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The application of evolutionary theory to human behavior has elicited a variety of critiques, some of which charge that this approach expresses or encourages conservative or reactionary political agendas. In a survey of graduate students in psychology, Tybur, Miller, and Gangestad (Human Nature, 18, 313-328, 2007) found that the political attitudes...
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... majority of participants (64.3%, n0173) identified with the Democratic Party, with the Republican Party coming in near last (1.9%, n05) among the six options (Fig. 1). The reported political affiliations of EA students were virtually identical to those of non-EA respondents (Fig. 1). There were no differences between EA and non-EA regarding Democratic Party preference (Fisher's exact test; p00.89) or Republican Party preference (Fisher's exact test; p01.0). Group differences for other party ...
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... majority of participants (64.3%, n0173) identified with the Democratic Party, with the Republican Party coming in near last (1.9%, n05) among the six options (Fig. 1). The reported political affiliations of EA students were virtually identical to those of non-EA respondents (Fig. 1). There were no differences between EA and non-EA regarding Democratic Party preference (Fisher's exact test; p00.89) or Republican Party preference (Fisher's exact test; p01.0). Group differences for other party preferences were also not statistically significant. We also compared EA students with the general public regarding ...
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... asked participants explicitly, "What best describes your position on social issues?" EA students responded in a strikingly liberal manner, even slightly more to the left than their non-EA colleagues (Table 1, item 1). In fact, 98% of EAs described their position on social issues as "liberal." ...
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... survey items further reject the EAPC hypothesis. When we asked participants explicitly, "What best describes your position on economic issues?" EA student responses were on average to the far left of the scale (Table 1). In regard to political affiliation, most EA students supported left-wing parties while only a handful supported right-wing ones (Fig. 1). EA students voted for the left-wing tickets at a considerably higher frequency and voted significantly less for the right- wing tickets than would be anticipated by the EAPC hypothesis (Fig. 2). A remark- able number of EA students supported Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. President Obama is generally liberal in ...
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... evidence against the claim that anthropologists who employ evolutionary perspectives to analyze behavior hold conservative or reactionary views. In almost every respect, the views of EA graduate students are extremely liberal in comparison with the U.S. public, and statistically indistinguishable from those of non-EA graduate students (Table 1, Fig. 1). In light of our results as well as those of Tybur and colleagues (2007), an important question emerges: Why are anthropologists and others who use evolutionary theory to analyze human behavior incorrectly stereotyped by many of their colleagues as conservatives who conduct research that is motivated by (or at least useful to) ...
Citations
... 26 The assumption that "essentialist" ideas about sex differences point to a hidden conservative agenda may explain why academics who are more liberal (in the sense of left-wing) tend to view evolutionary psychology with more skepticism (Buss & von Hippel, 2018, Jonason & Schmitt, 2016; see also Tybur & Navarrete, 2018). As it turns out, however, evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists are just as left-wing as their non-evolutionary colleagues (Lyle & Smith, 2012;Tybur et al., 2007). 27 Almost all my colleagues who study sex differences from a biological perspective are politically liberal and in favor of equalizing opportunities and conditions between the sexes as much as possible. ...
This chapter discusses the influence of ideological bias in the psychological study of sex and gender, with a focus on academic psychology. After introducing the essence of the problem, the chapter examines the conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender,” the binary nature of biological sex, and the challenges to the idea of a sex binary. The following sections provide a survey of recent introductory textbooks and generalist journals, as well as a historical overview of sex and gender in psychology from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The chapter ends with a consideration of the current state of the field, its future prospects, and suggestions to limit the growing influence of ideological bias in relation to sex and gender.
... HBE researchers were accused for promoting a political agenda based on social conservatism, neo-liberal capitalistic economy, xenophobia, and ethnic, sex, and other group prejudices Pavelka, 2002;Turner, 2005), even for eugenics and Nazi purity laws (Ehrlich & Feldman, 2003). HBE researchers responded to these critiques by claiming not only that they do not have any political agenda but that the students of evolutionary anthropology tend to have more liberal political views (Lyle & Smith, 2012). ...
This chapter covers evolutionary behavioral sciences in general, both animal and human disciplines. Firstly I briefly sketch the historical development and basic research tenets of (animal) behavioral ecology. Afterward, I depict human behavioral ecology (HBE) and its conceptual foundations; I use The Tsimane Health and Life History Project as the example of ethnographic research in HBE and provide arguments for the existence of natural selection in contemporary human populations. I present critiques of HBE and major unresolved questions including the accusations of a rigid view on human nature, the lack of connection with animal BE and cultural evolution research, a potential problem with fertility estimates, and an issue of phenotypic gambit. Afterwards, the conceptual foundations of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) are presented (the view of brain as a computer, massive modularity principle, Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness, adaptive lag and evolutionary mismatch, search for human universals) followed by the major criticisms of this discipline (the problem of declaring a trait as an adaptation, problem of inferring evolutionary processes on available data, and problem of Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness). Finally, I compare HBE and EP and highlight both the differences between the fields and their complementarity in the exploration of behavioral evolution.KeywordsEvolutionary social sciencesBehavioral ecologyEvolutionary psychology
... HBE researchers were accused for promoting a political agenda based on social conservatism, neo-liberal capitalistic economy, xenophobia, and ethnic, sex, and other group prejudices Pavelka, 2002;Turner, 2005), even for eugenics and Nazi purity laws (Ehrlich & Feldman, 2003). HBE researchers responded to these critiques by claiming not only that they do not have any political agenda but that the students of evolutionary anthropology tend to have more liberal political views (Lyle & Smith, 2012). ...
Life History Theory (LHT) represents one of the most prominent conceptual frameworks in evolutionary social sciences—its basic assumptions are described in this chapter with an emphasis on the hypothesized fast-slow continuum. LHT has somewhat different usage in evolutionary psychology, compared to evolutionary biology and HBE; thus, evolutionary psychological view of LHT and its criticisms are presented afterwards. I provide detailed analysis of the covariations between various life history traits (body mass, maturation age, onset of sexual behavior, age of first reproduction, fertility, and parental investment) and the level of their congruence with the continuum. Furthermore, I explore the existing data on the associations between ecological context and life history in light of a hypothesis that harsher environments trigger fast life history trajectory. I present my own approach to life history, namely the network approach, where life history traits and their covariations are viewed as the dynamic systems on a population level. Finally, I address LHT criticisms and unresolved questions—problems of transferring assumptions from the between-species to between-individual level, unsuitability of fast-slow continuum to adequately describe empirical data, and the problem of measurement of life histories in humans.KeywordsLife History TheoryFast-slow continuumHarsh environmentNetwork analysis
... HBE researchers were accused for promoting a political agenda based on social conservatism, neo-liberal capitalistic economy, xenophobia, and ethnic, sex, and other group prejudices Pavelka, 2002;Turner, 2005), even for eugenics and Nazi purity laws (Ehrlich & Feldman, 2003). HBE researchers responded to these critiques by claiming not only that they do not have any political agenda but that the students of evolutionary anthropology tend to have more liberal political views (Lyle & Smith, 2012). ...
In this chapter, I cover several topics related to evolutionary explanations of the processes emerging in human families. Sex differences in parental care as a part of sex roles are analyzed from a viewpoint of sexual selection. I explain the origins of markedly heightened parental care in humans and the conditions influencing parental investment—ecological conditions, parental characteristics, and offspring traits. I describe the importance of grandparental care for offspring and grandoffspring fitness, the conditions that may bias grandparental investment, and the role of this investment in the evolution of human longevity. Various parent-offspring interactions are described including the parent-offspring conflict (highlighting the parental control in offspring’s mating), the cooperation between parents and offspring, and parental effects in general. Afterwards, I describe reproductive motivation, its importance in exploring the evolution of behavioral traits, and provide examples of how we can empirically measure reproductive motivation. This chapter ends with the more detailed descriptions of the demographic transition’s roots and evolutionary explanations of demographic transition by comparing alternative hypotheses regarding this complex phenomenon.KeywordsParental careGrandparental careParent-offspring conflictReproductive motivationDemographic transition
... HBE researchers were accused for promoting a political agenda based on social conservatism, neo-liberal capitalistic economy, xenophobia, and ethnic, sex, and other group prejudices Pavelka, 2002;Turner, 2005), even for eugenics and Nazi purity laws (Ehrlich & Feldman, 2003). HBE researchers responded to these critiques by claiming not only that they do not have any political agenda but that the students of evolutionary anthropology tend to have more liberal political views (Lyle & Smith, 2012). ...
This chapter is dedicated to the behavioral ecological analysis of psychopathy. Firstly I describe psychopathy as a behavioral syndrome consisting of several traits (manipulativeness, emotional superficiality, lack of behavioral control, and sometimes antisocial behavior), and the most prominent instruments for psychopathy measurement. Afterwards, I briefly describe the nomological network of psychopathy, by depicting the relations between psychopathy, criminal behavior, aggressiveness, violence, moral behavior, social interactions, psychopathology, intelligence, executive functioning, and career choices. Genetic, neurobiological, and environmental precursors of psychopathy are described as well, with an emphasis on the maltreatment and deprivation in childhood as the facilitators of the psychopathy development. Evolutionary considerations of psychopathy are described: the role of assortative mating, faster life history and pace of life, presence of psychopathy in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and the relations between psychopathy and health. Considering the importance of reproductive success as a core fitness component, I describe the associations between psychopathy and fertility in a separate subchapter. Finally, I analyze the existing empirical data and show the application of behavioral ecological models in explaining the first evolutionary puzzle of personality (the maintenance of inter-individual variation in behavior) as applied to psychopathy.KeywordsPsychopathy definitionPsychopathy measurementNomological network of psychopathyEvolution of psychopathyBehavioral ecology of psychopathy
... HBE researchers were accused for promoting a political agenda based on social conservatism, neo-liberal capitalistic economy, xenophobia, and ethnic, sex, and other group prejudices Pavelka, 2002;Turner, 2005), even for eugenics and Nazi purity laws (Ehrlich & Feldman, 2003). HBE researchers responded to these critiques by claiming not only that they do not have any political agenda but that the students of evolutionary anthropology tend to have more liberal political views (Lyle & Smith, 2012). ...
The existence and characteristics of evolutionary tradeoffs in human populations are described in this chapter. Firstly I cover fertility-longevity tradeoff, the problems of its empirical detection and the possible explanation of this problem (a possibility of nonlinear association between these two fitness components), and the implications of the tradeoff for the evolution of menopause. The characteristics of the tradeoff based on the age of first reproduction are presented afterwards: fertility benefits of early reproduction followed by the health costs for females, the links between first and last reproduction, and the detrimental effects of delaying first reproduction after the age of 30. Another major tradeoff is the one between quantity and quality of offspring: I describe the effects of parental care for offspring’s longevity (especially in preindustrial populations), together with a lack of evidence for the link between parental care and offspring’s fertility. Finally, I depict mating-parenting tradeoff and its characteristics in humans.KeywordsFertility-longevity tradeoffAge of first reproduction tradeoffQuantity-quality tradeoffMating-parenting tradeoff
... HBE researchers were accused for promoting a political agenda based on social conservatism, neo-liberal capitalistic economy, xenophobia, and ethnic, sex, and other group prejudices Pavelka, 2002;Turner, 2005), even for eugenics and Nazi purity laws (Ehrlich & Feldman, 2003). HBE researchers responded to these critiques by claiming not only that they do not have any political agenda but that the students of evolutionary anthropology tend to have more liberal political views (Lyle & Smith, 2012). ...
In this chapter I introduce the field of behavioral ecology of personality or evolutionary personality ecology. The main conceptual framework is based on three topics, sometimes called evolutionary puzzles of personality: evolutionary explanations of inter-individual differences in behavior, cross-situational and temporal consistency in behavior, and associations between functionally different personality traits. Afterwards, I present the phenotypic associations between personality traits (based mostly on the Big Five/Five Factor Model of personality) and fertility in humans. The main part of the chapter is dedicated to the application of conceptual models from animal BE in explaining three evolutionary puzzles of personality in humans. At the end of the chapter I describe the extensions of the presented framework to other human behavioral traits like intelligence, psychopathological traits, social attitudes, and values.KeywordsBehavioral ecology of personalityEvolutionary puzzles of personalityBig FiveFive factor modelPersonality and fitness
... HBE researchers were accused for promoting a political agenda based on social conservatism, neo-liberal capitalistic economy, xenophobia, and ethnic, sex, and other group prejudices Pavelka, 2002;Turner, 2005), even for eugenics and Nazi purity laws (Ehrlich & Feldman, 2003). HBE researchers responded to these critiques by claiming not only that they do not have any political agenda but that the students of evolutionary anthropology tend to have more liberal political views (Lyle & Smith, 2012). ...
I used psychopathy to provide an illustration of how we can explore the evolution of behavioral traits on phenotypic data. But looking at my own work in the field, I never thought that the main contribution of my research is empirical data. I never thought that someone should teach students that psychopathy or any other behavioral trait has fitness-related outcomes based on the data that I collected. This is not only based on the fact that the research designs that I applied have important methodological limitations like nonrepresentative samples and cross-sectional designs. As I mentioned in a chapter where I described the basic tenets of behavioral ecology, we observe only the snapshots of evolution—the data on the associations between behavioral traits and fitness in a certain moment in time in a given population. These data are invaluable for understanding of the microevolutionary processes on behavioral traits but they are hardly sufficient to make reliable conclusions on these processes. In fact, I would like to go even further: even when observing these exact data, we do not see evolutionary processes, we observe potential processes—the ones that may or may not exist in the population (and yes, I think that we see potential processes even if we have representative samples and prospective research designs). These processes are probabilistic and uncertain phenomena (like any others, needless to say), even in the populational state that we speak of them; projecting them into the future carries an even larger margin of uncertainty. But this does not diminish the importance of these processes in any sense—potential realities are important as the real ones (just ask the surrealists). But it does provide us with indications of what main contributions of our research may be.
... Be that as it may, we agree with those who hold that progressive politics can be quite compatible with efforts to use evolutionary and ecological concepts to understand human behavioural variation [110,111]. Evolutionary social scientists frequently contribute substantive critiques of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and other oppressive ideologies and practices [87,112,113], and empirical evidence refutes the claim that they are more likely to hold regressive views [114,115]. ...
Inequality is increasingly recognized as a major problem in contemporary society. The causes and consequences of inequality in wealth and power have long been central concerns in the social sciences, whereas comparable research in biology has focused on dominance and reproductive skew. This theme issue builds on these existing research traditions, exploring ways they might enrich each other, with evolutionary ecology as a possibly unifying framework. Contributors investigate ways in which inequality is resisted or avoided and developed or imposed in societies of past and contemporary humans, as well as a variety of social mammals. Particular attention is paid to systematic, socially driven inequality in wealth (defined broadly) and the effects this has on differential power, health, survival and reproduction. Analyses include field studies, simulations, archaeological and ethnographic case studies, and analytical models. The results reveal similarities and divergences between human and non-human patterns in wealth, power and social dynamics. We draw on these insights to present a unifying conceptual framework for analysing the evolutionary ecology of (in)equality, with the hope of both understanding the past and improving our collective future.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’.
... HBE researchers were accused for promoting a political agenda based on social conservatism, neo-liberal capitalistic economy, xenophobia, and ethnic, sex, and other group prejudices Pavelka, 2002;Turner, 2005), even for eugenics and Nazi purity laws (Ehrlich & Feldman, 2003). HBE researchers responded to these critiques by claiming not only that they do not have any political agenda but that the students of evolutionary anthropology tend to have more liberal political views (Lyle & Smith, 2012). ...
