Integrating Development and Evolution in Psychological Science: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology, Developmental Systems, and Explanatory Pluralism

Theopsych: A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians

Evolutionary Psychology in the Service of Moral Philosophy:A Possible Future for Ethics? William S. Lewis Someone may ask, "What is the difference, then, between moral philosophy and moral psychology?" The answer may be that there is no interesting difference and that the issue is of interest only to university administrators. —Gilbert Harman, "Three Trends in Moral and Political Philosophy" (2003) In "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" (1891), William James provides a rough taxonomy of the state of ethical philosophy at the time that he was writing. Making a division between psychological approaches that identify the good with the feeling of pleasure derived by a naturally evolved organism and metaphysical approaches that hold that the good is conceptual, James argues that both are equally goods and that each implies similar obligation.1 James's solution, therefore, to the problem of which type of good must be honored is a pragmatist one: both are seen to have an effect on the organism and are thus equally real. Both are therefore equally worthy of consideration and respect. [End Page 48] Today, it may be harder to make the same kind of sweeping survey of the state of ethics and to solve the problem of casuistry in one stroke. In some department, somewhere, every type of moral philosophy is actively defended. However, for almost four decades, the "brain-borne" or metaphysical approach to ethics has been dominant in academic philosophy, and the evolutionary psychological understanding of happiness has played a secondary role. Now, deontologists, contractarians, utilitarians, experimental philosophers, and many virtue theorists work on how to conceptualize the good properly. Meanwhile, evolutionary moral psychologists have taken up the other part of James's project, albeit with little of his concern as a moral philosopher about finding how to achieve the most good. Instead, these scientists look to clues in our own and in other species' development in order to determine why we perceive certain activities and actions to be good (e.g., caring for others) and others to be bad (e.g., cheating on exams). The question this essay takes up is that of whether Ethics as a discipline has something to learn from the literature in evolutionary moral psychology and if this mode of explanation should be part of its future. Its primary thesis is that Ethics does have much to learn because the sciences that study the evolutionary mechanisms by which ethical judgments are produced will allow us, in a naturalist and pragmatist fashion, to better understand the possibilities for achieving our ethical goals. They will do so not because they demonstrate that all effective and achievable moralities must be anchored in evolutionarily derived moral faculties or intuitions but because these sciences can help to reveal the means by which our culturally derived ethical ideals might be realized as well as indicate the innate psychological and psychosocial stumbling blocks and hurdles to these ideals' realization. In "The Moral Philosophy and the Moral Life," James proves a keen diagnostician of the aim of moral philosophers as well as a keen analyst of the main questions to which moral philosophy must find answers if it is to be successful. Regarding the goal of moral philosophy, he notes that it aims "to find an account of the moral relations that obtain among things, which will weave them into the unity of a stable system, and make of the world . . . a genuine universe from the ethical point of view."2 In order to construct such a system, James notes that the moral philosopher must answer questions about the psychological origin of our moral judgments, about the meaning of our primary ethical terms such as good and obligation, and about how to rank competing goods and duties in order that we may [End Page 49] act correctly.3 In order to assess the importance of evolutionary moral psychology for moral philosophy, this essay will primarily be concerned with what James labels the origin question. However, the semantic and casuistic questions will be returned to when this essay argues that evolutionarily derived moral sentiments mean and demand something different than do second-order moral sentiments and that the latter should be given primacy over the...

Developmental systems theory (DST) expands the unit of replication from genes to whole systems of developmental resources, which DST interprets in terms of cycling developmental processes. Expansion seems required by DST's argument against privileging genes in evolutionary and developmental explanations of organic traits. DST and the expanded replicator brook no distinction between biological and cultural evolution. However, by endorsing a single expanded unit of inheritance and leaving the classical molecular notion of gene intact, DST achieves only a nominal reunification of heredity and development. I argue that an alternative conceptualization of inheritance denies the classical opposition of genetics and development while avoiding the singularity inherent in the replicator concept. It also yields a new unit—the reproducer—which genuinely integrates genetic and developmental perspectives. The reproducer concept articulates the non-separability of “genetic” and “developmental” roles in units of heredity, development, and evolution. DST reformulated in terms of reproducers rather than replicators preserves an empirically interesting distinction between cultural and biological evolution.

Evolutionary psychology has seen the majority of its success exploring adaptive features of the mind believed to be ubiquitous across our species. This has given rise to the belief that the adaptationist approach has little to offer the field of differential psychology, which concerns itself exclusively with the ways in which individuals systematically differ. By framing the historical origins of both disciplines, and exploring the means through which they each address the unique challenges of psychological description and explanation, the present article identifies the conceptual and theoretical problems that have kept differential psychology isolated not only from evolutionary psychology, but from explanatory approaches in general. Paying special attention to these conceptual problems, the authors review how these difficulties are being overcome by contemporary evolutionary research, and offer instructive suggestions concerning how differential researchers (and others) can best build upon these innovations.

Evolutionary developmental psychology is the study of the genetic and ecological mechanisms that govern the development of social and cognitive competencies common to all human beings and the epigenetic (gene-environment interactions) processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions. The basic assumptions and domains of this emerging field, as related to human life history and social and cognitive development, are outlined, as are implications for issues of importance in contemporary society.

Child and developmental psychologists, sociologists, educators, and policy makers have long viewed parenting and the family as the most significant influence on the developing child. This chapter provides an evolutionary view of human parenting. It reviews the basic tenets of evolution by natural selection and some of the major ideas of the field of evolutionary psychology, particularly evolutionary developmental psychology. The chapter then examines a more specific evolutionary theory, Trivers's parental investment theory, which accounts for the amount of investment females and males put into parenting. Yet, parenting straddles the nature side of the traditional continuum. Parenting is not only important to humans, but it is central to the survival of many species of animals, including all mammals and many birds. Natural selection is a highly interactive process, involving an active organism's response to a sometimes changing environment.

Happiness in modern society: Why intelligence and ethnic composition matter

An evolutionarily adaptive neural architecture for social reasoning

For humanities scholars debating the contours of W. E. B. Du Bois's notoriously conflicted account of racial identity, the field of evolutionary psychology has seemed completely irrelevant. Similarly, the experts busy debating evolutionary psychology's claims would not consider it particularly interesting that Du Bois offered a conflicted account of racial identity. This essay argues that both groups are mistaken, and that twentieth-century debates over racial identity and twenty-first-century debates over the study of human psychology have suffered as a result. Writers like Du Bois, I argue, were steeped in notions of evolutionary psychology, so our account of them and of their historical moment will be profoundly skewed if we ignore that discipline. By the same token, these writers' work can offer us new perspectives on how we debate this controversial discipline, and more broadly how we understand the relationship of biology to culture at stake in it. Evolutionary psychology, which uses principles of Darwinian evolutionary theory to make and test predictions about human psychology, has become astonishingly popular over the last twenty-five years, both as a research program and as a pop culture phenomenon. Its proliferating publishing venues, academic societies, and textbooks are echoed by journalism, novels, and movies that have trumpeted the field's hypotheses, making them as ubiquitous in US culture today as psychoanalytic notions, such as Freudian slips. (1) Someone who has never heard of evolutionary psychology is nonetheless likely to believe that men find physical cues of female fertility (like youth) attractive because it helps them pass on their genes. popularity of such claims has done little to secure their acceptance. Critics charge that evolutionary psychologists create too simple or direct a link between biology and complex psychological or sociological phenomena. And although titles like Triumph of Sociobiology suggest that the field has emerged victorious from these debates, the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara (home to two of the field's most influential members) tells a different story: it maintains an active website that, like an election-season war room, assembles responses to emerging criticisms (Cosmides and Tooby). (2) Perhaps because of the field's current aura of both glamour and threat, scholars have paid little attention to its own evolution. notion of an evolutionary psychology actually arose along with Darwinism in the late nineteenth century, much earlier than the 1975 academic birth usually marked by the publication of E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology. Yet scholars have only just begun to unpack the cultural development of the principles that coalesced into this academic field, and virtually no attention has been paid to the relation between its cultural and academic practices. In particular, questions of the relation of biology to human behavior arise nowhere more insistently than in debates over race in the early twentieth century. demise of comparative anatomy, the development of relativist forms of cultural anthropology, and the development of evolutionary theory itself have already been explored as contexts for those debates, but their relationship to evolutionary psychology remains to be acknowledged. (3) This essay investigates this relationship by turning to two writers who epitomize the potentially polarizing complexity of questions about racial identity: Du Bois and George Schuyler. Du Bois has become a famous example of a thinker who tried and failed to generate a nonbiological account of race. According to Kwame Anthony Appiah's influential analysis, Du Bois's The Conservation of Races rejected the biological or scientific meaning of race only to insist on neat divisions of racial history that would be incoherent without that biological meaning propping them up. In Appiah's analysis, only biological community can yield those common histor[ies] that align properly with racial identity, making Du Bois's attempt to reject biology but preserve race circular (Uncompleted Argument 27). …

Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing

This revised third edition provides an up to date, comprehensive overview of the field of comparative psychology, integrating both evolutionary and developmental studies of brain and behavior. This book provides a unique combination of areas normally covered independently to satisfy the requirements of comparative psychology courses. Papini ensures thorough coverage of topics like the fundamentals of neural function, the cognitive and associative capacities of animals, the development of the central nervous system and behavior, and the fossil record of animals including human ancestors. This text includes many examples drawn from the study of human behavior, highlighting general and basic principles that apply broadly to the animal kingdom. New topics introduced in this edition include genetics, epigenetics, neurobiological, and cognitive advances made in recent years into this evolutionary-developmental framework. An essential textbook for upper level undergraduate and graduate courses in comparative psychology, animal behavior, and evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience and behavioral biology.

In this article, I explore the emergent relationship between feminist media studies/cultural studies and the field of Evolutionary Psychology (EP). EP scholars increasingly conduct research on media and popular culture. At the same time, media/ted texts are increasingly marked by EP discourses. I take as my focus commercial women's online magazines produced in the UK and in Spain and accessed globally. Specifically, I explore a recurrent thread in their discussion forums: women expressing confusion, concern, disappointment, hurt and/or self-doubt, and asking for advice on discovering that their male partners consume various pornographies. A feminist poststructuralist discursive analysis is developed to explore both peer-to-peer and editorial advice on such ‘porn trouble’. I show how pseudo-scientific discourses give support to a narrative of male immutability and female adaptation in heterosexual relationships, and examine how these constructions are informed by EP accounts of sexual difference. The article offers empirical insights into the penetration of EP logics and narratives into popular culture transnationally. Advancing the notion of ‘postfeminist biologism’, my analysis contributes to feminist interrogations of EP's ongoing popularity in the face of sound, longstanding and widespread criticism of it as scientifically flawed and culturally pernicious.

Human internal and external pressures that drive cognition, emotion, motivation, and interpersonal behavior are critical aspects of clinical psychology and psychotherapy’s perspectives on psychopathology. Different theoretical orientations suggest that difficulties with emotional needs, interpersonal motivations, psychosocial stages, and maturational tasks lie at the core of psychopathology. From an evolutionary and neurobiological perspective, several affective systems were shaped through the interaction between genetic and environmental pressures and can be described as the neural basis for several emotion-based behavioral tendencies. However, efforts to integrate these constructs from basic neural science, evolutionary psychology, and clinical psychology have been sparse. In this sense, the present article aims to briefly review the literature on such clinically relevant constructs and make a proposal in a coherent metatheoretical perspective to integrate and make sense of these phenomena as an unified rationale. From affective neuroscience to evolutionary psychology, developmental psychopathology, and ecological systems perspectives, biopsychosocial and contextual pressures are suggested as a heuristic for a contemporary, coherent, and transtheoretical theory of the disorder.

This chapter looks briefly at evolutionary theory applied to human families, in particular inclusive fitness and parental investment theories, as well as some assumptions derived from evolutionary developmental psychology, including the concepts of ontogenetic, deferred, and conditional adaptations. It then examines factors that influence the investment decisions that mothers, fathers, grandparents, and stepparents make with regard to children. Lastly, it looks at issues related to living with siblings, including factors that influence both sibling conflict and cooperation and mechanism responsible for incest avoidance.

A central goal ofourtarget article was to evaluate the soundness of evolutionary psychology's epistemology in relation to the critical claim that evolutionary explanations are unfalsifiable. None of the 16 commentators challenge our central assertion-that the methods and strategies employed by evolutionary psychologists to generate and test hypotheses are scientifically defensible-and thus we consider our basic goal to have been achieved. However, the commentators raise a number of thoughtful and thought-provoking points. In our response to these commentaries we focus on a subset of philosophical and metatheoretical issues that we believe are most deserving of further discussion. The first part ofthis rejoinder addresses issues concerning evolutionary psychology and the philosophy of science; the second part addresses issues concerning the core assumptions of evolutionary psychology.