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."