Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett (2002): Human Evolutionary Psychology
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. The Evolutionary Approach to Human Behaviour 1
Natural selection 3
Box 1.1 Speciation and the evolutionary processes 4
Asking the right questions 5
Box 1.2 Reductionism vs holism 7
Approaches to the study of human behaviour 8
Box 1.3 The problem of external validity 11
Box 1.4 Human evolution 13
Towards a unified approach 14
Box 1.5 Modern human origins 16
2. Basics of Evolutionary Theory 22
Individual selection and the selfish gene 22
Box 2.1 Genomic imprinting 24
The problem of altruism 25
Box 2.2 Calculating degrees of relatedness 28
Box 2.3 Prisoner's dilemma 31
Box 2.4 Other models of cooperation 32
Box 2.5 Evolutionarily stable strategies 33
Parental investment and parent-offspring conflict 34
Sexual selection 37
Box 2.6 Female choice for exaggerated male traits 40
Box 2.7 Why do handicaps have to be so costly? 42
3. Cooperation Among Kin 45
Kin selection in humans 45
Box 3.1 Rules of thumb and kin recognition 48
Box 3.2 Adoption: an exception to kin selection? 50
Reproductive value and kin selection 52
Box 3.3 Reproductive value 53
Kinship, homicide and child abuse 56
Box 3.4 Homicide and infanticide as 'conflict assays' 59
Kinship and contingency 61
Kinship and health 64
4. Reciprocity and Sharing 67
Cooperation in humans: a difference in degree or kind? 67
Box 4.1 Fairness 69
Reciprocity and information exchange 69
Box 4.2 Competitive altruism 71
Labour exchange and bet hedging 72
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Food sharing among hunter-gatherers 72
Box 4.3 The marginal value theorem and tolerated theft 77
Box 4.4 The tragedy of the commons 85
Are humans inherently selfish? 86
Box 4.5 How 'selfish' genes lead to non-selfish people 90
5. Mate Choice and Sexual Selection 93
Universal principles of mate choice 94
Box 5.1 Anisogamy 95
Box 5.2 Lonely hearts advertisements: methodological considerations 97
Box 5.3 Evolution of pairbonding 104
Sexually selected traits 105
Box 5.4 WHR and body mass index 109
Box 5.5 The problem of concealed ovulation 112
Conditional mate choice strategies 118
Courtship 122
Fitness consequences of mate choice 126
Box 5.6 Changes in bridewealth among the Kipsigis 128
6. Life-history Constraints and Reproductive Decisions 137
Optimising family size 137
Box 6.1 Why do humans have such large brains? 139
Box 6.2 Why are human babies born so early? 141
Box 6.3 Impact of offspring production on parental survival 143
Box 6.4 Optimality models and stochastic dynamic programming 146
Box 6.5 Are !Kung birth rates low by accident rather than design? 148
Scheduling reproduction 150
For love or money 154
The demographic transition 158
The evolution of menopause 164
Box 6.6 Phenotypic correlations 165
Box 6.7 Celibacy and homosexuality 168
7. Parental Investment Strategies 171
Conflict in the womb 171
Parental biases and sibling rivalry 172
Box 7.1 Pregnancy sickness and parent-offspring conflict 173
Box 7.2 Teaching biases and peer groups 175
Box 7.3 Family environment and future reproductive strategies 176
Infanticide: scheduling investment 178
Box 7.4 Paternity certainty and sexual jealousy 182
Selective infanticide and the sex ratio 188
Box 7.5 Testing the Trivers-Willard hypothesis 192
Condition-dependent investment strategies 194
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8. Marriage and Inheritance 203
Matrilineal vs patrilineal inheritance 204
Box 8.1 Marriage and inheritance: a phylogenetic analysis 205
Box 8.2 Environmental correlates of polygyny 206
Resource competition and lineage survival 209
Box 8.3 Wealth-dependent herd management 213
Keeping it in the family: incest and marriage rules 221
Box 8.4 The Westermarck effect 222
Box 8.5 Incest and exogamy 225
Tibetan polyandry 224
Box 8.6 The member-joiner game 228
Box 8.7 Reproductive rivalry and the risk of fission 233
9. The Individual in Society 235
Kinship and kinship-naming 236
Sex biases in social organisation 240
Structure of social groups 244
Box 9.1 Self-structuring principles for societies 248
Box 9.2 Evolutionary history of society 252
The freerider problem 253
Box 9.3 How dialects control freeriders 260
Society, violence and warfare 260
Box 9.4 How not to do evolutionary analyses 263
Box 9.5 When does it pay to go berserk? 264
Box 9.6 Evolutionary explanations of rape 266
10. Cognition and the Modular Brain 270
A brief history of modularity 271
Box 10.1 Mental models: error-prone biases or simple rules that make us smart? 274
'Beyond modularity' 276
Box 10.2 'Fast-and-frugal' algorithms 278
Social exchange and cheat detection 281
Box 10.3 The Wason selection task 282
Box 10.4 Relevance theory and the selection task 286
The role of emotions 288
Box 10.5 Neurobiology of social reasoning 290
11. Social Cognition and its Development 295
Theory of mind 296
Box 11.1 Intentionality 297
Box 11.2 Theory theory 298
Development of theory of mind 300
Box 11.3 False belief task: a benchmark for theory of mind? 305
Box 11.4 Theory of mind in adults 307
When ToM fails 309
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Box 11.5 Theory of mind and clinical disorders 315
The social brain 316
12. Language 322
The evolution of language 323
Box 12.1 How many people can you talk to? 326
Box 12.2 When did speech evolve? 330
Box 12.3 The evolution of languages 333
The social functions of language 334
Box 12.4 An instinct for gossip? 337
Language and meaning 342
Cognitive underpinnings 344
Box 12.5 Motherese 345
Box 12.6 Laughter and social bonding 346
13. Cultural Evolution 351
What is culture? 352
Box 13.1 Psychological mechanisms of cultural transmission 353
Box 13.2 How memes differ from genes 356
Is culture adaptive? 361
Box 13.3 The evolution of fantasy 362
Cultural evolution under neutral selection 367
Box 13.4 The evolution of the teddy bear 368
Processes of cultural evolution 370
Box 13.5 Two examples of gene-culture co-evolution 372
How fast does culture change? 375
Box 13.6 What happens when cultural change is too slow? 377
Culture change and group selection 379
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