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Thesis ID: CBB001561977

Darwinizing Human Nature: Methodological Issues in Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology (2003)

Driscoll, Catherine Mary (Author)

Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
Stich, Stephen P.

Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Stich, Stephen P.
Physical Details: 290 pp.
Language: English

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This dissertation is designed to discuss central issues raised by two of the evolutionary behavioral sciences, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Both sciences purport to be able to explain the origins of human behavioral and cognitive adaptations respectively and give us some insight into human nature. My purpose is to go some way towards determining how well these two sciences do as means of determining human evolutionary origins, both by examining some of the central issues that they face, and by examining several case studies in which their methods have been applied to specific human behaviors. Sociobiology in particular has had a bad reputation, at least in part because s few of its proponents have used the project as a forum for pushing conservative social values. It has attracted a lot of criticism: in particular for being unwarrantedly adaptationist, and for addressing its explanations at behavior, rather than at psychology. Evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, has been better received; there is some belief that it is a more appropriate, less behaviorist project than sociobiology. I spend the first part of the dissertation examining some of these criticisms; however, I believe the charge adaptationism to be founded on the practices of individuals rather than being a central commitment of the project; I also conclude that the claim that behaviors cannot be adaptations to be unfounded. Furthermore, far from being a better project than sociobiology, I conclude that evolutionary psychology relies on a flawed central commitment to universal domain-specificity to establish its psychological conclusions, and its models rely on an unanalyzed notion of good design. In the second part of the dissertation I evaluate three well known and controversial studies that use sociobiological or evolutionary psychological methods to try to account for some bard to understand elements of human behavior: namely infanticide, art and altruism, and rape. Although the quality of this work is rather mixed, I conclude there is reason to think that natural selection is implicated to some degree in the origins of some of these behaviors.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2004): 3324. UMI order no. 3105442.

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