Buss - The handbook of evolutionary psychologynVolume 1 Foundations, Foundations

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Handbook of evolutionary psychology (Hoboken, N.J.)

The handbook of evolutionary psychology / edited by David M. Buss. 2nd edition.

volumes cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: Volume 1. Foundations volume 2. Application.

ISBN 978-1-118-75588-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-118-76399-5 (set) ISBN 978-1-118-75602-7 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-118-75597-6 (epub)

1. Evolutionary psychology. 2. Human evolution. I. Buss, David M. II. Title.

BF698.95.H36 2016

155.7dc23

2015008090

To Charles Darwin

Steven Pinker

For many years after I decided to become a psychologist I was seriously frustrated by my chosen field, and fantasized about a day when it would satisfy the curiosity that first led me to devote my professional life to studying the mind. As with many psychology students, the frustration began with my first class, in which the instructor performed the ritual that begins every Introduction to Psychology course: disabusing students of the expectation that they would learn about any of the topics that attracted them to the subject. Forget about love and hate, and family dynamics, and jokes and their relation to the unconscious, they said. Psychology was a rigorous science that investigated quantifiable laboratory phenomena; it had nothing to do with self-absorption on an analyst's couch or the prurient topics of daytime talk shows. Accordingly, the course confined itself to perception, which meant psychophysics, and learning, which meant rats, and the brain, which meant neurons, and memory, which meant nonsense syllables, and intelligence, which meant IQ tests, and personality, which meant personality tests.

When I proceeded to advanced courses, they only deepened the disappointment, by revealing that the psychology canon was a laundry list of unrelated phenomena. The course on perception began with Weber's law and Fechner's law and proceeded to an assortment of illusions and aftereffects familiar to readers of cereal boxes. There was no there thereno conception of what perception is or of what it is for. Cognitive psychology, too, consisted of laboratory curiosities analyzed in terms of dichotomies like serial/parallel, discrete/analog, and top-down/bottom-up (inspiring Alan Newell's famous jeremiad You can't play twenty questions with nature and win). To this day, social psychology is driven not by systematic questions about the nature of sociality in the human animal but by a collection of situations in which people behave in strange ways.

But the biggest frustration was that psychology seemed to lack any sense of explanation. Like the talk-show guest on Monty Python's Flying Circus whose theory of the brontosaurus was that the brontosaurus is skinny at one end; much, much thicker in the middle; and skinny at the other end, psychologists were content to explain a phenomenon by redescribing it. A student rarely enjoyed the flash of insight that tapped deeper principles to show why something had to be the way it is, as opposed to some other way it could have been.

My gold standard for a scientific explanation was set when I was a graduate studentnot by anything I learned in graduate school, mind you, but by a plumber who came to fix the pipes in my dilapidated apartment and elucidated why they had sprung a leak. Water, he explained, obeys Newton's second law. Water is dense. Water is incompressible. When you shut off a tap, a large incompressible mass moving at high speed has to decelerate quickly. This imparts a big force to the pipes, like a car slamming into a wall, which eventually damages the threads and causes a leak. To deal with this problem, plumbers used to install a closed vertical section of pipe, a pipe riser, near each faucet. When the faucet is shut, the decelerating water compresses the column of air in the riser, which acts like a shock absorber, protecting the pipe joints. Unfortunately, this is a perfect opportunity for Henry's law to apply, namely that gas under pressure is absorbed by a liquid. Over time, the air in the column dissolves into the water, filling the pipe riser and rendering it useless. So every once in a while a plumber has to bleed the system and let air back into the risers, a bit of preventive maintenance the landlord had neglected. I only wished that psychology could meet that standard of explanatory elegance and show how a seemingly capricious occurrence falls out of laws of greater generality.