Evolution in Mind – An Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology (Obee) - Softcover

Plotkin, H

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674001958 ISBN 13: 9780674001954

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

We aren't very strong, nor very fast, we have insufficient body hair to keep us warm and dry, and we will never eat bananas with our feet. But like our chimpanzee cousins, we, the naked apes, have evolved to flourish in our surroundings--a cultural environment largely of our own creation. For the human race, the critical evolution of the past million years has been the evolution of our minds.

Yet psychology, the very science that purports to understand us, has long been deeply ambivalent about Darwin's unsettling discoveries. In an accessible, level-headed overview, Henry Plotkin describes the new rapprochement called 'evolutionary psychology.' He examines how such a powerful theory as Darwinism could have been disregarded by much academic psychology and shows why the relationship between the two must be readdressed. The theory and data of evolutionary biology and animal behavior can illuminate many of our most basic mental processes and activities: language learning, perception, social understanding, and most controversially, culture and the sharing of knowledge and beliefs.

Ranging from the nature-nurture question, which has bedeviled philosophers and scientists for thousands of years, to recent debates about the mind's structure, Evolution in Mind vividly demonstrates how an evolutionary perspective helps us understand what we are, and how we got that way.

About this title

Review

"Henry Plotkin's "Evolution in Mind" is the sensible face of evolutionary psychology. While sanguine about the promise of evolutionary psychology, he avoids much of the eulogizing tone that characterizes other introductory tests. His account is strong on the history of psychology, on tracing the emergence of evolutionary psychology, and his examples of the current work of evolutionary psychologists is largely limited to ones that have a strong and prolonged set of results to support them." -- Terence Sullivan "Metapsychology" (01/12/2001)

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674001958
• ISBN 13: 9780674001954
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 286