And...we're back!!!
From now on, sessions will take place on Thursdays at 11 am.
The next one will be led by Ludwig Krippahl, professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the New University of Lisbon, and member of CENTRIA, the research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, who proposes a discussion on the "merits and demerits" of Evolutionary Psychology.
Evolutionary
Psychology: a good framework?
Evolutionary
Psychology is an approach to understanding human behaviour on the assumption
that the mechanisms responsible for our cognition and behaviour are mainly the
result of evolution through natural selection. If this is so, then we should
find common features of human behaviour and psychology that match what would
have been selected for during our evolution (our “environment of evolutionary
adaptedness”, a term coined by John Bolby in 1969). This framework has been
used to propose evolutionary explanations in controversial topics such as rape,
intersexual violence and mate choice. For example, the proposal by Thornhill
and Palmer that rape and sexual coercion are mate choice strategies that can
increase evolutionary fitness in some cases (1) led to criticisms that
evolutionary psychology was trying to justify rape (2).
Other, better
informed, criticisms focus the assumption that our behaviour is directly linked
to specialized modules evolved to elicit some behaviour patterns instead of
resulting from more general processes that allow us to learn behaviours from
social interaction. However, this may not be an actual problem for evolutionary
psychology but just a matter of distinguishing between more plastic aspects of
our behaviour from more fundamental tendencies that result from evolutionary
pressures.
I propose a
brief discussion on the merits and demerits of evolutionary psychology based on
four papers. The first is David Buss' 1995 paper introducing evolutionary
psychology (3); the second is a criticism of evolutionary psychology by David
Buller (4); and the third and fourth are research papers on sex differences in
aggression, presenting both experimental results and evolutionary explanations
(5,6).
1-
Thornhill, Randy, and Craig T. Palmer. A natural history of rape: Biological
bases of sexual coercion. MIT press, 2001.
2- «Thornhill
and Palmer were careful not to take their analysis as any kind of moral mandate
for rape; it was, rather, an evolutionary explanation of why men rape. They
insist that their interest is in helping rather than harming women. Nonetheless
some critics understood their analysis to justify rape, and, at least, to give
some comfort to rapists» .Richardson, Robert C. Evolutionary psychology as
maladapted psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2007.
3- Buss,
David M. "Evolutionary psychology: A new paradigm for psychological
science." Psychological inquiry 6.1 (1995): 1-30.
4- Buller,
David, “Evolutionary Psychology: A Critique”, in M. Nani and M.Marraffa (eds.),
A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind,
(http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/ep.htm), 2000.
5- Archer,
John. "Does sexual selection explain human sex differences in
aggression?." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32.3-4 (2009): 249-266.
6-
Vaillancourt, Tracy, and Aanchal Sharma. "Intolerance of sexy peers:
Intrasexual competition among women." Aggressive behavior 37.6 (2011): 569-577.
The four texts can be found here
See you on Thursday at 11 am! (The room will be confirmed shortly).
