Evolution in Mind: An Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology - Hardcover

Plotkin, Henry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674271203 ISBN 13: 9780674271203

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1998

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

About the Author

Henry Plotkin is Professor of Psychobiology and Head of the Department of Psychology at the University College in London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674271203
• ISBN 13: 9780674271203
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288