Adapting minds: evolutionary psychology and the persistent quest for human nature

Abstract

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 popularised 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 scrutinises several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicised discoveries. Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, inc…