Evolutionary psychology/External Links

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• Center for Evolutionary Psychology | Leda Cosmides, Dept. of Psychology, John Tooby, Dept. of Anthropology, Directors. University of California Santa Barbara.
  • "The goals of the Center are (1) to promote the discovery and systematic mapping of the adaptations that comprise the evolved species-typical architecture of the human mind and brain, and (2) to explore how cultural and social phenomena can be explained as the output of such newly discovered or newly mapped psychological adaptations."

• Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer., by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby.
  • An approximately 14,000 word document, 41 references. Last updated 1997.
  • "[Evolutionary psychology] not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it....In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors."
  • "But our natural competences -- our abilities to see, to speak, to find someone beautiful, to reciprocate a favor, to fear disease, to fall in love, to initiate an attack, to experience moral outrage, to navigate a landscape, and myriad others -- are possible only because there is a vast and heterogenous array of complex computational machinery supporting and regulating these activities. This machinery works so well that we don't even realize that it exists -- We all suffer from instinct blindness."
  • "Einstein once commented that "It is the theory which decides what we can observe". An evolutionary focus is valuable for psychologists, who are studying a biological system of fantastic complexity, because it can make the intricate outlines of the mind's design stand out in sharp relief. Theories of adaptive problems can guide the search for the cognitive programs that solve them; knowing what cognitive programs exist can, in turn, guide the search for their neural basis."

• The Evolutionary Psychology FAQ. 36 questions and answers. Last updated September 8, 2004.
  • "This FAQ is written and maintained by Edward Hagen, formerly of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, and now at the Institute for Theoretical Biology in Berlin. The FAQ assumes a basic knowledge of genes and natural selection. Its purpose is to outline the foundations of evolutionary psychology. These foundations are extremely robust (though not beyond criticism). The status of specific hypotheses (e.g., mate selection preferences, cheater detection modules) is more debatable, and will not be discussed in detail here. In addition, I address many of the common misconceptions about evolutionary psychology. This FAQ draws upon the work of many individuals."

• The Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES)
  • "The Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) is an interdisciplinary, international society of researchers, primarily from the social and biological sciences, who use modern evolutionary theory to help to discover human nature - including evolved emotional, cognitive and sexual adaptations."

• What is Evolutionary Psychology? Kruger, D.J. (2002).
  • An evolutionary approach to psychology focuses on proximate mediation; those affects, cognitions and behaviors which helped to solve some adaptive problem in the ancestral environment. This approach is quite useful in organizing information about a wide variety of structurally distal phenomena. There is no grand unifying theory of social psychology, it is currently composed of many specialized areas of research. Framing knowledge about human cognitions and behaviors in terms of their adaptive functions would lend coherence and commonality to the massive amounts of data already collected. Evolutionary psychology is concerned with the conditions that existed in ancestral environments, the proximate mechanisms that evolved to deal with conditions in this environment, and the function of these evolved mechanisms in our current environment."

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External links

• Human Behavior and Evolution Society
• Evolutionary Psychology page at Scholarpedia
• Evolutionary Psychology at the Open Directory Project
• Evolution's Voyage/Evolutionary psychology for the common person

Introductory peer-reviewed texts

• Buss, D. M. (1995). Evolutionary psychology: A new paradigm for psychological science. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 1-30. Full text

• Durrant, R., & Ellis, B.J. (2003). Evolutionary Psychology. In M. Gallagher & R.J. Nelson (Eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology, Volume Three: Biological Psychology (pp. 1-33). New York: Wiley & Sons. Full text

• Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2005). Conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 5-67). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Full text

A few introductory peer-reviewed papers and chapters

• Buss, D. M. (1995). Evolutionary psychology: A new paradigm for psychological science. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 1-30. Full text

• Durrant, R., & Ellis, B.J. (2003). Evolutionary Psychology. In M. Gallagher & R.J. Nelson (Eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology, Volume Three: Biological Psychology (pp. 1-33). New York: Wiley & Sons. Full text

• Kennair, L. E. O. (2002). Evolutionary psychology: An emerging integrative perspective within the science and practice of psychology. Human Nature Review, 2, 17-61. Full text

• Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2005). Conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 5-67). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Full text

Evolutionary Psychology Academic Societies

• Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES)- International society of researchers who use modern evolutionary theory to discover human nature.
• The International Society for Human Ethology (ISHE)- aims to promote ethological perspectives in the scientific study of humans worldwide.
• The Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS)- an international and interdisciplinary association of scholars, scientists, and policymakers concerned with evolutionary, genetic, and ecological knowledge and its bearing on political behavior, public policy and ethics.
• Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law
• The New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology
• The NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society ([NEEPS[www.neepsociety.com]); a regional society dedicated to encouraging scholorship and dialogue on the topic of evolutionary psychology]
• Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law

Evolutionary Psychology Journals

• Evolution and Human Behavior - Academic journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
• Evolutionary Psychology - An open access peer-reviewed journal.
• Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective
• The Journal of Social, Evolutionary & Cultural Psychology - An open access peer-reviewed journal.
• Biological Theory: Integrating Development, Evolution and Cognition - A journal devoted to theoretical advances in the fields of biology and cognition, with an emphasis on the conceptual integration afforded by evolutionary and developmental approaches. Free access to Winter 2006 issues
• Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Publishes target articles as well as peer review commentary, some of which have been related to evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary Psychology Research Groups and Centers

• The UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology UCSB researchers in evolutionary psychology and allied disciplines.
• Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology Program at the Psychology Department of the University of Texas at Austin
• Evolution and Human Adaptation Program at the University of Michigan
• Human Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
• UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture
• IGERT Program in Evolutionary Modeling, University of Washington & Washington State University
• Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University
• Evolutionary Anthropology Research Group, Durham University
• Human Evolutionary Ecology Group at the University College London
• Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Program at the University of Arizona, Tucson
• The Evolutionary Psychology Research Group at Simon Fraser University
• Evolution and Behaviour Group and MSc Programme at Brunel University
• Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute
• Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science
• Biological Anthropology Program, UCLA
• Evolutionary Psychology Lab, Florida Atlantic University
• The Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
• Research Group on Evolution and Higher Cognition, Rutgers University
• Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, at University College London
• Evolution and the Social Mind at UCSB.
• Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute for Urban Ethology, Germany
• Behavioural Ecology at Simon Fraser University
• Behavioral Biology Laboratory University of Chicago
• Nebraska Behavioral Biology Group
• Evolutionary Psychology Research Group, Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Evolutionary Psychology and Behavior Ecology Group at the University of Liverpool
• Evolutionary World Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Washington
• International Paleopsychology Project
• New England Complex Systems Institute
• Group on Evolutionary Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• Evolusjonspsykologi og individuelle forskjeller/ Evolutionary Psychology and Individual Differences, Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

A small sampling of papers and research concerning Evolutionary Psychology

• Evolutionary Psychology of Religion by Steven Pinker
• Controversies Surrounding Evolutionary Psychology by Edward H. Hagen.
• The role of function in evolutionary psychology by Jennifer Mundale and William Bechtel
• [1] David Buss reprints.
• [2] Leda Cosmides and John Tooby reprints.
• [3] Martin Daly, Margo Wilson et al. reprints.
• [4] David C. Geary reprints.
• Ed Hagen reprints.
• What Is Evolutionary Psychology? by Clinical Evolutionary Psychologist Dale Glaebach.

Online Videos

• Video An interview of Steven Pinker by Robert Wright (journalist), offering a good discussion of Evolutionary Psychology.
• Video An interview of Edward O. Wilson by Robert Wright (journalist), which helps put Evolutionary Psychology in its scientific, academic, political and philosophical context.
• Video: Margaret Mead and Samoa. Good review of the nature vs. nurture debate triggered by Mead's book "Coming of Age in Samoa."