The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology
Chapter One
Conceptual Foundations of
Evolutionary Psychology
JOHN TOOBY and LEDA COSMIDES
THE EMERGENCE OF EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY: WHAT IS AT STAKE?
THE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for
understanding the design of the human mind and brain, as Darwin himself
was the first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding
of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human
species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural
science capable of precision and rapid progress. Yet, nearly a century and a half
after The Origin of Species was published, the psychological, social, and behavioral
sciences remain largely untouched by these implications, and many of these disciplines
continue to be founded on assumptions evolutionarily informed researchers
know to be false (Pinker, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology is
the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary,
and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically ... read full excerpt from The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology ebook
