Psychology: An Evolutionary Approach

by Steven J.C. Gaulin

Aims to show the relevance of evolutionary thinking to the range of psychological phenomena. This book applies theory to questions from various domains of psychology such as learning, cognition,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0137599943
• ISBN13: 9780137599943
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 402 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The first of a new generation of texts for teaching psych

Is human nature infinitely variable from culture to culture, relatively unconstrained by our biology, or is there a single basic human biological nature that just varies in certain particulars from environment to environment ? We care about this not only from a scientific perspective, but even a political one, since our view of human nature is one of the foundations of political philosophy as well. The evolutionary psychology (EP) approach is here. Rather than adding yet another field to the growing list of social psychology, personality psychology, biological psychology, depth psychology, behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, gestalt psychology, narrative psychology, transpersonal psychology, and so on endlessly, EP comes with the slogan that it can unify the whole mess. Simply put, by understanding the process nature uses to design organisms, and applying that to human evolution, we discover what the mind is designed to do and how. It's the scientific equivalent of asking God for our original blueprints. Except that we have to infer the design from very imperfect information.There have been several other good introductory EP texts, such as the excellent one by David Buss, a specialist in human mating patterns. There is also one by Cosmides and Tooby, authors of a landmark scholarly text in the field which contains a manifesto for distinguishing evolutionary psychology from the social sciences. There is even a reasonably good cartoon version of an overview of the field, by Evans and Zarate.What is very special about *this* new text by Gaulin and McBurney is that they have NOT just issued another manifesto against social science or another highly focused text on human mating and explanations for altruism. They seem to have actually begun a new era in the field, its implied agenda all along, to provide a unified framework for studying all of psychology, from sensation and perception to cognition, social behavior, and culture. As if all of human behavioral variety can be explained from the start in terms of where we came from.How does this potentially change psychology in general ? That's the main strength of this book. The authors make very clear that thinking in terms of the history of our species and the history of life in general; rather than isolated findings from loosely related experimental conditions; leads to very different conclusions at times. Like other fields, EP gives us a specific set of tools and protocols for investigating patterns in nature. But unlike other fields, it gives us a pegboard for hanging all those experimental results and investigating their relationship and what it tells us about ourselves and even our relationship to the rest of nature.The question is of course whether it succeeds. Is evolutionary psychology really to the point yet where it is no longer a protoscience, but a central way to understand human behavior ? There remain some dedicated opponents of the field, like Richard Lewontin, Stephe