Product Description

Was human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was--that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology - the paradigm popularised by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire - and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided. Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. Evolutionary psychologists claim many discoveries based on this approach, including the evolutionary rationale for human mate preferences (that males prefer nubile females and females prefer high-status males) and "discriminative parental solicitude" (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children). In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinises several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicised "discoveries." Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence. Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #843361 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 564 pages

Review
""Adapting Minds" is destined to become required reading among evolutionary psychology's detractors. But, despite its flaws, it will be read with interest by evolutionary psychologists too. Buller provides a useful overview of the filed and of the current debates... Buller enables evolutionary psychologist to get back to arguing about the science." -- "Nature"

Customer Reviews

Scientific Knowledge does not occur in a cultural vacuum
the previous reviews are unnecessarily vitriolic. I am always bemused by people who profess to be objective and scientific who then tear something apart using emotive language and not much else. Buller makes some important points and that shouldn't be lost. Any criticism that encourages a discipline to be more reflective and to analyse their methodology and assumptions is important. However, Buller still has some failings, and a much better approach is: 'Feminism and Evolutionary Biology: Boundaries, Intersections and Frontiers' edited by Gowaty. Scientific Knowledge does not occur in a cultural vacuum. To look at the power structures isn't to negate science, but to improve it. I hope for further analysis of Evolutionary Psychology from various disciplines.

Terrifyingly accurate
When I first heard about this book, I was as suspicious as everyone else, having been a strong adherent of evolutionary psychology myself. After reading plenty of Pinker, Cosmides, Tooby and all the rest, I was absolutely convinced that their theories and experiments were the beginning of a long needed paradigm shift in psychology and philosophy, away from the misguided anti-nativist empiricism of old.

Whilst the old anti-nativist empiricists still stand as misguided, I can see now that contemporary evolutionary psychology is not much better. Buller completely tears apart all the staggering assumptions made by evolutionary psychologists - assumptions I had never even thought about, never mind attempted to question... from essentialist misunderstandings about "normal" people and definitions of species, to the arguments behind universal developmental programs and the assumed entitlements to postulate universal mental modules, Buller shows how psychological adaptations simply could not have evolved in the way evolutionary psychologists claim.

I didn't want to believe any of this. It's not nice to have a massive array of foundational theories ripped up and disposed of, especially when you believed them so strongly that they became part of the way you viewed both yourself and your friends and family. I suspect many people are in this position, and find it psychologically difficult to challenge these assumptions. If you are interested in the truth, however, then you will put up with these sorts of problems. I'm not arguing that everyone should take Buller's word as truth - not everything he says is strictly accurate (in fact numerous times whilst reading this I thought he made some terrible arguments) - but he seems to be generally right, and when he is generally right, he is right about the most important points he is trying to make.

I want to get one misunderstanding clarified - Buller is very well read in evolutionary theory and evolutionary biology, and he is a strong supporter of both. He is not by any means anti-evolution. He is only criticising the specific assumptions made by evolutionary psychologists. In an environment where many academics and popular science readers are taking the theories of evolutionary psychologists as gospel truth, this book could not be more important. I only hope that in supporting Buller I do not get lynched by a large angry mob. If only that angry mob would actually read the book properly and not dismiss his views out of hand, then we would finally be able to try and develop a new method of conducting evolutionarily well-informed psychological research.

Baffled bully bashes brain science
Is "philosopher" a species doomed to extinction? There is sense of "cornered animal" in the writings of some of them. They swarm out of various aeries like locusts, buzzing and biting with the fury of blackflies. They're adept at building straw mannequins, which they then flog with unremitting fury. Their selected targets cover a wide range of science and scientists, but their focus remains on one underlying issue: from what do modern humans derive their behaviour?

We have an illustrative example here, direct from the Illinois corn land. It's one of the more focussed and polemical assaults. The victim of this bashing is "evolutionary psychology", the nascent science of the origins of the human psyche. Buller's book is a scathing attack on the work of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, who published "The Adapted Mind" in 1992 - hence his title. Buller tries to establish his credentials in the opening chapter, "Evolution", where he describes how DNA builds bodies. Part of your body, of course, resides inside your skull - the brain. It's taken philosophers some time to get behaviour out of the "heart" and into the brain. The terms "brain" and "mind" form a still uneasy relationship among scholars. While his biology is sound, Buller's scope in establishing the foundation for his thesis is far too limited.

Once he's gotten the biology behind him, Buller then lists all the sins he perceives in the work of Tooby and Cosmides and their colleagues. The author, like so many of those other locusts, wants to turn a programme of research into a philosophical "movement" or "school" similar to that of his own field. Since "Evolutionary Psychology" [EP] doesn't fit into a philosophical school, Buller tries to establish one. He argues that since some EP writers have suggested human behaviour patterns were established on the African savannah during the Pleistocene, then that is the foundation of EP. We may then pick over the evidence to determine what fails to fit and use it as ammunition against the "movement" - which is merely Buller's creation anyhow. He therefore takes a string of points made by evolutionary behaviouralists and subjects them to detailed scrutiny. While not rejecting EP out of hand, he attempts to deflesh the theme with the "death of a thousand cuts". Each suggestion offered by Tooby and Cosmides [among others] is refuted, modified, or diverted, mostly by Buller's own ideas, but sometimes with help. Women and men are different and have different motivations, Buller concedes, for example. Women, however, are less concerned with "security" than with "mating opportunities", according to this philosopher, neatly reversing the consensus.

The author, in attempting to fit his victims into a framework he's chosen for them, must build some rather awkward structures. While there are many of these in the book, the most glaring and outrageous of these is his force-fitting them into the idea of "essentialism". An old idea, with a bumpy history, "essentialism" carries many definitions. Essentially [sorry!], the idea is that somewhere resides a "basic" and "universal" example of whatever is being considered. Buller uses platinum as his example. A chemical element, platinum has properties such as density, melting point, malleability and the like. He then turns on Tooby and Cosmides again to declare their view of "human nature" is a form of "essentialism". Everything human, he says they claim, can be boiled down to a set of characteristics universal to all humanity. This idea has been considered and dismissed for evolutionary biology long ago. Why Buller attempts to shove this square peg into a circular aperture is the worst of his efforts to denounce "evolutionary psychology". It's a false comparison.

Buller's chief target, of course, is the issue of "empirical data". What is the evidence pointing to evolutionary tracks underlying our characteristics? Many critics of the roots of human behaviour have a field day dancing on the papers issued by those seeking to explain our behaviour in an evolutionary framework. Buller doesn't waste his energy in such cavorting. He simply ignores a generation of work in animal behaviour - a field he apparently hasn't heard of. For a book on "adapting" to totally ignore its modern founder, Edward O. Wilson, isn't just an oversight, it's an appalling demonstration of narrow focus. The "empirical data" Buller is so keen to disparage in humans is well covered in the journals. The various traits of many creatures, once deemed "unrelated" to humans, has been shown to closely duplicate our own. Buller, having opened his narrative with an account of DNA and its workings, simply failed to understand the implications of those processes. The result is a book that might be acclaimed for its shortsighted view clothed in a tattered cloak of contrived issues. This book is nothing more than a manual for the troops assaulting a young science. It's clear that "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" remains distasteful to some when applied to humans. That's what made it "dangerous" in the first place. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]