Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology
Johan J. Bolhuis1*, Gillian R. Brown2, Robert C. Richardson3, Kevin N. Laland4*
1 Behavioural Biology Group and Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2 School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom, 3 Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America, 4 School of Biology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom
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 JJ, Brown GR, Richardson RC, Laland KN (2011) Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. PLoS Biol 9(7): e1001109. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109
Published: July 19, 2011
Copyright: © 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.
Funding: JJB is funded by Utrecht University and by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) grants (ALW Open Competition and GW Horizon Programme) (http://www.nwo.nl/). GRB is funded by a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship, UK (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/). RCR is funded by the University of Cincinnati. KNL is funded by the BBSRC, UK (http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/) and an ERC Advanced Grant http://erc.europa.eu/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Abbreviations: AI, artificial intelligence; EEA, environment of evolutionary adaptedness; EP, Evolutionary Psychology
* E-mail: j.j.bolhuis@uu.nl (JJB); knl1@st-andrews.ac.uk (KNL)
+++++
