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Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature
 
 
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Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Hardcover)

by DJ Buller (Author) "Several years ago, I spent a semester's leave in London, put up in a flat off Kensington Gardens on someone else's dime ..." (more)
3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 564 pages
  • Publisher: MIT Press (15 Mar 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0262025795
  • ISBN-13: 978-0262025799
  • Product Dimensions: 24 x 16 x 4.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 679,490 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Review
""Adapting Minds" is destined to become required reading among evolutionary psychology's detractors. But, despite its flaws, it will be read with interest by evolutionary psychologists too. Buller provides a useful overview of the filed and of the current debates... Buller enables evolutionary psychologist to get back to arguing about the science." -- "Nature"

Product Description
Was human nature designed by natural selection in the Pleistocene epoch? The dominant view in evolutionary psychology holds that it was--that our psychological adaptations were designed tens of thousands of years ago to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In this provocative and lively book, David Buller examines in detail the major claims of evolutionary psychology - the paradigm popularised by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate and by David Buss in The Evolution of Desire - and rejects them all. This does not mean that we cannot apply evolutionary theory to human psychology, says Buller, but that the conventional wisdom in evolutionary psychology is misguided. Evolutionary psychology employs a kind of reverse engineering to explain the evolved design of the mind, figuring out the adaptive problems our ancestors faced and then inferring the psychological adaptations that evolved to solve them. Evolutionary psychologists claim many discoveries based on this approach, including the evolutionary rationale for human mate preferences (that males prefer nubile females and females prefer high-status males) and "discriminative parental solicitude" (the idea that stepparents abuse their stepchildren at a higher rate than genetic parents abuse their biological children). In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinises several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicised "discoveries." Drawing on a wide range of empirical research, including his own large-scale study of child abuse, he shows that none is actually supported by the evidence. Buller argues that our minds are not adapted to the Pleistocene, but, like the immune system, are continually adapting, over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes. We must move beyond the reigning orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology to reach an accurate understanding of how human psychology is influenced by evolution. When we do, Buller claims, we will abandon not only the quest for human nature but the very idea of human nature itself.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Scientific Knowledge does not occur in a cultural vacuum, 1 April 2008
By Ever Dundas (Edinburgh, Scotland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books) (Paperback)
the previous reviews are unnecessarily vitriolic. I am always bemused by people who profess to be objective and scientific who then tear something apart using emotive language and not much else. Buller makes some important points and that shouldn't be lost. Any criticism that encourages a discipline to be more reflective and to analyse their methodology and assumptions is important. However, Buller still has some failings, and a much better approach is: 'Feminism and Evolutionary Biology: Boundaries, Intersections and Frontiers' edited by Gowaty. Scientific Knowledge does not occur in a cultural vacuum. To look at the power structures isn't to negate science, but to improve it. I hope for further analysis of Evolutionary Psychology from various disciplines.
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6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Baffled bully bashes brain science, 24 Dec 2005
By Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Is "philosopher" a species doomed to extinction? There is sense of "cornered animal" in the writings of some of them. They swarm out of various aeries like locusts, buzzing and biting with the fury of blackflies. They're adept at building straw mannequins, which they then flog with unremitting fury. Their selected targets cover a wide range of science and scientists, but their focus remains on one underlying issue: from what do modern humans derive their behaviour?

We have an illustrative example here, direct from the Illinois corn land. It's one of the more focussed and polemical assaults. The victim of this bashing is "evolutionary psychology", the nascent science of the origins of the human psyche. Buller's book is a scathing attack on the work of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, who published "The Adapted Mind" in 1992 - hence his title. Buller tries to establish his credentials in the opening chapter, "Evolution", where he describes how DNA builds bodies. Part of your body, of course, resides inside your skull - the brain. It's taken philosophers some time to get behaviour out of the "heart" and into the brain. The terms "brain" and "mind" form a still uneasy relationship among scholars. While his biology is sound, Buller's scope in establishing the foundation for his thesis is far too limited.

Once he's gotten the biology behind him, Buller then lists all the sins he perceives in the work of Tooby and Cosmides and their colleagues. The author, like so many of those other locusts, wants to turn a programme of research into a philosophical "movement" or "school" similar to that of his own field. Since "Evolutionary Psychology" [EP] doesn't fit into a philosophical school, Buller tries to establish one. He argues that since some EP writers have suggested human behaviour patterns were established on the African savannah during the Pleistocene, then that is the foundation of EP. We may then pick over the evidence to determine what fails to fit and use it as ammunition against the "movement" - which is merely Buller's creation anyhow. He therefore takes a string of points made by evolutionary behaviouralists and subjects them to detailed scrutiny. While not rejecting EP out of hand, he attempts to deflesh the theme with the "death of a thousand cuts". Each suggestion offered by Tooby and Cosmides [among others] is refuted, modified, or diverted, mostly by Buller's own ideas, but sometimes with help. Women and men are different and have different motivations, Buller concedes, for example. Women, however, are less concerned with "security" than with "mating opportunities", according to this philosopher, neatly reversing the consensus.

The author, in attempting to fit his victims into a framework he's chosen for them, must build some rather awkward structures. While there are many of these in the book, the most glaring and outrageous of these is his force-fitting them into the idea of "essentialism". An old idea, with a bumpy history, "essentialism" carries many definitions. Essentially [sorry!], the idea is that somewhere resides a "basic" and "universal" example of whatever is being considered. Buller uses platinum as his example. A chemical element, platinum has properties such as density, melting point, malleability and the like. He then turns on Tooby and Cosmides again to declare their view of "human nature" is a form of "essentialism". Everything human, he says they claim, can be boiled down to a set of characteristics universal to all humanity. This idea has been considered and dismissed for evolutionary biology long ago. Why Buller attempts to shove this square peg into a circular aperture is the worst of his efforts to denounce "evolutionary psychology". It's a false comparison.

Buller's chief target, of course, is the issue of "empirical data". What is the evidence pointing to evolutionary tracks underlying our characteristics? Many critics of the roots of human behaviour have a field day dancing on the papers issued by those seeking to explain our behaviour in an evolutionary framework. Buller doesn't waste his energy in such cavorting. He simply ignores a generation of work in animal behaviour - a field he apparently hasn't heard of. For a book on "adapting" to totally ignore its modern founder, Edward O. Wilson, isn't just an oversight, it's an appalling demonstration of narrow focus. The "empirical data" Buller is so keen to disparage in humans is well covered in the journals. The various traits of many creatures, once deemed "unrelated" to humans, has been shown to closely duplicate our own. Buller, having opened his narrative with an account of DNA and its workings, simply failed to understand the implications of those processes. The result is a book that might be acclaimed for its shortsighted view clothed in a tattered cloak of contrived issues. This book is nothing more than a manual for the troops assaulting a young science. It's clear that "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" remains distasteful to some when applied to humans. That's what made it "dangerous" in the first place. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Antirational trash, 17 Jan 2008
By Michael Starks "Featherless Biped" (Milky Way) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books) (Paperback)
Bought this thinking anything from Bradford books and MIT must be good. Instead it's a boring, stupid, incompetent, antiscientific and antirational piece of closet creationist trash. Heads should roll at Bradford for this atrocity! If you must then start by reading the last chapter first as he conceals a frank statement of his antirationality til the end. I made detailed notes on it as I thought is was a serious work of science and was going to do a long page by page refutation but why bother! The praise from some Science and Nature reviewers shows they did not read it and/or have as little understanding of behavior as Buller. The positive comments from the jacket by Sterelny, Wilson, Sober and Caporael are due to the fact that they all share Buller's retro antirational blank slate views that human nature is due to our culture. The first part of the book is dull repeats of basic biology cribbed from intro texts and unrelieved by photos or drawings. Along the way there are some incredibly bizarre takes on the use of language and scientific method. Then you find an attempt to refute some well known studies of stepchild abuse. He may have a minor point here that they have some statistical flaws. Worth a short article in a prof. journal but hardly a book. As you get to the end he lets his antiscience and antirationality out in the open, telling us that regardless of whether our behaviour is innate we should not investigate it! The fact that our brain is no different from our other organs and it's functions a product of genes and evolution continues to be resisted or just ignored not only by academics but by the general public. Nevertheless the basics of our behaviour are as innate as our heartbeat and detailed evidence (for those who have trouble with the obvious) is all around us everywhere we look once our eyes are opened--just watch people doing anything or turn on the tv (or see the huge and rapidly growing scientific literature). Novices can start with Pinker's "The Blank Slate" but there are now dozens of good popular and scientific books on evolutionary psychology and hundreds of articles in the literature of philosophy, psychology, economics etc. The aricles in Buss's The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and some at the end of Gazzinaga's The Cognitive Neurosciences 3 are good starting points for the serious reader. Once you realize that psychology, philosophy, history,politics, art, music, anthropology, literature, economics, sociology, law, and science are all manifestations of our innate psychology(with the minor extensions we call culture and civilization), you can look anywhere to study our adapted mind.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Terrifyingly accurate
When I first heard about this book, I was as suspicious as everyone else, having been a strong adherent of evolutionary psychology myself. Read more
Published 8 months ago by A. Hirst

3.0 out of 5 stars Aw Shucks
Haines needs to read the introduction to this book. Buller cites Kitcher's influence upon him and that he would not be looking at E. Read more
Published 11 months ago by davdevalle

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