In this Book
- On Our Minds: How Evolutionary Psychology Is Reshaping the Nature versus Nurture Debate
- Book
- 2004
- Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
summary
There is no question more fundamental to human existence than that posed by the nature-versus-nurture debate. For much of the past century, it was widely believed that there was no essential human nature and that people could be educated or socialized to thrive in almost any imaginable culture. Today, that orthodoxy is being directly and forcefully challenged by a new science of the mind: evolutionary psychology. Like the theory of evolution itself, the implications of evolutionary psychology are provocative and unsettling. Rather than viewing the human mind as a mysterious black box or a blank slate, evolutionary psychologists see it as a physical organ that has evolved to process certain types of information in certain ways that enables us to thrive only in certain types of cultures.In On Our Minds, Eric M. Gander examines all sides of the public debate between evolutionary psychologists and their critics. Paying particularly close attention to the popular science writings of Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould, Gander traces the history of the controversy, succinctly summarizes the claims and theories of the evolutionary psychologists, dissects the various arguments deployed by each side, and considers in detail the far-reaching ramifications—social, cultural, and political—of this debate. Gander's lucid and highly readable account concludes that evolutionary psychology now holds the potential to answer our oldest and most profound moral and philosophical questions, fundamentally changing our self–perception as a species.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Part One: The Evolution of a Controversy
- Part Two: The Blind Watchmaker Meets the Scatterbrained Computer Programmer
- Chapter Six: What Is the Mind?
- pp. 116-131
- Part Three: The Nature of Human Cultures
- Chapter Eight: The Benefits of Hardwiring
- pp. 155-173
- Conclusion: Brave New World Revisited–Again
- pp. 224-236
- Afterword: Writing on The Blank Slate
- pp. 237-250
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 279-282
Additional Information
ISBN
9780801881381
Related ISBN(s)
9780801873874
MARC Record
OCLC
70735832
Pages
312
Launched on MUSE
2013-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No