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THE DESCENT of MADNESS: Evolutionary Origins of Psychosis
THE DESCENT OF MADNESS Drawing on evidence from across the behavioural and natural sciences, this book advances a radical new hypothesis: that madness exists as a costly consequence of the evolution of a sophisticated social brain in Homo sapiens. Having explained the rationale for an evolutionary approach to psych- osis, the author makes a case for psychotic illness in our living ape relatives, as well as in human ancestors. He then reviews existing evolutionary theor- ies of psychosis, before introducing his own thesis: that the same genes causing madness are responsible for the evolution of our highly social brain. Jonathan Burns’ novel Darwinian analysis of the importance of psychosis for human survival provides some meaning for this form of suffering. It also spurs us on to a renewed commitment to changing our societies in a way that allows the mentally ill the opportunity of living. The Descent of Madness will be of interest to those in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, sociology and anthropology, and is also accessible to the general reader. Jonathan Burns is chief specialist psychiatrist at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine. His main areas of research include psychotic illnesses, human brain evolution and evolutionary origins of psychosis. THE DESCENT OF MADNESS Evolutionary Origins of Psychosis and the Social Brain Jonathan Burns First published 2007 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Jonathan Burns This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. -
Cinderella Effect Facts
The “Cinderella effect”: Elevated mistreatment of stepchildren in comparison to those living with genetic parents. Martin Daly & Margo Wilson Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1 <[email protected]> <[email protected]> Theory Parents commit a huge amount of time, attention and material resources to the care of their children, as well as incurring life-threatening risks to defend them and bodily depletion to nourish them. Why are parents motivated to invest so heavily in their children? From an evolutionary perspective, the answer is surely that natural selection has favoured intensive parental care in our lineage. Those ancestral genotypes and phenotypes that best succeeded in raising children to become reproducing adults were the ones that persisted and proliferated. If the psychological underpinnings of parental care have indeed evolved by natural selection, we may furthermore anticipate that parental feeling and action will not typically be elicited by just any random conspecific juvenile. Instead, care-providing animals may be expected to direct their care selectively towards young who are (a) their own genetic offspring rather than those of their reproductive rivals, and (b) able to convert parental investment into increased prospects for survival and reproduction. This is the kernel of the theory of discriminative parental solicitude, which (notwithstanding some interesting twists and caveats) has been abundantly verified in a broad range of care-giving species -
The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
3GC01 06/09/2015 12:40:42 Page 3 Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2015). The theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology. In Buss, D. M. (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Second edition. Volume 1: Foundations. (pp. 3-87). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. CHAPTER 1 The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology JOHN TOOBY and LEDA COSMIDES THE EMERGENCE OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: WHAT IS AT STAKE? HE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the human mind and brain, as Darwin himself was Tthe first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural science capable of precision and rapid progress. Yet, more than a century and a half after The Origin of Species was published, many of the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences continue to be grounded on assumptions that evolutionarily informed researchers know to be false; the rest have only in the past few decades set to work on the radical reformulations of their disciplines necessary to make them consistent with findings in the evolutionary sciences, information theory, computer science, physics, the neuro- sciences, molecular and cellular biology, genetics, behavioral ecology, hunter-gatherer studies, biological anthropology, primatology, and so on (Pinker, 1997, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences—a framework that not only incorporates the evolu- tionary sciences and information theory on a full and equal basis, but that systemati- cally works out all the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). -
Evolution, Child Abuse and the Constitution Christopher Malrborough
Journal of Law and Policy Volume 11 | Issue 2 Article 6 2003 Evolution, Child Abuse and the Constitution Christopher Malrborough Follow this and additional works at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/jlp Recommended Citation Christopher Malrborough, Evolution, Child Abuse and the Constitution, 11 J. L. & Pol'y (2003). Available at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/jlp/vol11/iss2/6 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at BrooklynWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Law and Policy by an authorized editor of BrooklynWorks. MARLBOROUGHMACROX.DOC 6/25/03 5:10 PM EVOLUTION, CHILD ABUSE AND THE CONSTITUTION Christopher Marlborough* INTRODUCTION The presence of a non-genetic parent in a child’s home is the largest single risk factor for severe child maltreatment yet discovered.1 Professor Owen Jones has used the example of stepparent infanticide to explain how evolutionary analysis in law can serve society’s goals when prevailing theories have failed.2 * Brooklyn Law School Class of 2003; B.A., State University of New York at Purchase, 1991. I would like to thank Professors Jennifer Rosato and Bailey Kuklin for their input and guidance in writing this note and my lovely wife Jennifer for her infinite patience. 1 MARTIN DALY & MARGO WILSON, THE TRUTH ABOUT CINDERELLA: A DARWINIAN VIEW OF PARENTAL LOVE 7 (1998) [hereinafter DALY & WILSON, CINDERELLA]. 2 Owen Jones, Evolutionary Analysis in Law: An Introduction and Application to Child Abuse, 75 N.C. L. REV. 1117 (1997) [hereinafter Jones, Child Abuse]. Professor Jones suggests a four-stage process to determine when evolutionary principles can be helpful to inform legal policy. -
Evolutionary Psychology As a Unifying Framework and Meta-Theory
Part V | Chapter 1 Chapter 1 Ultimate explanations: Evolutionary psychology as a unifying framework and meta-theory The term ‘evolutionary psychology’ (EP) was coined during “lengthy and intensive debates about how to apply evolution to behavior” (Tooby & Cosmides, 2005, p. 15) between Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, Don Symons, John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and David Buss in the 1980s. It is a relatively young and developing way of thinking in psychology that can serve as a meta-theoretical framework, as it builds directly on the foundations of biology. More spe- cifically, EP is based on the only scientific explanation for the complexity of earthly life forms, namely evolution by natural selection. In the scientific community, it is largely ac- knowledged that humans are a product of evolution by natural selection too. We are mammals belonging to the branch of the tree of life called primates and our closest living relatives are the chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we share a common ancestor that lived some 6 to 7 million years ago. Though such long time spans are beyond our ‘natural’ capacity to comprehend, consider this: the process of evolving from a light-sensitive cell to a human eye can happen in fewer than 400,000 years (Nilsson & Pelger, 1994). Researchers named our species homo sapiens and contemporary researchers have deter- mined our ‘start date’ to be at least 300,000 years ago, based on new homo sapiens findings in Morocco (Hublin et al., 2017). ‘Start date’ is a bit of a misleading term, as there is of course no ‘sudden appearance,’ but a very slow, invisible, and gradual change. -
Evolutionary Psychology
to appear in: A. Michalos (ed.) (2011): Encyclopedia of Quality of Life Research (Springer, Berlin). EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY Francis Heylighen Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Definition Evolutionary psychology (EP) is an approach to the study of the mind that is founded on Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. It assumes that our mental abilities, emotions and preferences are adapted specifically for solving problems of survival and reproduction in humanity’s ancestral environment, and derives testable predictions from this assumption. Description History When Charles Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection as an explanation for the origin of species, he already anticipated that this concept would also help us to understand the mind as a product of biological evolution. He made some first steps towards such “evolutionary psychology” in his later works on human descent and on the expression of emotions. His approach inspired several late 19th century philosophers and psychologists, including William James and James Mark Baldwin. However, in the 20th century, psychology became dominated first by behaviourism, then by cognitive approaches, which saw the mind basically as a blank slate, to be “programmed” by experience. Evolutionary perspectives on mental phenomena were relegated to other disciplines, including ethology (the study of animal behaviour) as investigated by Konrad Lorenz, evolutionary epistemology as founded by Donald T. Campbell, and sociobiology (evolutionary theory of social interactions) proposed by Edward O. Wilson. Building on these developments while adding specifically psychological methodologies for testing hypotheses, evolutionary psychology came back to the fore in the 1990s, under the impulse of researchers such as David Buss, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Wright, 1995; Buss, 2011). -
My Background, Research Interests, and Future Plans by Geoffrey Miller
My background, research interests, and future plans By Geoffrey Miller Miller, G. F. (2011). My background, research interests, and future plans. In X.T. Wang & Su, Y.-J. (Ed.), Thus spake evolutionary psychologists (进化心理学家如是说), pp. 320-328. Beijing: Peking University Press. After I got a B.A. in psychology and biology from Columbia University, I went to graduate school in psychology at Stanford in 1987. I intended to study cognitive psychology, but found it too boring and abstract. Fortunately, two founders of evolutionary psychology – Leda Cosmides and John Tooby – were working as post-docs with my advisor Roger Shepard. Along with David Buss, Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and Gerd Gigerenzer – who were visiting Stanford in 1989- 1990 – they introduced me to the possibility of applying evolutionary theory to study human nature. After that, my Stanford friend Peter Todd and I knew that we wanted to join this new field of evolutionary psychology, but we weren’t quite sure what research to do. We had learned about genetic algorithms – ways of simulating evolution by natural selection in computers – and we applied them to designing neural networks for learning some simple tasks. We hoped to illustrate how evolution and learning could interact to produce adaptive behavior. Our research led to my post-doc at University of Sussex in England in the early 1990s, working on artificial life and evolutionary robotics. That was fun, but I realized that I was more interested in human psychology than in cognitive engineering. At Stanford, I also grew interested in sexual selection through mate choice. It seemed like a very powerful but neglected process, not only for explaining sex differences in bodies and brains, but also for explaining the fast evolution of any extravagant mental abilities, whether bird song or human language. -
The Cinderella Effect: Parental Discrimination Against Stepchildren the Cinderella Effect: Parental Discrimination Against Stepchildren
The Cinderella Effect: Parental Discrimination against Stepchildren The Cinderella Effect: Parental Discrimination against Stepchildren Cinderella stories about abused stepchildren are cross-culturally universal. Are they founded in reality? Because Darwinian selection shapes social motives and behavi- our to be effectively nepotistic, an obvious hypothesis is that stepparents will be over- represented among those who mistreat children. This possibility was long neglected, but stepparenthood has turned out to be the most powerful epidemiological risk fact- or for child abuse and child homicide yet known. Moreover, non-violent discriminati- on against stepchildren is substantial and ubiquitous. Martin Daly, Professor, Margo Wilson, Professor, Department of Psychology, Department of Psychology, McMaster University McMaster University Parents are Discriminative Nepotists selectively toward close relatives of the caretaker. A cornerstone of evolutionary psychology is the Usually, this means the caretaker’s own offspring. proposition that Darwinian selection shapes social Imagine a population of animals in which there are motives and behaviour to be effectively »nepotis- two alternative, heritable types of parental psyche. tic«, that is, to contribute selectively to the well-be- Type A invests its time and energy selectively in the ing and eventual reproduction of the actors’ genetic care of its own young, who are better than average relatives. In any species, the genes and traits that bets to be carriers of the same heritable tendencies. persist and proliferate over generations are those Type B nurtures any youngster in need, regardless whose direct and indirect effects cause them to of which type of behaviour it will display when it replicate at higher rates than alternative genes and later becomes a parent itself. -
Springer MRW: [AU:, IDX:]
M Martin Daly and Margo Wilson inconsistencies between evolutionary logic and observed crime statistics in industrialized, West- Gavin Vance and Todd K. Shackelford ern cities like Chicago and Detroit. They argued Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA that available data on violent crime are vulnerable to misinterpretations and erroneous conclusions, such as the belief that the majority of homicides Synonyms are committed against kin. However, the factual basis of this claim relies largely on one’sdefini- Aggression; Crime; Homicide; Intimate Partner tion of kin. The kin altruism hypothesis predicts Violence that, because individuals share roughly 50% of their genes with full siblings, biological children, or parents, an individual may aid copies of his or Definitions her own genes by behaving altruistically toward these individuals (Hamilton, 1964). Therefore, if Martin Daly is an evolutionary psychologist who humans regularly engaged in the killing of genet- received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. ically related kin, this would pose a considerable Margo Wilson was an evolutionary psychologist contradiction between patterns of human aggres- who received her Ph. D from University College sion and the theory of evolution by natural selec- London. Together, Daly and Wilson applied an tion (Darwin, 1859). Daly and Wilson explain that evolutionary perspective to crime statistics to pro- crime statistics like those from Chicago and vide an explanation for patterns of violence and Detroit do not present a conflict with evolutionary homicide in modern human societies. theory because many of the homicide victims Martin Daly and Margo Wilson were a reported as “kin” in police records are not genet- husband-wife research team who, together, inves- ically related to the perpetrator. -
Justin Garson: Evolution and Psychology (Ch.3 of the Biological
The Biological Mind A Philosophical Introduction Justin Garson First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Justin Garson The right of Justin Garson to be identif ed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identif cation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN13: 978-0-415-81027-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-81028-9 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-1-315-77187-8 (ebk) Typeset in Franklin Gothic by Saxon Graphics Ltd., Derby 3 Evolution and psychology In the last chapter I speculated that altruism evolved initially to help us be better parents. This conjecture, however – “altruism evolved in order to do such-and-such” – prompts a more fundamental question. -
Law, Policy, and Cooperation Yochai Benkler
Law, Policy, and Cooperation Yochai Benkler Abstract: The last two decades have seen significant work undermining the selfishness hypothesis commonly used as a simplifying device for analysis based on the rational actor model. The work traverses a wide range of disciplines, from experimental economics and game theory, to anthropology, social psychology, and evolutionary biology. At the same time, organizational sociology and management science have been chronicling and systematizing observations about the development of collaborative models of production in some of the most innovative, competitive industries in the global economy, while work on the emergence of the networked economy has emphasized the increasing centrality of large scale collaborative models to information and cultural production. These diverse intellectual trends suggest a need to adapt legal and policy design to incorporate the greater diversity of human types and attitudes toward cooperation. The paper synthesizes out of the underlying literature a set of design elements, and suggests how they might be used to systematize our approaches to the design of policy interventions and institutions based on assumptions that differ quite fundamentally from the dominant assumptions of selfishness and solipsism, without requiring an assumption of universal altruism or necessitating a new communitarianism. Introduction The marginal productivity of homo economicus is declining. The thin view of the rational actor, whose preferences are well ordered and transitive, who readily calculates many steps forward and single-mindedly pursues the optimization of his own welfare, has been a productive model across many fields. It has formed the basis of mainstream economics, much of contemporary political science, as well as law and economics. -
HBES Newsletter Summer 2009
H UMAN BE H AVIOR & EVOLUTION SOCIETY Summer-Fall 2009 Newsletter In This Issue View From The President’s Window Interview The Student Voice HBES Conference 2009 Competition Winners HBES 2010 Letters From The Editors Announcements Redesigned HBES.COM Academic Positions Meetings Remembering Collaborations/Studies New Books Resources Margo Wilson Read more... View Interview MisMannered Students From the President’s Window Randy Thornhill Coming Soon Carolyn Hodges | Kate Hanson Sobraske Peter J. Richerson Our HBES president is Pete The featured interview Stay tuned for the next The HBES student Richerson, Distinguished in this edition is with edition of Mismannered. representatives are Carolyn Professor in the Department Professor Randy Thornhill, Hodges and Kate Handson of Environmental Science Distinguished Professor of Sobraske. Learn more about and Policy at UC Davis. Prof. Biology at the University the award for outstanding Richerson discusses the of New Mexico and HBES paper in EHB. Read more... Environment of Evolutionary president-elect. Thanks to Adaptedness Josh Tybur for (EEA) and conducting what we this interview. now know Hope you about climate enjoy. variation. Read more... Read more... © Copyright HBES 2007 - All Rights Reserved | email: [email protected] | web: www.hbes.com Remembering Margo Wilson HBES’ great friend Margo Wilson passed away after a long and courageous battle with lymphoma. Margo’s intellectual contribution to our field through her work with Martin Daly on homicide is an enduring classic. Her service to the society as President and as founding editor of EHB with Martin was instrumental in growing the Society and Journal from small beginnings to enduring institutions.