Social evolution and social influence: selfishness, deception, self-deception. A scholarly paper by Mario F. Heilmann, University of California at Los Angeles.
This is a talk on the grand view of the human sciences, presented to CHEIRON, the European Society for the History of the Behavioural Sciences and reprinted in its Newsletter, Spring 1988, pp. 7-12.
Spencer is so grandiose that it is hard to summarize his ideas, yet he was one of the most influential thinkers in nineteenth-century Britain, and his ideas were an inspiration around the world. His version of evolution was utterly generalised in all the ways Darwin tried to be circumspect. The organic analogies which Spencer developed are the foundation-stones for the widespread idea of functionalism across the biomedical and human sciences, extending to architecture, systems theory, cybernetics and information theory. The essay was reprinted in a collection from the journal: G. Marsden, ed., Victorian Values. Longman, 1990.
This essay moves from pure ideology about changing human nature to using biofeedback as a transitional topic to spelling out the desiderata for treating human nature as a historical project.
Socio-political overview of the circumstances leading to the development of Evolutionary Psychology as distinct from Sociobiology, by Val Dusek. This web page is associated with the Science-as-Culture mailing list and journal.
Ketelaar and Ellis have provided a remarkably clear and succinct statement of Lakatosian philosophy of science and have also argued compellingly that evolutionary theory fills the Lakatosian criteria of a progressivity.
When it comes to emotions men and women are equally expressive, but men display most of their joy, disgust or other sentiments in the lower left quadrant of their face. Women, on the other hand, show their emotions across their entire countenance.
Article describes how the stresses and strains that afflict humans are evident in baboon societies. Also suggests that both species share the long-term health effects.
Abed, Riadh T and de Pauw, Karel W (1999) An Evolutionary Hypothesis for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Psychological Immune System?. Behavioural Neurology 11:245-250.
This paper by John Stewart uses an evolutionary worldview to derive an ethical system that will require humanity to develop the psychological capacity to transcend the dictates of our biological and cultural past.
The menfolk of the Meriam, a people who live on islands off the northeast tip of Australia, spend their time spear-fishing and turtle-hunting, but are they really fishing for compliments?
By around the age of 4 years, children can work out what people might know, think or believe based on what they say or do. This is called mindreading, which builds upon the human ability to infer the intentions of others.
The model of the human neurocognitive architecture proposed by evolutionary psychologists is based on the presumption that the demands of hunter-gatherer life generated a vast array of cognitive adaptations. Here we present an alternative model.
These results support the inference of significant behavioral differences between Neanderthals and the Skhul/Qafzeh hominids and indicate that a significant shift in human manipulative behaviors was associated with the earliest stages of the emergence of modern humans.
Any decrease in average menarcheal age during the past 20-30 years has been small (almost certainly less than six months), particularly when compared with the reduction of a year or more that occurred in many European countries between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries.