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Nov 2007
ISBN 0262182602
232 pp.
13 illus.
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Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology
Robert C. Richardson

Human beings, like other organisms, are the products of evolution. Like other organisms, we exhibit traits that are the product of natural selection. Our psychological capacities are evolved traits as much as are our gait and posture. This much few would dispute. Evolutionary psychology goes further than this, claiming that our psychological traits-including a wide variety of traits, from mate preference and jealousy to language and reason-can be understood as specific adaptations to ancestral Pleistocene conditions. In Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology, Robert Richardson takes a critical look at evolutionary psychology by subjecting its ambitious and controversial claims to the same sorts of methodological and evidential constraints that are broadly accepted within evolutionary biology.

Table of Contents
 Contents
 Preface and Acknowledgements
 Introduction: Man's Place in Nature
1 The Ambitions of Evolutionary Psychology
2 Reverse Engineering and Adaptation
3 The Dynamics of Adaptation
4 Recovering Evolutionary History
5 Idle Darwinizing
 Notes
 References
 Index
 
 


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