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Was human nature designed by natural selection
in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary
psychology holds that it was -- that our psychological adaptations
were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems
faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative
and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major
claims of evolutionary psychology -- the paradigm popularized
by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David
Buss in The Evolution of Desire -- and rejects them
all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary
theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional
wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided.
Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of
reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the
mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced
and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved
to solve them. Evolutionary psychologists claim many discoveries
based on this approach, including the evolutionary rationale
for human mate preferences (that males prefer nubile females
and females prefer high-status males) and "discriminative
parental solicitude" (the idea that stepparents abuse
their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents
abuse their biological children). In the carefully argued
central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes
several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized
"discoveries." Drawing on a wide range of empirical
research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse,
he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence.
Buller argues that our minds are not adapted
to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually
adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes.
We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary
psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human
psychology is influenced by evolutionary. When we do, Buller
claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature
but the very idea of human nature itself.
David J. Buller is Associate Professor
of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University.
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