Evolutionary Psychology and Presentation of EP--论文代写范文精选

显然在理解团体和社会凝聚力时，必须考虑结构的思想,从个体生物学和心理学来理解，寻求解释社会个体的行为和心理。进化心理学是一个标准的社会科学模型。在进化心理学模型中,个人被看作是文化和进化的历史。下面的essay代写范文进行阐述。

Evolutionary Psychology
Sociological approaches to the issues associated with societal cohesion are unsatisfying and confused. Whilst nominally sociology is individualist, in practice it concerns itself with the phenomena of group interactions considered simply as arbitrary and changeable aspects of socially-learned behaviours. Adhesion to a group is a consequence of the inadequacy of the isolated individual; the isolated individual (in an aggregation of individuals) cannot survive, must belong, feel he belongs and be seen as belonging to some group. But this goes further. The isolated group may not survive but must belong to some larger group of groups. The need at every level is for protection and contact and one should look for foundations of group feeling in empathy, love, emotions, often pre-human. Individuality can be considered both externally, that is the recognition of one individual by another and internally, the construction of the self, which we can discuss for human beings (I propose that it derives from language) but which we can only guess at for other creatures. 

The forces forming groups exist in the minds of the individuals; underlying these forces is the relation of individual identity and group identity. The forces of cohesion and division depend on individual evolutionary psychology (shared by members of the group) in interaction with the imitable social patterning, It seems clear that in understanding the formation of groups and social cohesion one must move to consideration of the structure of the mind, of perception of self and others, of social mapping in the individual, working outwards from individual biology and psychology to the group, society, State. 

One seeks explanation for societies in terms of individual behaviour and psychology. The foundations for societal structures are to be found in the evolved psychology of the individual plus his physical needs and capabilities plus the link between individual and society formed by the integration of the individual and social self. This is what the recently developed approach of evolutionary psychology claims to do but how satisfactory is its account? The following paragraphs first present the content of evolutionary psychology as adherents describe it. This is followed by criticisms expressed by others who do not accept 'orthodox' Evolutionary Psychology (that is as promoted primarily by Cosmides and Tooby, 1989: 1990: 1992).

Presentation of EP
Evolutionary psychology is an alternative to the Standard Social Science Model, in which the individual is viewed metaphorically as a general purpose learning machine, and the origin of behaviour is primarily through learning and culture. In the evolutionary psychology model, the individual is viewed as having both a cultural and an evolutionary history. Evolutionary psychology takes many of the lessons of human language and applies them to the rest of psyche. Evolutionary psychology provides deeper insights into the fundamental psychological mechanisms of humans.

All manifest behaviour depends on the underlying psychological mechanisms. These are special purpose learning devices, domain- specific modules which evolved by natural selection because they solved adaptive problems confronting ancestral humans in the EEA, the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA, the era of evolutionary adaptation in the Pleistocene. Specifically the set of information-processing machines were designed to solve problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The specialised psychological mechanisms are like keys that fit particular locks.

The brain is a physical system functioning as a computer, circuits are designed to generate behaviour that is appropriate to the environmental circumstances. The research programme is to search for the origins of the basic psychological mechanisms that comprise human nature. Humans are living fossils - collections of mechanisms produced by prior selection pressures operating on a long and unbroken line of ancestors, not invariably 'fitness maximisers' but executing adaptations which may be less well-tuned for modern environments. Evolutionary universals may not be adaptive now but such behaviours must have arisen as adaptations in the Pleistocene, for the different ancestral environment of life of small bands of hunter-gatherers on the African savannas.

Evolutionary psychology is generally restricted to studying universal aspects of human behavior and mentality, thereby explicitly avoiding the study of differences among individuals or groups. Variations among individuals, and such groups as races and social classes, only reflect the influence of diverse environments upon a common biological heritage. The psychological modules may differ in effectiveness from one individual to another, but given the number of different modules, their effect is to "average out" individual differences. Beneath the level of surface variability, all humans share certain views and assumptions about the nature of the world and human action by virtue of these human universal reasoning circuits.

Culture is the manufactured product of evolved psychological mechanisms situated in individuals living in groups. Evolutionary psychology offers tools which can be applied to any behavioural topic: sex and sexuality, how and why people cooperate, whether people are rational, how babies see the world, conformity, aggression, hearing, vision, sleeping, eating, hypnosis, schizophrenia.

Criticism of EP
The imprecision with which certain terms are conceptualised and defined (e.g. psychological mechanisms, decision rules, procedures) is a problem.The central weakness in the whole approach is the hypothetical psychological mechanisms which look very much like the ad hoc constructs used in mainline psychology for many years. A 'psychological mechanism' is"as classic a case of a hypothetical construct as has ever been invented by theorists to make sense of inputs and outputs".

These 'mechanisms' - a rather out of date term for aspects of brain function - do not seem to be tied down in any way to neural organisation or indeed to genetic organisation and expression. The mind does not have an anatomy like the liver; a psychological mechanism cannot be treated as an organ.

Our knowledge of the hypothesised EEA environments is scant. The 'Pleistocene models' offered are often extremely facile; virtually none of the data from paleoanthropology or ethnography are used. It is unlikely that natural selection has essentially ceased since the Pleistocene. The quest for a universal set of genetically invariant mechanisms which evolved in the Pleistocene is quite likely to be illusory.

Why assume that adaptation started in the Pleistocene and the "mechanisms" then evolved have persisted unchanged to the present. Central aspects of human evolutionary psychology go back long before the Palaeolithic. Basic plans for perception, movement and thought were evolved long before then. We would do better to consider primate evolutionary psychology. Why not, following Darwin, trace emotional structures in modern humans much further back; the behavioural similarities manifested in apes, baboons, monkeys, even dogs, to which Darwin drew attention, are striking

Why assume overriding human uniformity in mind/brain organisation. It seems highly implausible that whilst there are manifest physical differences between human populations, there should be no significant differences in mental/neural organisation - causing not differences in achieved result (equal effectiveness of all languages, all visual perception) but differences in the structures through which e.g. language and perception operate.

It is implausible to treat e.g. fear of snakes and language as comparable modules or to claim them for evolutionary psychology as prime examples of psychological mechanisms which evolved in the EEA.

Where are the examples of specific evolutionary psychological modules satisfactorily confirmed by standard laboratory techniques? How can the assumptions be verified by direct experiment? How can it be verified that our minds are not adapted to modern circumstances? How can the difference between the modern man and the way of life of pleistocene man be measured?

Where in the brain are the relevant circuits and how, physically, do they work? What kind of information is being processed by these circuits? What information-processing programs do these circuits embody? and what were these circuits designed to accomplish (in a hunter-gatherer context)?（essay代写)

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