Evolutionary psychology
Tag archives for Evolutionary psychology
How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?
Posted by Greg Laden on February 27, 2013 Humans appear to have a great deal of variation in sexual orientation, in what is often referred to as “gender” and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to “genes” as the “cause” of any particular subset of this diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to “culture” as the…
Evolutionary Psychology: Careful, some practitioners may be carrying a kitchen knife!
Posted by Greg Laden on December 10, 2012 
Darwinian Psychology, or really, any “Psychology” that claims to be science, will operate under the assumption that the human brain, as an organ, has arrived at its modern form through the process of evolution, which includes a certain amount of design through Natural Selection. It does not take that much additional sophistication to realize that…
Critique of Rebecca Watson’s Talk: Haters gonna hate.
Posted by Greg Laden on December 6, 2012 
Whinging About Skepchick A critique of a talk by Rebecca Watson is very likely heavily influenced by the critiquer’s membership in one group or another as defined by The Great Sorting. This not because Rebecca is a polarizing person. It is because she has been outspoken on issues that tend to polarize people, like feminism.…
How Girls Evolved to Shop
Posted by Greg Laden on December 3, 2012 
Rebecca Watson gave the following talk at Skeptcon. It is funny, well done, and critiques a Pop-Evol-Psy concept or two, which I have also addressed (Why Do Men Hunt and Women Shop?, Understanding Sex Differences in Humans: What do we learn from nature?, Falsehoods: Human Universals, A Tutorial in Human Behavioral Biology, Driving The Patriarchy:…
Why Do Men Hunt and Women Shop?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 27, 2012 The title of this post is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today’s behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by “sound”…
A Tutorial in Human Behavioral Biology
Posted by Greg Laden on November 28, 2011 If you read only one book this holiday season, make it all of the following twenty or so! But seriously … I’d like to do something today that I’ve been meaning to do, quite literally, for years. I want to run down a selection of readings that would provide any inquisitive person with a solid…
When Your Genes Turn Bad …
Posted by Greg Laden on May 9, 2009 Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s BoyfriendWhen I first received this book to review, I thought “Oh, great, another one of these pop evolutionary psychology books by some academic with a large mortgage payment” (or words to that effect). But then I read it and my…
Dawkins…. On Purpose
Posted by Greg Laden on March 5, 2009 Dawkins gave a talk that could be criticized as not particularly new, in that his main idea is that human brains are too powerful and adaptable to continue to function primarily within an adaptive program serving as a proper adaptive organ. Instead, human brains think up all sorts of other, rather non-Darwinian things to do.…
, which is now available for the 
