[ AFFILIATION RELATION: Joining the crowd may be an evolutionarily productive practice. And people will often band together by whatever means available. In a 2001 study, for example, John Tooby and colleagues concluded that no part of the human cognition is designed to encode race as a group identifier (not the case with age or gender). During humans' evolutionary history, the researchers reasoned, people did not often encounter other races. As they showed using team jerseys, categorizing by race is a byproduct of the actual objective set by natural selection: categorizing by coalitional affiliation. (Kurzban et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci, 98:15387-92, 2001.) ]
Perhaps music serves as a mating display or a means of coordinating social interactions. Maybe religiosity serves as a group-level adaptation, allowing some to persevere over others. Some researchers, known generally as evolutionary psychologists, seek rigorous ways to investigate such complex human traits. In so doing, they’re pushing the boundaries of scientific explanation and addressing aspects of human behavior once believed to be off-limits for scientists.
As a field, evolutionary psychology (EP) has the difficult, and some say untenable, mission of discerning whether complex human qualities–everything from sexual attraction to language–are adaptations honed through natural selection or just nonadaptive byproducts of a uniquely human collection of cognitive systems.
Born roughly 30 years ago from the study of adaptation and altruism by George Williams, W.D. Hamilton, Robert Trivers, Edward O. Wilson, and others, as well as from advances in cognitive science, primatology, and hunter-gatherer studies, EP gained further recognition with 1992’s The Adapted Mind,1 an anthology that explored culture’s evolutionary foundations, including language, parental care, environmental aesthetics, and sex. Wilson, now a Harvard professor emeritus, identified the field in the 1975 book, Sociobiology.2 He defines EP as “the study of the biological basis of all forms of social behavior in human beings.” He suggests that scientists dispense with the name sociobiology and call it EP, to skirt criticisms that the field championed racism and genetic determinism.
EP, though gaining acceptance, remains divisive. Proponents and practitioners face the challenge of empirically and methodologically using evolutionary history and rationale to decipher the motivations behind distinct human behaviors–to show how they might be adaptations hard-wired in the human brain. MORE
Food for the pleasure center of the brain
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