Jerome Barkow | Dalhousie University (original) (raw)
Papers by Jerome Barkow
Oxford University Press eBooks, 1992
Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur... more Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright© 1992 by Oxford University ...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Jun 1, 1991
Darwin, Sex and Status argues that a human sociobiology that mistakes evolutionary theory for the... more Darwin, Sex and Status argues that a human sociobiology that mistakes evolutionary theory for theories of psychology and culture is wrong, as are psychologies that could never have evolved or social sciences that posit impossible psychologies. Status develops theories of human self-awareness, cognition, and cultural capacity that are compatible with evolutionary theory. Recurring themes include: the importance of sexual selection in human evolution; our species' preoccupation with self-esteem and relative standing; the individual as an active strategist, regularly revising culturally provided information; and awareness as an impressionmanagement device. Culture is a somewhat structured information pool that itself evolves, often in ways that reduce the genetic fitness of its participants.
Current Anthropology, 1978
AI HALLOWELL is important o sociobiology for two reasons. First, he tried to turn anthropology in... more AI HALLOWELL is important o sociobiology for two reasons. First, he tried to turn anthropology in a biosocial direction at a time when our field was still celebrating its victory over the bad biology of social Darwinism by discarding all consideration of the evolution of human behavior. ...
Journal of Bioeconomics
The Editors wish to thank all the referees of published articles in Vol. 1, 1999 & Vol. 2... more The Editors wish to thank all the referees of published articles in Vol. 1, 1999 & Vol. 2, 2000 as well as referees who provided comments to papers they recommended rejection. We are most grateful to our referees who gave so generously of their time to provide constructive and excellent comments for authors who submitted papers to our journal.
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 1976
The Psychology of Social Status, 2014
ABSTRACT
The Frontiers Collection, 2013
ABSTRACT
An explicit theory of sociocultural universals is essential for a nomothetic sociocultural anthro... more An explicit theory of sociocultural universals is essential for a nomothetic sociocultural anthropology. For lack of such a theory, social scientists in general and ethnographers in particular have little choice but to assume that home-host cultural similarities are universals requiring little analysis but that differences must be accounted for. Social scientists also cope with this theoretical lack by relying on a logically endless loop of social constructionism. Evolutionary psychology provides a way to buttress both the study of cultural differences and the approach of social constructionism. EP
… psychology and the generation of culture, 1992
1 The Psychological Foundations of Culture JOHN TOOBY AND LEDA COSMIDES INTRODUCTION: THE UNITY O... more 1 The Psychological Foundations of Culture JOHN TOOBY AND LEDA COSMIDES INTRODUCTION: THE UNITY OF SCIENCE One of the strengths of scientific inquiry is that it can progress with any mixture of empiri-cism, intuition, and formal theory that suits the convenience ...
Review of General Psychology, 2012
Popular culture is a subcategory of culture. Today, mass and new media appear to be interfering w... more Popular culture is a subcategory of culture. Today, mass and new media appear to be interfering with the evolved mechanisms that permit the acquisition and editing of culture. We know surprisingly little about these cognitive attentional processes that enable the information acquisition and editing packed into the term “cultural transmission.” It was Michael Chance who first concluded that we attend to and learn preferentially from those high in status. For Chance, high status based on fear leads to agonistic attention and a constricted type of learning, while hedonic attention based on respect permits much broader learning possibilities. If Chance's theories are supported, then it would follow that much of the current unpredictability of popular culture and culture change in general reflects the replacement of family and community high-status figures by influential media celebrities, thereby damaging the transmission of local culture. Chance's approach would also explain wh...
The Adapted Mind is an edited volume of original, commissioned papers centered on the complex, ev... more The Adapted Mind is an edited volume of original, commissioned papers centered on the complex, evolved psychological mechanisms that generate human behavior and culture. It has two goals: The first is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology to a wider scientific audience. Evolutionary psychology is simply psychology that is informed by the additional knowledge that evolutionary biology has to offer, in the expectation that understanding the process that designed the human mind will advance the discovery ofitsarchitecture. It unites modem evolutionary biology with the cognitive revolution in a way that has the potential to draw together all of the disparate branches of psychology into a single organized system of knowledge. The chapters that follow, for example, span topics from perception, language, and reasoning to sex, pregnancy sickness, and play. The second goal of this volume is to clarify how this new field, by focusing on the evolved information-processing mechanisms that comprise the human mind, supplies the necessary connection between evolutionary biology and the complex, irreducible social and cultural phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians. Culture is not causeless and disembodied. It is generated in rich and intricate ways by information-processing mechanisms situated in human minds. These mechanisms are, in turn, the elaborately sculpted product of the evolutionary process. Therefore, to understand the relationship between biology and culture one must first understand the architecture of our evolved psychology (Barkow, 1973, 1980a, 1989a; Tooby & Cosmides, 1989). Past attempts to leapfrog the psychological-to apply evolutionary biology directly to human social life-have for this reason not always been successful. Evolutionary psychology constitutes the inissing causal link needed to reconcile these oRen warring perspectives (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987). With evolutionary psychology in place, cross-connecting biology to the social sciences, it is now possible to provide conceptually integrated analyses of specific questions: analyses that move step by step, integrating evolutionary biology with psychology, and psychology with social and cultural phenomena (Barkow, 1989a; Tooby & Cosmides, 1989). Each chapter in this volume is a case study of the difficult task of integrating across these disciplinary boundaries. Although it has been said that the first expressions of new and better approaches often look worse than the latest and most elaborated expressions of older and more deficient ones, we think these chapters are
Oxford University Press eBooks, 1992
Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur... more Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright© 1992 by Oxford University ...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Jun 1, 1991
Darwin, Sex and Status argues that a human sociobiology that mistakes evolutionary theory for the... more Darwin, Sex and Status argues that a human sociobiology that mistakes evolutionary theory for theories of psychology and culture is wrong, as are psychologies that could never have evolved or social sciences that posit impossible psychologies. Status develops theories of human self-awareness, cognition, and cultural capacity that are compatible with evolutionary theory. Recurring themes include: the importance of sexual selection in human evolution; our species' preoccupation with self-esteem and relative standing; the individual as an active strategist, regularly revising culturally provided information; and awareness as an impressionmanagement device. Culture is a somewhat structured information pool that itself evolves, often in ways that reduce the genetic fitness of its participants.
Current Anthropology, 1978
AI HALLOWELL is important o sociobiology for two reasons. First, he tried to turn anthropology in... more AI HALLOWELL is important o sociobiology for two reasons. First, he tried to turn anthropology in a biosocial direction at a time when our field was still celebrating its victory over the bad biology of social Darwinism by discarding all consideration of the evolution of human behavior. ...
Journal of Bioeconomics
The Editors wish to thank all the referees of published articles in Vol. 1, 1999 & Vol. 2... more The Editors wish to thank all the referees of published articles in Vol. 1, 1999 & Vol. 2, 2000 as well as referees who provided comments to papers they recommended rejection. We are most grateful to our referees who gave so generously of their time to provide constructive and excellent comments for authors who submitted papers to our journal.
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 1976
The Psychology of Social Status, 2014
ABSTRACT
The Frontiers Collection, 2013
ABSTRACT
An explicit theory of sociocultural universals is essential for a nomothetic sociocultural anthro... more An explicit theory of sociocultural universals is essential for a nomothetic sociocultural anthropology. For lack of such a theory, social scientists in general and ethnographers in particular have little choice but to assume that home-host cultural similarities are universals requiring little analysis but that differences must be accounted for. Social scientists also cope with this theoretical lack by relying on a logically endless loop of social constructionism. Evolutionary psychology provides a way to buttress both the study of cultural differences and the approach of social constructionism. EP
… psychology and the generation of culture, 1992
1 The Psychological Foundations of Culture JOHN TOOBY AND LEDA COSMIDES INTRODUCTION: THE UNITY O... more 1 The Psychological Foundations of Culture JOHN TOOBY AND LEDA COSMIDES INTRODUCTION: THE UNITY OF SCIENCE One of the strengths of scientific inquiry is that it can progress with any mixture of empiri-cism, intuition, and formal theory that suits the convenience ...
Review of General Psychology, 2012
Popular culture is a subcategory of culture. Today, mass and new media appear to be interfering w... more Popular culture is a subcategory of culture. Today, mass and new media appear to be interfering with the evolved mechanisms that permit the acquisition and editing of culture. We know surprisingly little about these cognitive attentional processes that enable the information acquisition and editing packed into the term “cultural transmission.” It was Michael Chance who first concluded that we attend to and learn preferentially from those high in status. For Chance, high status based on fear leads to agonistic attention and a constricted type of learning, while hedonic attention based on respect permits much broader learning possibilities. If Chance's theories are supported, then it would follow that much of the current unpredictability of popular culture and culture change in general reflects the replacement of family and community high-status figures by influential media celebrities, thereby damaging the transmission of local culture. Chance's approach would also explain wh...
The Adapted Mind is an edited volume of original, commissioned papers centered on the complex, ev... more The Adapted Mind is an edited volume of original, commissioned papers centered on the complex, evolved psychological mechanisms that generate human behavior and culture. It has two goals: The first is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evolutionary psychology to a wider scientific audience. Evolutionary psychology is simply psychology that is informed by the additional knowledge that evolutionary biology has to offer, in the expectation that understanding the process that designed the human mind will advance the discovery ofitsarchitecture. It unites modem evolutionary biology with the cognitive revolution in a way that has the potential to draw together all of the disparate branches of psychology into a single organized system of knowledge. The chapters that follow, for example, span topics from perception, language, and reasoning to sex, pregnancy sickness, and play. The second goal of this volume is to clarify how this new field, by focusing on the evolved information-processing mechanisms that comprise the human mind, supplies the necessary connection between evolutionary biology and the complex, irreducible social and cultural phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians. Culture is not causeless and disembodied. It is generated in rich and intricate ways by information-processing mechanisms situated in human minds. These mechanisms are, in turn, the elaborately sculpted product of the evolutionary process. Therefore, to understand the relationship between biology and culture one must first understand the architecture of our evolved psychology (Barkow, 1973, 1980a, 1989a; Tooby & Cosmides, 1989). Past attempts to leapfrog the psychological-to apply evolutionary biology directly to human social life-have for this reason not always been successful. Evolutionary psychology constitutes the inissing causal link needed to reconcile these oRen warring perspectives (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987). With evolutionary psychology in place, cross-connecting biology to the social sciences, it is now possible to provide conceptually integrated analyses of specific questions: analyses that move step by step, integrating evolutionary biology with psychology, and psychology with social and cultural phenomena (Barkow, 1989a; Tooby & Cosmides, 1989). Each chapter in this volume is a case study of the difficult task of integrating across these disciplinary boundaries. Although it has been said that the first expressions of new and better approaches often look worse than the latest and most elaborated expressions of older and more deficient ones, we think these chapters are
JBIS, 2022
For interstellar messages that we have sent so far, the underlying assumption in schemes for enco... more For interstellar messages that we have sent so far, the underlying assumption in schemes for encoding/ decoding is that the recipients are fundamentally similar to ourselves. But there have been criticisms of this assumption of equivalence approach because intelligence even on our own planet takes many different forms, and these forms are influenced by the senses of the individual. Jonas and Jonas (1976) describe hypothetical extraterrestrial species with alternate senses inspired by Earth animals. This current work further expands on the capability of these extraterrestrial species to understand messages that we would send. A continuum of similarity to humans is proposed, from species whose senses do not allow them to develop radio technology, to species who do but whose senses do not allow them to understand 2D images, to species with senses only slightly different than our own. Implications for message construction are considered, and recommendations for future message content are given. These recommendations include redundant sections with questions that require different senses (similar to how a person can see a number in a colorblind test only if they are not colorblind). Replies would tell us the sensory modalities we should be addressing with this particular extraterrestrial intelligence. Another recommendation would be to use information about a targeted planet to determine the most probable sense of inhabitants, and tailor messages to that sense.
There is no field called "evolutionary" or "Darwinian" psychological anthropology, though the cal... more There is no field called "evolutionary" or "Darwinian" psychological anthropology, though the call for such a field is now decades old (Barkow, 1973). Its absence is remarkable. In the past, when anthropologists became aware of a powerful theory of human psychology that claimed universality, the encounter was memorable. Even today, Freudian thought is a strong influence in psychological anthropology. Evolutionary psychology is not, despite the great ferment, controversy, and enthusiasm it has produced in biology and psychology, despite its rapidly multiplying successes, its claim to be transcultural, and its impressive scope. The last phrases merits emphasis: the evolutionary psychology literature ranges from landscape aesthetics to sibling rivalry, from sex differences to ethnocentrism, from Freudian defense mechanisms i to social stratification to gossip to time preferences. ii The explanation for its odd lack of impact on psychological anthropology no doubt has to do with the history and traditions of anthropology itself.