Evolutionary Psychology:
Evolutionary psychology is basically what these books are about. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology that begins with recognition that members of the same species all share a universal brain structure. The study of evolutionary psychology is the study of how that brain structure works and recognizing how it manifests itself outwardly.
Metaphorically speaking, everyone on Earth lives in the same cheap suburb, where all the houses have the exact same blueprints. Nobody in the neighborhood owns a copy of their blueprints, though. All our houses look different, people have painted them differently, shingled them differently, gotten different curtains and shutters, decorated their yards differently, finished their driveways differently, built garages, built additions, and done every other conceivable thing to make their houses look different from the outside. It’s taken a long time for anyone to figure out that all the houses might’ve started with the same blueprints. Now some people are trying to figure out what those original blueprints are.
The two things that cause variations in that basic neural blueprint are genetic variation and life experiences.
Genetic variation happens in humans for the same reason it happens in any other animals: to ensure that the species will contain some members that are well suited to various living conditions, so that regardless of how the living conditions change (to a certain extent, anyway), some members of the species will be able to adapt.
Life experiences differ for all the reasons I talked about in the last book—learning, childhood development, personal history, cultural background, abilities, skills, and all that.
One other thing that affects the outward manifestation of evolutionary psychology are variables that exists outside the self—namely, available resources, including the personalities of the other people the person is dealing with in a personal interaction situation.
From The Evolutionary Psychology Primer, by Dr. Leda Cosmides and Dr. John Tooby, who are the co-directors of the evo-psych graduate program at the University of California at Santa Barbara:
Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.
Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history.
Principle 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler that it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve — they require very complicated neural circuitry
Principle 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.
Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.
The Five Principles are tools for thinking about psychology, which can be applied to any topic: sex and sexuality, how and why people cooperate, whether people are rational, how babies see the world, conformity, aggression, hearing, vision, sleeping, eating, hypnosis, schizophrenia and on and on. The framework they provide links areas of study, and saves one from drowning in particularity. Whenever you try to understand some aspect of human behavior, they encourage you to ask the following fundamental questions:
Where in the brain are the relevant circuits and how, physically, do they work?
What kind of information is being processed by these circuits?
What information-processing programs do these circuits embody?
What were these circuits designed to accomplish (in a hunter-gatherer context)?
…In other words, everything I’ve been talking about for the past book.
If you want a Ph.D. in evo-psych, Dr. Cosmides and Dr. Tooby are the ones to talk to. As a formal field of study, evo-psych is basically theoretical neurology, where people break human behavior down into smaller and smaller component by reverse engineering how our brains work and figuring out, “If this happens, what happens next?”
Something else you can do with this framework is build up from it, to see how it creates behavior patterns in groups. As far as I can tell, I’m about the only person who’s doing that.
By breaking human behavior down into fundamental components, you can avoid the pitfalls of both behavioral and cognitive psychology.
For the practical application of evo-psych to everyday life, you start by asking: How is the person expending their energy?
Then you start asking further questions to refine your answer: How does the person perceive that expending his or her energy in this way, as opposed to any other, offer the most effective means of preserving the survival of his or her DNA? Is the person trying to survive, reproduce, or both? How is he or she trying to do that?
Then you refine the person’s goals and instinctive perceptions further. Intellect and emotional reactions (meaning instinctive reactions) determine the person’s perception of the situation. Their instinct and intellects interact to give them their eight basic motivations. Their choice is affected by the five outside factors in their decision-making.
Scientists have been studying evo-psych for 20 years or more now. They’ve dumped tons and tons of research into it. And what do they have to show for themselves? A whole lot of highly technical discoveries virtually nobody can understand. The science exists to solve all kinds of problems in the world, but if they can’t figure out how to win public support for it, it isn’t going to do anyone any good.
Once upon a time, people thought the atom bomb would be the ultimate weapon for ending wars of imperialism. But on the contrary, the ultimate weapon for ending wars of imperialism turned out to be the AK47. Millions of peasant rice farmers who were willing to fight as long and as hard as it took to win succeeded where dozens of the world’s greatest scientists failed.
So I guess this makes me the Ho Chi Mihn of science, eh?
Heh, heh, heh…