That is not to say that the “ Selfish Gene” was wrong, though. The idea that most of what we do is in service of the selfish gene’s reproductive goals still holds true. Imagine I’m a chimp, and some other chimp or even several other chimps decide I ought to be punished” Your next evolutionary psychology book recommendation is Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s Homicide. This looks at the possible motives for murder as a product of the process of evolution. Is that a fair way to summarise it? Even if we half-accept the original thesis, such as that some time in our past a good chunk of men didn’t care about paternity, there are obvious evolutionary reasons why those ancestors who didn’t care about paternity are not well represented today. In “How the Mind Works”, Pinker draws from both evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He sets out to explain the intricacies of the human mind, from cognition to categorization, to social intelligence.

The SAGE Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology | Sage

Still today, mounds of data and evidence notwithstanding, plenty of people still deny the presence of innate human drives, the importance of genes in shaping character and behavior, and the inborn psychological toolkit we all come equipped with. Got it. Now, I’m very intrigued about your fourth evolutionary psychology book recommendation. This is Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe by Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza. Could you give us an overview of the argument this book is making? When I first started reading “ The Moral Animal,” I thought I had stumbled into the decryption code of the world. This is really important for evolutionary psychologists to know, for two reasons. Firstly, I think evolutionary psychologists sometimes cut a corner. For example, looking at mating strategies, they might interview 1,000 men and show them pairs of pictures and say: ‘which of these images do you prefer?’ Or, they might interview 1,000 women and say: ‘Would you be willing to have an affair or not?’ Then they’ll infer differences. Which is all very sensible if what they say, and what they are aware of, directly influences what they would actually do. Because it’s the doing that’s important—actually having sex and producing children, not saying who you would be more attracted to. To begin with, remember that genetic mutations don’t develop with a predisposition towards helping the individual survive or reproduce, but they first evolve out of total randomness.It’s partly the fact it’s so beautifully written. It came out in 1994—I’d just become a teenager then, and was getting into all sorts of popular science, from Richard Dawkins to Stephen Hawking. Steven Pinker was one of those writers, although it’s hard to know if it had an influence on me later. He aligns with the zeitgeist and says that I quote: “ Ecological differences among existing humans are entirely the product of childhood and education“. A few of the “leftist” and “blank slate” biases that most evolutionary psychologists complain about are present here. Sex At Dawn I’m not a linguist so it may be that some of the content isn’t as current as it was. The version I have now was published in 2007, and in it Pinker says things hadn’t changed too much. That’s consistent with what Buss said about Pinker’s theories still being current. But a bit of a warning there. This introduction to one of the most exciting approaches to psychology is the best one out there—authoritative, lively, and balanced. It manages to be both theoretically sophisticated and accessible to a wide range of students interested in human nature and how it got that way."- Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, USA

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

If you want to learn more about why the “ tabula rasa hypothesis“, behaviorism, and the “ standard social science model” are just plain wrong, this is your book.

Another chunk of the criticism applies to “pop evolutionary psychology”, such as the evolutionary psychology that people who read one or two books on the topic engage in. That’s the typical “after-the-facts storytelling”. Or, as Nassim Taleb said, “people who love a nice narrative but have no evidence”. The second reason is that it sets up an enormous question for evolutionary psychologists. Most of what’s studied are the obvious questions: When will you kill somebody? When will you feud over something? What will your mating strategies be? They’re sort of obvious, because biologists have already studied them in animals. A lot of it is really saying: how do these theories apply to humans? This is known as Lanchester’s square law. It was discovered in the First World War. It’s about the use of bullets, but it applies more broadly and means that the cost of punishing people, when you are in agreement that someone should be punished, are dramatically lower for humans than for other animals. And if the costs are lower, it’s more likely to evolve. Other academics have done some of the numerical simulations and, again, show what he predicted from that basic premise. So that’s the central idea.