Conceptual Challenges in Evolutionary Psychology

This book offers a multi-disciplinary approach by scientists and philosophers that reveals the stamp of evolution on everyday life: how kinship unravels nurture, how family life affects the personalities we acquire, how our minds develop to negotiate social hierarchies, whether we decide to eat or not, what qualities we prefer in our sexual and marriage patterns, how we name and raise our children, how our thoughts and emotions are framed to make adaptive decisions, and methods for identifying evolved adaptations of the human life-cycle. It serves as an advanced text for students and scholars that critiques the dominating work of Buss, Cosmides and Tooby, Dennett, and Pinker. Taking the field beyond the narrow and contentious innatist--adaptionist view of the mind, it supplies a much sought-after interactional, `biopsycho-sociocultural' paradigm using a variety of evidence to converge on carefully reasoned conclusions.