Darwin in mind : new opportunities for evolutionary psychology
Abstract
Evolutionary Psychology (EP) views the human mind as organized into many modules, each underpinned by psychological adaptations designed to solve problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. We argue that the key tenets of the established EP paradigm require modification in the light of recent findings from a number of disciplines, including human genetics, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and paleoecology. For instance, many human genes have been subject to recent selective sweeps; humans play an active, constructive role in co-directing their own development and evolution; and experimental evidence often favours a general process, rather than a modular account, of cognition. A redefined EP could use the theoretical insights of modern evolutionary biology as a rich source of hypotheses concerning the human mind, and could exploit novel methods from a variety of adjacent research fields.
Citation
Bolhuis , J , Brown , G R , Richardson , R & Laland , K N 2011 , ' Darwin in mind : new opportunities for evolutionary psychology ' , PLoS Biology , vol. 9 , no. 7 , e1001109 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109
Publication
PLoS Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1544-9173Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2011 Bolhuis et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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