The nurture of nature : biology, psychology and culture
In this thesis I explore what consequences taking development seriously in evolutionary considerations will have for how we understand the evolution of psychology and culture. I first explicate the relationship between development and evolution that informs a number of approaches to evolution, including neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology and evolutionary developmental biology. I argue that, to a greater or lesser extent, developmental processes have been misconstrued in these accounts and that the full role of development, from an evolutionary point of view, has not always been acknowledged. Instead, I suggest that a better model of the relationship between development and evolution can be found in developmental systems theory. I explore the neo-Darwinian underpinnings of a number of accounts of the evolution of culture and psychology, including the branch of evolutionary psychology associated with the work of, among others, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and the gene-culture co-evolutionary account of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd. I argue that as well as being vulnerable to the same sorts of problems that plague neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology, they face other difficulties. These accounts suppose an
Hannon, Elizabeth Mary
The nurture of nature : biology, psychology and culture. In this thesis I explore what consequences taking development seriously in evolutionary considerations will have for how we understand the evolution of psychology and culture. I first explicate the relationship between development and evolution that informs a number of approaches to evolution, including neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology and evolutionary developmental biology. I argue that, to a greater or lesser extent, developmental processes have been misconstrued in these accounts and that the full role of development, from an evolutionary point of view, has not always been acknowledged. Instead, I suggest that a better model of the relationship between development and evolution can be found in developmental systems theory. I explore the neo-Darwinian underpinnings of a number of accounts of the evolution of culture and psychology, including the branch of evolutionary psychology associated with the work of, among others, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and the gene-culture co-evolutionary account of Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd. I argue that as well as being vulnerable to the same sorts of problems that plague neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology, they face other difficulties. These accounts suppose an
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