IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB001200846

The Cognitive Fictions and Functions of Gender in Evolutionary Psychology and Poststructuralist Theory (2013)

Carluccio, Dana (Author)

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Volume: 38
Pages: 431--457

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Psychology Discipline formation Evolutionary psychology Mind and body Philosophy Science and gender Darwinism Zoology 20th century, late 19th century United States Brooks, William Keith

This essay brings this blind spot into focus by analyzing the role of tendency in post-Darwinian debates over mind and body. Tendencies certainly predate Darwinian evolutionary theory, but they play a unique role in facilitating that theory's application to the human mind. I explore that role here by considering both a very early and a very recent moment in the history of that application. First, I turn to nineteenth-century American zoologist William Keith Brooks, who helped establish evolutionary psychology as an academic and popular program when he published The Condition of Women from a Zoölogical Point of View (1879), a two-part essay arguing that men and women tend toward particular forms of intellect. Next, I turn to a 1990s exchange between evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss and philosopher of science David J. Buller, which examines whether men and women tend to have different experiences of romantic jealousy. The obsolescence of Brooks's theory makes this comparison possible and productive: it allows us to disregard the content of his conclusions and focus instead on the tendential reasoning by which he drew them.

...More

Description A comparison between evolutionary psychology in the 19th century and in the 20th century.

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001200846/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Cassidy, Angela; (2007)
The (Sexual) Politics of Evolution: Popular Controversy in the Late 20th-Century United Kingdom (/isis/citation/CBB000700410/)

Article Shields, Stephanie A.; (2007)
Passionate Men, Emotional Women: Psychology Constructs Gender Difference in the Late 19th Century (/isis/citation/CBB000700405/)

Book Michael Ruse; Robert J. Richards; (2017)
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics (/isis/citation/CBB838749899/)

Thesis Root, Michael J.; (2005)
Boundary-Work in United States Psychology: A Study of Three Interdisciplinary Programs (/isis/citation/CBB001560758/)

Article Wegener, Mai; (2009)
Der psychophysische Parallelismus. Zu einer Diskursfigur im Feld der wissenschaftlichen Umbrüche des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts (/isis/citation/CBB000933303/)

Thesis Malane, Rachel Ann; (2004)
“Sex in Mind”: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences (/isis/citation/CBB001562029/)

Article Karen Harvey; (2019)
Epochs of Embodiment: Men, Women and the Material Body (/isis/citation/CBB438222312/)

Article Valentina Mann; (2022)
Mind and knowledge in the early thought of Franz Boas, 1887–1904 (/isis/citation/CBB798978120/)

Article Nash, Richard; (2015)
William Keith Brooks and the Naturalist's Defense of Darwinism in the Late-Nineteenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB001510220/)

Book Jones, Jeannette Eileen; Sharp, Patrick B.; (2010)
Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality (/isis/citation/CBB001033825/)

Book Hamlin, Kimberly Ann; (2014)
From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (/isis/citation/CBB001422038/)

Thesis Hamlin, Kimberly Ann; (2007)
Beyond Adam's Rib: How Darwinian Evolutionary Theory Redefined Gender andInfluenced American Feminist Thought, 1870--1920 (/isis/citation/CBB001560667/)

Article Schuller, Kyla; (2012)
Taxonomies of Feeling: The Epistemology of Sentimentalism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Racial and Sexual Science (/isis/citation/CBB001201815/)

Book Numbers, Ronald L.; Stenhouse, John; (1999)
Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (/isis/citation/CBB000110621/)

Article Faye, Cathy; (2012)
American Social Psychology: Examining the Contours of the 1970s Crisis (/isis/citation/CBB001221634/)

Article Alexandra Rutherford; (2017)
“Making better use of U.S. women” Psychology, Sex Roles, and Womanpower in post-WWII America (/isis/citation/CBB508833050/)

Article Merchant, Carolyn; (2010)
George Bird Grinnell's Audubon Society: Bridging the Gender Divide in Conservation (/isis/citation/CBB001021162/)

Article Adelman, George; (2010)
The Neurosciences Research Program at MIT and the Beginning of the Modern Field of Neuroscience (/isis/citation/CBB001034941/)

Thesis Driscoll, Catherine Mary; (2003)
Darwinizing Human Nature: Methodological Issues in Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology (/isis/citation/CBB001561977/)

Article De Vos, Jan; (2010)
From Milgram to Zimbardo: The Double Birth of Postwar Psychology/Psychologization (/isis/citation/CBB001035645/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}