Chapter 6 Why evolution matters

Two ideas come together:

  1. mental life is the product of our physical brains, materialism
  2. biological entities like the brain are the products of natural selection.

Brain psychology is a product of evolution. It then becomes rational to see the mind as adapted to fulfill certain tasks:

  1. perceiving the world
  2. communicating with other members of our species

Misconceptions about evolution and psychology when thinking about psychology from an evolutionary point of view and here are two of them:

  1. natural selection, the forces of evolutionary adaptation cause animals to want to spread their genes
    • The confusion here is the distinction between ultimate causation and proximate causation.
    • ultimate causation: the reason why something has evolved, and that involves a creature’s history and the evolutionary course
    • proximate causation: what a creature wants
    • Argument from William James
      • Feelings like hunger has to do with sustaining our body with this sort of utility we get from food
      • Psychologically, people eat because the food tastes good
    • Evolution wires up our psychology to achieve certain ends, but our psychology’s typically ignorant as to evolution’s goals.
  2. Everything should be an adaptation, that everything we do has adaptive significance exist in order to increase the reproductive success of the animal.
    • Natural selection doesn’t directly influence behaviors, rather, natural selection evolves brains and bodies. Once they come to exist, they do all sorts of things. Some are adaptive, and others are not, and this is true for instance for hiccups or lower back pain, or self-pity.
    • our brains have evolved over a period of many millions of years, largely adapted once we became humans and separated from other species, living roughly as hunter-gatherers or at least in some sort of small group without access to alcohol or television or Facebook or all of the things in modern technology.
    • We haven’t adapted to live in a world with billions of people and so we might be ill-suited to do so. Some of the behaviors we do may actually be to our detriment today.

One interesting evolution psychology topic: which mental traits, behaviors, desires are adaptions, which of them are accidents.

  • Adaptions: color vision, most of our perceptual system, language (people are debating about this), sexual desire (but pornography exploits it)
  • Non-adaption: love of television, chocolate

  • Hard cases that nobody knows why it evolved: pleasure from art or music, female orgasm, humor, sexual violence, xenophobia [ˌzenəˈfoʊbiə]

  • Why does poop smell bad?
  • Why does chocolate taste good?
  • Why do we love our children for the most part?
  • Why do we get angry when people hit us?

  • Why don’t we feel good when somebody does us a favor?

As psychologists, we’re going to use the tools of evolutionary theory to step back and explore the nature and origins of the most intimate aspects of ourselves including our emotions.

  • Life is impossible without emotions
    • our emotions are shaped by cultural contexts. Depending on who you are and where you live, your emotions will be different, they’ll respond to different things.
    • But just as we’d expect from an evolutionary perspective, they have universal roots. There are aspects of emotions that all of us share