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This course covers evolutionary psychology: the scientific study of human nature, based on the biological principles of evolution through natural selection, sexual selection, social selection, multilevel selection, and cultural development. We will analyze human psychological adaptations for finding food, avoiding predators and pathogens, attracting and choosing mates, competing for status, sustaining relationships, raising children, helping relatives, trading goods and services, and signaling traits and virtues. We will learn why humans evolved our amazing abilities for language, intelligence, creativity, art, music, humor, group cooperation, compassion, and heroism. Evolutionary psychology can help us understand sex differences, cross-cultural differences, and individual differences in intelligence, personality traits, and mental health. It can illuminate modern issues in emotions, ethics, romance, sexuality, family life, careers, consumer behavior, existential risks, and humanity’s long-term future.
Originally published in 1976, this book remains a classic work in the development of evolutionary thought, and its influence is undiminished today. Dawkins articulates a gene's eye view of evolution - a view giving center stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. Dawkins argues that individual organisms behave altruistically for the food of the genes, and that such kin altruism is only one way in which gene selfishness can translate itself into individual altruism. Dawkins, in this book, explains how it works, together with reciprocation, Darwinian theory’s other main generator of altruism.
This book examines human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, providing the conceptual tools needed to study evolutionary psychology and apply them to empirical research on the human mind. The book consists of five parts. Part One introduces the foundations of evolutionary psychology. Part Two concerns human adaptations to the problems of survival. Part Three focuses on challenges of sex and mating and examines the large empirical foundation that evolutionary psychology has established in this domain. Part Four focuses on challenges of parenting and kinship. Part Five concerns problems of group living.
