Abstract
After a century of intermittent dialogue between psychology and evolutionary biology, the outline of a synthesis between the two disciplines now appears to be emerging. The current form of this synthesis, referred to here as narrow evolutionary psychology1 (Barkow et al., 1992; Buss, 1999), is the union of two specific frameworks from evolutionary biology and psychology. Specifically, narrow evolutionary psychology brings together the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology, which views evolutionary change primarily in terms of changes in gene frequency, with a nativist cognitive psychology, which views the mind as a collection of relatively autonomous, specialized processors, or modules (Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994). As I outline in more detail below, both strands of evolutionary psychology are largely adevelopmental. There is accumulating evidence, however, that both evolutionary and psychological theory must incorporate a developmental perspective in order to construct successful theory. For example, it is now well established that a major route to evolutionary change is via alterations in developmental programs. If this is indeed the case, then evolutionary change must act in accordance with the range of possible changes to these programs, which in the case of behavior and cognition involves alterations to the development of the brain. From a psychological perspective, it is increasingly clear that ontogeny plays a far more central role in shaping behavior and cognition than its marginalization in nativist cognitive psychology allows (Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997).
EDITOR’S NOTE: In this book, the term ‘narrow evolutionary psychology’ signifies the approach to evolutionary psychology developed by Cosmides, Tooby, Buss, et al. This term was chosen not to imply that this approach has an inappropriately narrow point of view, but merely to suggest that the approach adopts a narrower range of assumptions than ‘broad evolutionary psychology’ (or, just ‘evolutionary psychology’). This latter term signifies evolutionary psychology generally, practiced with any of a very broad range of assumptions possible within the general framework of evolutionary approaches to psychology. For more detail on this terminology, see the editor’s introduction, p 1
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Quartz, S.R. (2003). Toward a Developmental Evolutionary Psychology. In: Scher, S.J., Rauscher, F. (eds) Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0267-8_9
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