Psychology 306: Evolutionary Psychology
Spring Semester 1999
Wednesday 4 - 6:30, Wilson 316

Jon Kaas
061 Wilson Hall
322-6029
kaasjh@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu

Randolph Blake
511 Wilson Hall
343-7010
randolph.blake@vanderbilt.edu

"Is it not reasonable to anticipate that our understanding of the human mind would be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed?"

George C. Williams

"The mind consists of a set of adaptations, designed to solve the long standing adaptive problems humans encountered as hunter-gatherers."

Leda Cosmides and John Toby

"Evolution is to allegory as statues are to birdshit. It is a convenient platform upon which to deposit badly digested ideas."

Steve Jones

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Readings

How the Mind Works (HTMW) by Steven Pinker
River Out of Eden (ROE) by Richard Dawkins
Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA by R.C. Lewontin
Selected articles

Week 1: Introductory comments, course goals, what is evolutionary psychology? What is the standard social science model? (HTBW 1; de Jong van der Steen "Biological thinking in evolutionary psychology")

Week 2 (1/20): Genesis: How old is the universe? The earth? Life on earth? Humanoids? Natural selection and sexual reproduction; what is the unit of natural selection - species, individuals, genes? What is DNA? (HTBW 3; ROE; Wilson "Human groups as the units of selection")

Week 3 (1/27): Looks are everything: biology of beauty and sexual attraction (HTBW pp. 460 - 502; Buss "Strategies of human mating")

Week 4 (2/3): Almost human: What were our primate ancestors like? Chimps and bonobos are 98% human. Arboreal life and its demands: you are what you eat

Week 5 (2/10): Family reunion: our human ancestors during the first 100,000 years; sex roles; the family; social exchange (HTBW 7)

Week 6 (2/17): Friend or foe: helping each other and hurting each other - biological roots of altruism and violence (HTBW 6, 502 - 520; Kevles Kevles "Scapegoat biology"; Simon "A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism")

Week 7 (2/24): Nature's crowning achievment: how brains work; big brains/little brains - big minds/little minds; how the environment sculpts the brain - development and plasticity (Quartz Sejnowski "Neural basis of cognitive development: constuctivist manifesto")

Week 8 (3/3): MidTerm Exam

Week 9 (3/10) - Spring Break

Week 10 (3/17): Swiss Army Knife Theory of Mind: is the mind a general purpose, content independent device or, instead, an array of special purpose computational devices adapted by natural selection? (HTBW 2; Quartz Sejnowski, see above)

Week 11 (3/24): Perceiving is believing: inverse optics, ill-posed problems, bags of tricks (HTBW 4; TBA)

Week 12 (3/31): The ultimate social tool: language and communication in a social environment (TBA)

Week 13 (4/7): Biology of God: has evolution created religion and morals? (HTBW 8; EO Wilson "Biological basis of morality")

Week 14 (4/14): On the other hand: objections to evolutionary psychology (Lewontin monograph)

Week 15 (4/21): Final thoughts

Additional Readings
(recommended but not required)

Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859, reprinted New York: Penguin Books)
The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins (1986, New York: Norton)
The Moral Animal, Robert Wright (1994, New York: Pantheon)
On Human Nature, EO Wilson (1978, Cambridge: Harvard Press)
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1976, New York: Oxford Press)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett (1995, New York: Simon Schuster)
The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris (1967, New York: McGraw Hill)
The Evolution of Desire, David Buss (1994, New York: Basic Books)
Descaretes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Antonio Dasmasio (1994, New York: Grosset/Putnam)
The Evolution of Human Desire, Donald Symons (1979, New York: Oxford Press)
Anatomy of Love, H.E. Fisher (1992, New York: Norton)
Vision, D Marr (1982, San Francisco: Freeman)
The Emotional Brain, J LeDoux (1996, New York: Simon Schuster)

Some Relevant Web Sites

Book reviews of HTBW:
http://www.science-books.com/sciencebooks/reviews/howthemindworks.html
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?1997110613R
On evolutionary psychology:
http://www.evoyage.com/
Stephen Jay Gould on evolutionary psychology:
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?1997062647F
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?1997061234F
Dennett's and Pinker's reply to Gould:
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?1997081459E1
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?1997100955E1
Steve Jones on genetics, cloning and biotechnology:
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?1998042314R
Steve Jones on the evolution of sexual behavior:
http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?1997071739R
Martin Gardner reviews "Do Parents Count:?" http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?1998110519R
Why we have big brains:
http://www.massey.ac.nz/~i75202/emural/nrg.htm "In hunter-gatherer societies, men hunt and women stay at home. This strong bias persists in most agricultural and industrial societies and, on that ground alone, appears to have a genetic origin. ... My own guess is that the genetic bias is intense enough to cause a substantial division of labor even in the most free and egalitarian of future societies." (Wilson, New York Times Magazine, October 12, 1975.)