a bit like what we were saying about whether the true motives for murder are explicitly understood by the murderer.

The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. Noah Kagan A few months ago, I was drinking a Noah’s Mill whiskey (cute) with my good buddy Brian Balfour and talking about life. Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them. Written by an eminent evolutionary psychologist who is President of the Northeastern Evolutionary Psychology Society, the text examines psychological processes that lead to human survival and those that may lead to reproductive benefits√≥sometimes even at a cost to survival.Alison Gopnik She makes the very interesting argument that our particular evolutionary niche is such that we can’t just depend on mothers to provide care.

You come to the edge of the field and see there’s something you can’t understand, something you can’t test, or a time when you know you wouldn’t even know what an answer looks like. One of the reasons for reading The God Delusion is that it will disabuse you of the idea – which is a common stereotype of atheists – that they are utterly humourless. A lot of evolutionary psychology is quite new, and there are a lot of alternative theories for things.With a prophet's clarity, Dawkins told us the answers from the perspective of molecules competing for limited space and resources to produce more of their own kind. In his widely praised book, award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt examines the world’s philosophical wisdom through the lens of psychological science, showing how a deeper understanding of enduring maxims-like Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, or What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger-can enrich and even transform our lives. That’s something you might think is obvious—if you’ve read the Grimm Fairy Tales, there’s always an evil stepmother. In the first edition, Evolutionary Psychology was the premier and original text for the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology.

You might expect them to be just fundamentally mistaken, often, and you’re starting to completely blur the thing that leads to evolutionary consequences. But that’s what we’re doing much of the time—coming up with externally plausible explanations for why we do what we do that don’t necessarily have much to do with why we really do what we do. Obama read “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman, about how people make decisions — quick, instinctive thinking versus slower, contemplative deliberation. Evolutionary Psychology features a wealth of student-friendly pedagogy including critical-thinking questions and case study boxes designed to show how to apply evolutionary psychology to real-life situations. It should be a welcome addition to the field that serves to further individuals' understanding of Evolutionary Psychology.

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