Critical Approaches to Evolutionary Psychology (original) (raw)
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During the past two decades, I have taught twenty-five courses that contain substantial evolutionary material. Those courses group into two distinct sets that have interlaced chronologically through the twenty years: (1) a graduate seminar in literary theory that I have taught fourteen times; and (2) eleven interdisciplinary seminars, eight for undergraduates, and three for graduate students. In this article, I describe all these courses and explain how the graduate seminar in literary theory has changed over time, as both evolutionary psychology and literary Darwinism have become more mature and sophisticated. Being committed to a biocultural perspective, I discuss the problem of advocacy, how to make sure that students understand that they are free to think out their own positions. I give examples of paper topics, describe the way students respond to evolutionary ideas, and sketch out an ideal curriculum centered on evolutionary theory as a comprehensive explanatory framework within which to synthesize research in the social sciences and the humanities.
Within contemporary philosophy of mind, to say that mind, self, and cognition are embodied is to claim that mental phenomena are constituted not only by what’s going on inside a person’s brain, but depend intimately on the person’s body beyond the brain and, more inclusively, the world in which the person is situated. The goal of this seminar is to understand the significance of this claim, and to articulate the nature of the suggested dependence relation. Acting as a dis-embodied foil for our discussion will be a narrowly circumscribed mechanistic approach to cognition which forms the core of classical cognitive science. According to this approach, thinking is a form of computation operating on symbolic representations that are physically realized solely inside the brain. Despite its commitment to physicalism, classical cognitive science epitomizes a broadly Cartesian vision of cognition as an inner, solitary, ratiocinative, detached, and general-purpose mechanism that is wedged between action and perception, and can be studied without regard to one’s body and environment. Over the past three decades, the once-dominant cognitivist paradigm has increasingly come under attack by a loosely-knit family of research programs emphasizing the embodied, embedded, extended, and/or enactive character of cognition (“4E-cognition”). Advocates of 4E-cognition span a large network of research communities (including philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, robotics, sociology, anthropology, science studies, gender studies, and informatics), taking their cues from disparate sources such as Continental philosophy (esp. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein), American Pragmatism (esp. James, Dewey, and Mead), pioneers in psychology (from Vygotsky to Gibson) and biology (from Uexküll to Varela). (At this point, one is tempted to cite Fodor’s quip that in intellectual history, everything happens twice: first as philosophy and then as cognitive science). Because of the sheer diversity of sources and evidence on which proponents of 4E-cognition have drawn, it is often difficult to determine whether they belong to one church or many. The main task in our seminar will thus be to compare and contrast the intellectual enterprises which are grouped together under the banner of 4E-cognition. In what ways do they depart from the Cartesian paradigm, and how exactly does each of them conceive of the role which embodiment and situatedness play for mind and cognition? How do they differ in their ontological commitments and methodological practices? Are there any unifying themes that go beyond a shared opposition to traditional “dis-embodied” approaches; and if so, what are they? What is the relationship between philosophical and scientific approaches to 4E-cognition more generally? Finally, how does all of this matter for our understanding of what kinds of beings we are?
The (sexual) politics of evolution: Popular controversy in the late 20th-century United Kingdom
This article outlines the major threads of controversy around the emerging subject of evolutionary psychology in the U.K. mass media during the 1990s. Much of this controversy centered on the role of evolution in shaping human gender roles and sexualities, contributing to the subject's mass appeal. This case is used to illustrate the argument that in theorizing about evolution and humans, "human nature" and "human origins" both provide a flexible resource for making arguments about how people do and should relate to one another and that such theorizing is therefore reflective of how power is held (and contested) in society. In the case of popular evolutionary psychology, shifts in the U.K. political landscape during the 1990s combined with changes in gender and sexual politics to create a situation where evolutionary theorizing about humans became more acceptable than it had been in the past. This was particularly true in left-liberal media, where a newfound compatibility between certain aspects of Darwinism and feminism created a very different space for debating gender, sexuality, and the role of human nature in today's society
Evolutionary Psychology as Public Science and Boundary Work
This paper explores the phenomena of public scientific debates, where scientific controversies are argued out in public fora such as the mass media, using the case of popular evolutionary psychology in the UK of the 1990s. An earlier quantitative analysis of the UK press coverage of the subject (Cassidy, 2005) suggested that academics associated with evolutionary psychology had been unusually active in the media at that time, particularly in association with the publication of popular science books on the subject. Previous research by Turner, by Gieryn, and by Bucchi has established the relationship between such appeals to the public domain and the establishment of scientific legitimacy and academic disciplinary boundaries. Following this work, I argue here that popular science has, in this case, provided a creative space for scientists, outside of the constraints of ordinary academic discourse, allowing them to reach across scientific boundaries in order to claim expertise in the study of human beings.
Incarnate Minds, Embodied Gods (RELG 336)
There is a growing body of evidence in the cognitive sciences (including philosophy, neuropsychology, and linguistics) that suggest there can be no thought without a brain in a body in an environment. Increasingly, the locus of human personhood is to be found not in the (disembodied) soul or mind but rather in the matter of human everydayness. The ramifications of these trends are far reaching, affecting the identity of the human being him/herself, the ontology of the divine, and the interaction there between. What implications for theology does the mind–body problem present? What might it mean to think theologically about these issues? What kinds of theological tools might we employ in exploring mind–body holism? This course will examine questions and issues such as these first by locating the mind–body problem within trajectories of Western philosophical thought and modern cognitive science, and second by exploring how theological notions of the incarnation provide a rich and robust space in which to engage—even embrace—mind–body holism. These historical, scientific, philosophical, and theological insights will finally be brought to bear on a number of contemporary social challenges posed by the mind–body problem.
'A Change of Perspective: Integrating Evolutionary Psychology Into the Historiography of Violence.'
Due to violence’s cross-cultural and trans-historical importance in human societies and its contemporary significance as a locus of social fears, it has unsurprisingly been a key topic in research on the influence of innate biological factors on human psychology and behaviour. At the same time, especially since the 1980s, historians of crime have been focusing ever more attention on the topic of small-scale, ‘everyday’ violence, taking into account both its quantitative social history (e.g., analysing homicide and assault rates) and qualitative cultural history (e.g., reconstructing attitudes toward violence). There are many points at which these two strands of inquiry – natural science and socio-cultural history – might usefully contribute to a unified analysis. However, there have so far been few efforts to consider what a natural science perspective on violence (in particular that offered by ‘evolutionary psychology’ would actually mean for historical understanding of a topic such as violence. The work that has been done in this direction has been promising, but has also revealed certain difficulties in integrating approaches. Finally, some historians have sought to position history (particularly cultural history) as a site of resistance to ‘biological’ analyses of behaviour. In this paper, I will discuss some key interdisciplinary efforts made so far and argue that there are useful ways that evolutionary psychology can assist our understanding of violence within historical time frames.