Haley M. Dillon

Evolutionary Psychology’s Place in Evolutionary Studies: a Tale of Promise and Challenge

The Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) Consortium and the academic programs born from its creation have been wildly successful in their initial ventures. These achievements are marked by feedback from across the EvoS campuses, the resultant scholarly work produced by participating students, and faculty collaborations spurred by exposure to the organization. The success of EvoS is probably best marked by the recent National Science Foundation grant (CCLI Award #0817337), awarded jointly to SUNY New Paltz and Binghamton University, with the purpose of expanding EvoS beyond the bounds of these two institutions. A particularly noteworthy element of many EvoS programs is the role of Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a perspective in the behavioral sciences that addresses questions of human behavior from the perspective of evolution. In light of several forms of data, including analyses of a variety of disciplines drawn on from evolutionary psychologists in their work, we argue that evolutionary psychologists may well be the most naturally interdisciplinary scholars within the behavioral sciences, making them highly appropriate for inclusion in EvoS. But our research shows not only promise regarding the relationship between EP and EvoS—challenges are raised as well. We present additional data showing that EP is currently represented disproportionately within the EvoS world—a fact that clearly shows that there are currently limitations to the potential impact of EvoS in modern academia. Scholars from other disciplines, particularly within the humanities and social sciences, seem to be missing the evolution revolution. Implications regarding how EvoS can broaden its scope to be even more powerful in its integrative scope are discussed.

A ladder of lies: the adaptive advantages of deception

The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, by Robert Trivers. Philadelphia, PA: Basic Books, 2011. ‘The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools’. Herbert Spencer Largely through historical examples and personal anecdotes, Robert Trivers builds the foundation for an evolutionary theory of self-deception and deceit in his recent book, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Beginning with the evolutionary roots and logic of our unrivaled ability to hide the truth from ourselves and others, Trivers then explores phylogenetic, psychological, anthropological, and historical examples of deception, its consequences, and its propagation. Perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of The Folly of Fools is Trivers visiting, and revisiting of the (seemingly) incompatible notions that: (1) of the most complex creatures that have ever evolved, we have a sensory system that provides us with an incredibly rich image of the world around us; yet (2) our brains swiftly bend, distort, or ignore this information. In other words, why, at the expense of valuable energetic resources, has evolution favored such sensitive truth-detecting and truth-dispensing processes? It is worth noting that this stark truth/lie dichotomy is likely a bit of an exaggeration; for example, visual perception does not have to wait for processing in visual areas of the brain to be distorted. The bending and aggregating of visual information begins as early in sensory processing as retinal ganglion cells. This relative lack of ‘truth’ in our sensory experience is, later in the text, addressed by Trivers: ‘At every single stage from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others, the mind continually acts to distort information flow...’ (p. 139).

The Creatures of Flame: Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire

Where do we come from? At this point in human history, the best evidence suggests that evolution by natural selection has been the dominant force in shaping human’s cognitive processes and physical structures (Buss 2004). In making the case that processes connected to cooking hold the true key to human origins, Richard Wrangham (2009) begins his fascinating account deep in time in the jungles of Africa. From Wrangham’s perspective, evolution has touched all aspects of what it means to be human. In particular, Wrangham evaluates a daily process, cooking, in terms of its evolutionary service. From bipedalism to our large brains, cooking has affected the very essence of what separates humans from other species. Wrangham’s major hypothesis is coined “the cooking hypothesis,” and is centered around our adapted diet of cooked food, and how the results of cooking pervade our lives—from our bodies to our minds (p. 14). Wrangham argues that the advent of fire, and cooking (as a result), gave rise to the genus Homo (p. 2).