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	Frederick, D.A. (2007). Evolutionary psychologists propose evolved mechanisms that are dependent on one’s environment, one’s own condition, and socially transmitted cultural information: Quotes from evolutionary psychologists. Available at dfred.bol.ucla.edu. Updated January, 2007. [CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD FILE] Introduction When I inform people that I am an evolutionary psychologist, I often receive looks of disbelief. “How can you believe that humans are governed by inflexible innate preferences” I am asked. “People’s preferences and behavior vary widely across cultures so biological explanations can’t be true” they say. “Socialization and widely held cultural beliefs clearly shape individual behavior” they proclaim. “Biology might matter a little, but it is clear that what truly matters is cultural influences on behavior” I am told. Some people mistakenly believe that evolutionary psychologists propose that the mind is full of very rigid genetically determined mechanisms that are insensitive to socially transmitted (or cultural) information. Certainly some evolutionary psychologists have proposed that some preferences will be “highly canalized.” That is, they will develop in similar ways across cultures (e.g., it’s always most adaptive to develop two arms instead of one, Singh’s proposal that relatively low WHR signals reproductive viability). However, it is important to note that these same evolutionary psychologists also propose that there are many evolutionary mechanisms that are completely dependent on environmental and social input and that these mechanisms are responsible for generating our capacity for culture. We do not believe in “cultural” vs. “biological” causes of behavior. This distinction makes little sense to an evolutionary psychologist. The capacity for culture, the ability to imitate others, and the ability to attend to social information are viewed as an extremely important evolved adaptation. The question for evolutionary psychologists is identifying which evolved mechanisms rely heavily on socially transmitted information, how evolved mechanisms influence what becomes the subject of socially transmitted information, how different evolved mechanisms become evoked by different environmental conditions, and which evolved mechanisms are highly canalized and which are not. Rather than taking my word for what evolutionary psychologists believe, below I have assembled a growing list of quotes from evolutionary psychologists on how the human mind and culture. Currently the quotes are taken primarily from the following scholars: Buss, Cosmides, Gangestad, Haselton, Kurzban, and Tooby. Please feel free to email me additional quotes and I will update this document accordingly (enderflies1@aol.com). Please include the article reference in APA format and the page number for the quote. Quotes from Evolutionary Psychologists Gangestad, S. G., Haselton, M. G., & Buss, D. M. (2006). Evolutionary foundations of cultural variation: Evoked culture and mate preferences. Target Article: Psychological Inquiry, 17(2), 75-95.. [PDF Format] In the cross-cultural record, two facts stand out. First, people in different cultures vary widely in their behavior, beliefs, and practices. Substantial cultural variation exists in just about every arena of human life, from subsistence strategies, food sharing, and child care arrangements to religious beliefs, body decoration, and leisure time pursuits. Second, human universals underlying this cultural variation abound (Brown, 1991). Thus, although marriage arrangements vary widely across human societies, long-term, culturally recognized, and sanctioned pair bonds occur in all human groups (Murdock, 1949); special terms distinguishing kin exist in all natural languages (Brown,1991); everywhere, basic facial expressions appear to be interpreted similarly (Ekman et al., 1987); and in all known cultures, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of murder (Buss, 2005; Daly & Wilson, 1988). A comprehensive understanding of human behavior must account for universal features as well as variation between and within cultures. Page 75 Most theorists recognize that genes and environment influence behavior only in a context partly defined by the other, such that a dichotomy between nature and nurture (the idea that influence can be understood through reference to only genes or environment, respectively) is wrongheaded. Behavior results from an underlying, often universal, evolved developmental system (itself consisting of both genetic and environmental components) in conjunction with individual environmental influences, including social experiences. This developmental system gives rise to psychological traits. In some cases (e.g., binocular vision), canalization may be sufficiently strong such that under all normal developmental environments, the traits are universally invariant. In other cases, evolved developmental systems are designed to produce variable phenotypic traits, contingent on variable environments. In all cases, however, universal invariance or variable traits are outcomes of systems. One role of theory is to specify how evolved developmental systems and psychological adaptations translate variable environments into behavioral outcomes, thus creating variation within and between cultures. Page 76 Behavioral ecologists study how animals adaptively adjust their behavior to their ecologies. They generally assume that adaptive adjustments are problem-specific and involve a multiplicity of adaptations (e.g., Krebs & Davies, 1993). Humans should also possess a psychology that is sensitive to a large number of adaptively relevant environmental variables…. To illustrate, we consider an example analogous in many ways to the context-specific responses of the collared flycatcher. Recent research has shown that changes in women’s sexual preferences and interests are intricately patterned. Fertile women particularly prefer the scent of men who evidence a robust developmental history, as indicated by phenotypic cues such as bodily symmetry (Gangestad &Thornhill, 1998; Rikowski & Grammer, 1999; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999b; Thornhill et al., 2003), more masculine faces (Johnston, Hagel, Franklin, Fink, & Grammer, 2001; Penton-Voak et al., 1999; Penton-Voak & Perrett, 2000), and male behavioral displays of social presence and intrasexual competitiveness (Gangestad, Simpson, Cousins, Garver-Apgar, & Christensen, 2004). These shifts appear to be specific to when women evaluate men as short-term sex partners, not long-term mates (Gangestad et al., 2004; Haselton & Miller, in press; Penton-Voak et al., 1999). Yet not all desired traits are more preferred near ovulation. For instance, traits particularly valuable in long-term mates, such as resources, do not show ovulatory increases in female preference (Gangestad, 2004; Haselton & Miller, in press; see also Thornhill et al., 2003). The only explanation as yet proposed to account for these changes is that selection has shaped female preferences for indicators of genetic benefits to offspring in short-term mates to be enhanced mid-cycle?the time when women could have benefited by mating with such partners. Indeed, women appear to show particular sexual interest in men other than primary social partners when they are fertile (Bellis & Baker, 1990; Gangestad, Thornhill, & Garver, 2002; Haselton & Gangestad, 2005; but see also Pillsworth, Haselton,&Buss, 2004). And emerging evidence suggests that women with partners lower on hypothesized fitness indicators are those whose preferences for extra-pair partners are particularly likely to increase as ovulation approaches (Haselton & Gangestad, 2005; Gangestad, Thornhill, & Garver-Apgar, in press). This same line of research has demonstrated a variety of additional context-specific conditional responses: (a) Women’s primary male partners respond contingently based on correlates of their fertility status; men appear to be more vigilant of the whereabouts of partners who are in fertile phases than those same partners in nonfertile phases (Gangestad et al., 2002; Haselton & Gangestad, 2005); (b) women who see themselves as physically attractive particularly prefer masculine faces, presumably because they face smaller trade-offs between qualities advertised by facial masculinity and the effort a partner invests in the relationship, and hence are more able to command both (Little, Burt, Penton-Voak, & Perrett, 2001); (c) when women particularly value investment in a relationship from a man, they may prefer less masculine faces (Penton-Voak, 2001); (d) when women pursue a short-term mating strategy, they show an elevated preference for men who are physically attractive and sexy (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Greiling & Buss, 2000). In sum, the available evidence points to an intricately designed, environmentally sensitive psychological architecture. Women’s sexual interests are dependent on external factors, such as relationship context (short term vs. long term) and partner quality, as well an important internal cue, her cyclical fertility status. Considered as a whole, the patterning of women’s sexual interests and preferences cannot be understood as a set of contingent responses that have been shaped by broad, domain-general learning processes. Rather, the contingent nature of these interests is best explained by invoking the concept of evolved psychological architecture containing design features dedicated to solving specific adaptive problems in the domain of mating. This area of research provides an example in which variable contemporaneous inputs produce changes in psychological and behavioral outputs. Evolutionary psychologists also expect responses to environmental factors that may developmentally calibrate or condition psychological adaptations, producing more stable differences between individuals occupying different ecologies (Buss, 1991; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). In short, this conceptual framework points to the possibility of specialized, problem-specific adaptations underlying patterns of within-group similarity and between- group difference?what scientists often refer to as culture. Pages 77-78 First, the elements of culture may be acquired through modeling or social learning and transmitted throughout a population. This is, of course, the dominant view in the social sciences and is likely one major source of cultural variation. For example, the development and retention of cumulative knowledge in the form of technology (e.g., canoe-making, agricultural practices, systems of mathematics) is probably best explained by cultural transmission (see, e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1985, Henrich & Gil-White, 2000; see also Flinn, 1997). Second, some variation across cultures may be understood in terms of differences in the social and ecological conditions within which groups live and the specially designed adaptations humans have for responding to them. Tooby and Cosmides (1992) introduced the term “evoked culture” to refer to the fact that these conditions (e.g., war, drought, abundance) provide inputs for a richly responsive domain-specific psychology and thereby “evoke” different behavioral repertoires, forging different elements of culture. The specific content and organization of culture, then, is partly a product of domain-specific phenotypic sensitivities to environmental input in conjunction with specific input. Metaphorically, evoked cultural variation can be understood in terms of a specially programmed jukebox (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The jukebox is designed to play a different song depending on environmental inputs (e.g., temperature, population density). As the jukebox is moved from one environment to another (or as environments change temporally), the jukebox plays different tunes. The variable tunes played under specific conditions are due to the jukebox’s design in concert with specific environmental inputs (see also Kenrick, Li,&Butner, 2003). To propose that this process accounts for some important forms of cultural variation is not to deny that human learning occurs but rather to shift the emphasis toward understanding how selection has shaped domain-specific phenotypic sensitivities to environmental inputs. The preceding discussion of specialized contingent responses points to one set of paths by which culture may be evoked. In socioecological circumstances in which women should particularly value male relationship investment, they may prefer less masculine faces;when investment is not especially valued, or when women anticipate only short-term mating, women’s preferences may shift to more masculine faces and other characteristics indicative of good genes (Penton-Voak, 2001). Pages 78-79 Parasites and physical attractiveness. In a subsequent study, Gangestad and Buss (1993) asked whether mate preferences shift when individuals occupy ecologies with high levels of parasites. In such circumstances, we might expect individuals to place greater weight on physical attractiveness as a certificate of current health or an indicator of pathogen-resistant genes. Additional analyses of the cross-cultural data from Buss (1989) revealed that, indeed, parasite prevalence is positively correlated with importance of physical attractiveness as a mate preference for both sexes, using culture as the unit of analysis. Gangestad and Buss interpreted these differences as reflecting differences in evoked culture?the cultural patterns were due to responses of an evolved, specially designed mating psychology to ecological factors that moderate the association between certain characteristics (in this case, physical attractiveness) and mate value. Page 82 Psychologists find cultural differences fascinating, and rightly so. Cultural variations allow us to see possibilities we might not otherwise have imagined possible. They allow opportunities to transcend one’s own ethnocentrism. They offer the possibility of testing theories about causal influence. And perhaps inevitably, for some, they offer the hope that humans can change, that the current forms of modern cultures do not represent the only ways of being, and that the troubling aspects of modern society might someday be reduced or eliminated. Some social scientists have viewed culture as a causal force separate from, and independent of, biology. This has been called “the myth of culture as a causal explanation” (Buss, 2001, p. 896). In fact, causal dichotomies that separate biology and culture are false, obscuring more than they reveal. Cultural variation and cultural change are real. But these facts in themselves are not evidence against claims that evolution has played a major role in shaping the mechanisms of the mind, as is mistakenly assumed by some social scientists. Indeed, evolutionary psychology has provided promising conceptual tools needed to present a more coherent theoretical framework for predicting and explaining cultural variation. This article has focused on evoked culture as one such conceptual tool. The examples of evoked culture described are illustrative rather than exhaustive. Page 90 We view the concept of evoked culture as critical to understanding some, but certainly not all, forms of cultural variation. Transmitted culture (Richerson & Boyd, 2005; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992), in which ideas, values, attitudes, beliefs, and inventions are communicated from the minds of an individual or group to the minds of other individuals or groups, represents a second promising concept that cultural researchers can successfully utilize. Some social scientists assume that transmitted culture lies outside the province of evolutionary psychology or, more mistakenly, somehow contradicts the tenets of evolutionary psychology. In fact, the only way in which culture can be transmitted from mind to mind is through a foundation of evolved psychological mechanisms. This notion was implicitly recognized decades ago by two pioneers in psychology, Allport and Postman (1947), in the delimited context of rumor: “Rumor is set into motion and continues to travel by its appeal to the strong personal interests of the individuals involved in the transmission” (p. 314). The evolved psychological mechanisms involved in transmitted culture have just begun to be examined (see, e.g., Henrich & Gil-White, 2001) but remain an important conceptual tool, in addition to that of evoked culture, provided by the framework of evolutionary psychology. Page 91 According to the evolutionary psychological metatheory, humans have evolved psychological adaptations that are specifically designed to receive and process variable social and cultural input. Evolutionary psychology thus suggests that biological potentialities permit a wide range of psychological, behavior, and sociocultural outcomes and do not dictate singular outcomes. Hence, evolutionary psychology provides a theoretically grounded unifying framework for understanding how and why humans are so exceptionally responsive to their cultural environments. Page 91. Tooby and Cosmides (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. From The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture by Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby. "There is within-group similarity of behavior and there are between group differences, and these persist across generations, but also change over historical time. Highly organized socially communicated information exists outside of any particular individual at any one time (in the cognitive mechanisms of other individuals), and over time this information can be internalized by the specific individual in question. Page 33. "The critique of the [Standard Social Science Model] that has been emerging from the cognitive and evolutionary communities is not that traditional accounts have underestimated the importance of biological factors relative to environmental factors in human life. Instead, the target is the whole framework that assumes that “biological factors” and “environmental factors” refer to mutually exclusive sets of causes that exist in some kind of explanatory zero-sum relationship, so that the more one explains ‘biologically’ then less there is to explain ‘socially’ or ‘environmentally. On the contrary, as well will discuss, environmentalist claims necessarily require the existence of a rich, evolved cognitive architecture.” Pages 33-34. "There may be good reasons to doubt that the ‘behavior’ of marriage is a cross-cultural universal or that the articulated ‘meaning’ of gender is the same across all cultures, but there is every reason to think that every human (of a given sex) comes equipped with the same basic evolved design (Toobdy & Cosmides, 1990a). The critical question is not, for example, whether every human male in every culture engages in jealous behaviors… instead, the most illuminating questions is whether every human male comes endowed with developmental programs that are designed to assemble (either conditionally or regardless of normal environmental variation) evolutionarily designed sexual jealousy mechanisms that are then present to be activated by appropriate cues.” Page 45. The mapping between the evolved architecture and manifest behavior operates according to principles of expression that are specified in the evolved developmental mechanisms and the psychological mechanisms they reliably construct; manifest expressions may differ between individuals when different environmental inputs are operated on by the same procedures to produce different manifest outputs (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987; Tooby & Cosmides, 1989b). For example, some individuals speak English while others do not, yet everyone passes through a life stage when the same species-typical language acquisition device is activated (Pinker & Bloom, this volume). Page 45. [Standard Social Science Model] partisans have confidently rested their empirical case on what now appears to be uncertain ground: that manifest universality across cultures is the observation that evolutionary hypotheses require and that, on the other hand, cross-cultural variability establishes that the behavior in question is uncontaminated by “biology” and is, instead, solely the product of “culture” or “social processes.” The recognition that a universal evolved psychology will produce variable manifest behavior given different environmental conditions exposes this argument as a complete non sequitur….” Page ? On "adopted culture" (as opposed to “evoked culture): “The advantages of such mechanisms is straightforward. Information about adaptive courses of action in local conditions is difficult and costly to obtain by individual experience alone. Those who have preceded an individual in a habitat and social environment have built up in their minds a rich store of useful information. The existence of such information in other minds selected for specialized psychological adaptations that were able to use the social observations to reconstruct some of this information within one’s own mind…” Page 91 FROM: Buss, D. M. (1995). Evolutionary psychology: A new paradigm for psychological science. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 1-30. "A second context for evolutionary psychological analysis is the ontogenetic context… [which is an] analysis of the experiences during development that can shunt individuals toward different strategies…. Second, developmental experiences set differing thresholds on species-typical psychological mechanisms. The threshold for responding to a threat with extreme violence, for example, may be lowered in some cultures…. A third form of contextual analyses entails an analysis of the immediate situations inputs that activate the operation of a particular mechanism…. A central goal of evolutionary psychology is to explicate all these forms of contextual input ? historical, ontogenetic, and experiential” Page 11. "The key issues of this debate have been obscured by false dichotomies that must be jettisoned before we can think clearly about the issues ? false dichotomies such as “nature versus nurture,” genetic versus environmental,” “cultural versus biological,” and “innate versus learned.” These dichotomies imply the existence of two separate classes of causes, the relative importance of which can be evaluated quantitatively. Evolutionary psychology rejects these false dichotomies. All humans have a nature ? a human nature that differs from cat nature, rat nature, and bat nature. That nature requires particular forms of environmental input for its development. Once developed, all mechanisms require particular forms of input to be activated and to function properly. The mechanisms of learning that make humans responsive to immediate and developmental contingencies owe their existence to evolution by natural selection.” Page 5 A common misconception of evolutionary approaches is that they postulate “instincts” ? rigid, genetically inflexible behavior patterns that are invariantly expressed and unmodifiable by the environment. Although this view may have characterized some evolutionary approaches in the past and in some cases is erroneously thought to characterize contemporary evolutionary approaches, nothing could be farther from the current views in evolutionary psychology. Indeed, there are few other perspectives within psychology that place greater importance on a detailed and complex treatment of environmental, situational, and contextual factors. Page 10-11. "The Ache of Paraguay are highly promiscuous, whereas the Hiwi show high levels of monogamy ? a difference perhaps attributable to the high ratio of men to women among the Hiwi and the low ratio of men to women among the Ache, providing input into mechanisms that are sensitive to the relative availability of mates…. These cultural differences are real and important, but explanatory accounts of them cannot ignore evolved psychological mechanisms that underlying aggression and sexuality ? mechanisms that are differentially activated in some contexts more than in others. Explanations require a specification of precisely what these contexts are and, ideally, a historical account of how they came to pass.” Page 13 "'Culture', 'learning', and socialization' do not constitute explanations, let alone alternative explanations to those anchored in evolutionary psychology. Instead, they represent human phenomena that require explanation. The required explanation must have a description of the underlying evolved psychological mechanisms at its core" Page 14 FROM: Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual Strategies Theory: A contextual evolutionary analysis of human mating. Psychological Review, 100, 204-232. "One misunderstanding of evolutionary predictions in psychology is that postulated adaptations are presumed to be highly intractable, impervious to environmental context. Early sociobiologists may have fostered this misunderstanding by writing as if adaptations were intractable. We have shown precisely the opposite, that it is the context that powerfully determines the nature of the mate preferences observed. However, rather than invoking general, and hence imprecise and typically ill-specified contexts such as culture or socialization, we have identified a specific and theoretically driven contextual variable: Mate preferences, far from being impervious to varying conditions, are highly sensitive to contextual conditions. The temporal contextual variable [short-term vs. long-term relationships], important as it appears to be, is clearly just the start of an examination of important conditions on which mate preferences depend. One excellent candidate for future research involves assessment of one's own mate value…. Other important contextual variables probably include age, one’s network of family and alliances, the sex ratio in the available mating pool, the degree to which parents and kin influence mating decisions, and individual successes or failures in the pursuit of each strategy.” Page 230 FROM: Buss, D.M. (2006). Sexual selection and human mating strategies (letter to the editor). Science, 312, 690-691. "Evolutionary psychologists have long theorized and empirically verified that humans possess a menu of mating strategies: Both women and men pursue long-term committed mating, short-term mating, serial mating, polygynous mating, polyandrous mating, and mixed mating strategies (including extra-pair copulations) (1, 2). A particular individual’s mating strategy is predictably contingent on sex ratio, mate value, influence from kin, and cultural norms (1?3). Contrary to Roughgarden’s statement that it is "axiomatic" in evolutionary psychology that only males pursue promiscuity, much theoretical and empirical research documents the adaptive benefits to females of short-term mating (1). These include access to resources, advantageous mate switching, and possibly beneficial genes. Men typically benefit from long-term committed mating (e.g., increased offspring survival) and incur costs when pursuing promiscuous mating (e.g., violence from other men and decrement in mate value) (2)." FROM: Buss, D.M., & Reeve, H.K. (2003). Evolutionary psychology and developmental dynamics. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 848-853. "Some evolutionary psychologists emphasize domain-general mechanisms (Geary & Huffman, 2002) and others, domain-specific mechanisms (Symons, 1992; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Many evolutionary psychologists endorse the view that evolved mechanisms “have both modular qualities and connectedness with other [mechanisms]” (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 12), although there is legitimate disagreement, and much lack of knowledge, about the precise form of modular qualities and nature of connectedness to other mechanisms. Most evolutionary psychologists endorse the view that “plasticity,or environmental responsiveness, is a universal property of living things” (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 34), including humans (e.g., Buss, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992), but they differ in the forms of plasticity posited. Some evolutionary psychologists contend that modern environments have altered selection pressures sufficiently so as to make some evolved adaptations no longer “adaptive,” whereas others emphasize the continuity of human adaptive problems and their evolved solutions from the deep past through modern times. The key point is that within the unified framework of evolutionary psychology, there is a range of legitimate scientific disagreements about important conceptual and empirical issues?precisely the sort of intellectual ferment one expects in an exciting, emerging hybrid discipline." Page 848-849 "Prior to the theories anchored in evolutionary psychology, the state of theory in many of these domains can be described charitably as impoverished. Theories of mating within psychology, for example, posited single and simple motives?people mate because of proximity; people mate because of similarity; people mate because of “the equity motive.” All these mainstream psychological theories failed miserably. They failed to explain why humans would be motivated in the directions posited. They were extraordinarily simplistic, positing typically a single process. The generality of the theories precluded the generation of specific predictions in particular domains. Each assumed that men and women were identical in their mating motives. Each of these theories was context blind, positing the same mating tendencies regardless of circumstances. And none posited a menu of mating strategies that included short-term sexual strategies, long-term committed strategies, mixed mating strategies, mate poaching strategies, and mate expulsion strategies?all features of modern evolutionary theories of mating (e.g., Buss, 2003; Schmitt & 118 Members of the International Sexuality Description Project, 2003)." Page 849. “Many criticisms of evolutionary psychology, however, appear not to accord with standards of reasonable and legitimate scientific discourse. Thus, evolutionary psychology is sometimes grossly mischaracterized, tarred and feathered with unwarranted labeling and name calling, and tied to irrelevant but emotionally arousing associations that denigrate the field unfairly. And in its stead, many critics offer vague, nonpredictive, unfalsifiable, and sometimes downright obscurantist conceptual alternatives as replacements. Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003), unfortunately, succumbed to several of these problems. The first was mischaracterization. For example, they argued that ‘the preconceptions of evolutionary psychology . . . center on the assumption that basic aspects of an organism . . . are best understood as the products of its genes’ (Lickliter & Honeycutt, 2003, p. 820). In contrast, evolutionary psychologists argue for complex and specialized forms of interactionism in which environments at many levels of analysis play a causal role at every step in the causal chain, including the selective environment of evolutionary history, the ontogenetic environment of the developing organism, the immediate inputs into evolved psychological mechanisms, and many aspects of the internal environment such as influences from other psychological mechanisms (Buss, 1995; Daly & Wilson, 1988; DeKay & Buss, 1992; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; see also West-Eberhard, 2003). Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003) argued that evolutionary psychology views the environment of an organism as “secondary to the role of genetic factors” (p. 821), whereas in fact evolutionary psychologists do not partition genes and environment into primary and secondary roles (Buss, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). In fact, evolutionary psychology has been at the forefront in rejecting these dichotomies, as well as those of social versus biological, genetic versus environmental, biological versus cultural, all of which have no warrant within the metatheory of evolutionary psychology (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; Pinker, 1997). Lickliter and Honeycutt failed to mention that all of the influential theories of social evolution from at least the past 2 decades (see any edition of Behavioral Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach; e.g., Krebs & Davies, 1991) emphasize the context-sensitivity of social behavior, suggesting that selection has acted on evolved decision rules that influence which behaviors are produced in different ecological contexts. The current emphasis in evolutionary psychology on the context-dependency of behaviors entails the foundational premise that genes and the environment interact in complex ways in the development of organisms, as also suggested by developmental dynamics, although one would never guess this from the strawman arguments made by Lickliter and Honeycutt. In sum, Lickliter and Honeycutt attributed to evolutionary psychologists positions that evolutionary psychologists simply do not hold. Page 851. FROM: Buss, D.M. (2001). Human Nature and Culture: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective. Journal of Personality, 69:6, 955-978. See pages 963-975 for various examples of how cross-cultural differences might be driven by evolutionary processes. FROM: Buss, D.M., Haselton, M.G., Shackelford, T.K., Bleske, A.L., Wakefield, J.C. (1999). Interactionism, Flexibility, and Inferences about the Past. American Psychologist, 54:6, 443-445. "Several commentators worry about "genetic reductionism," but nowhere in our article (Buss et al, 1998) did we argue for such reductionism. Evolutionary psychology provides a truly interactionist framework, as we outlined in our article. Current behavior is a function of evolved mechanisms combined with environmental input; without environmental input, clearly there would be no behavior. As we explained in "Adaptations, Exaptations, and Spandrels," psychological mechanisms require environmental input at each stage of development. Moreover, existing mechanisms evolved precisely because they interacted with features of the ancestral environment in particular ways?ways that led to their propagation more than coexisting alternative designs. Attempts to characterize evolutionary psychology as "genetic determinism" wildly miss the central tenets of evolutionary psychology. Consider the hypothesis that sexual jealousy is a psychological mechanism that evolved to combat intrasexual threats and mate defections (e.g., Buss, Larsen, & Westen, 1996). The mechanism is activated only when a person encounters social input, such as interest in one's mate from rivals or cues to infidelity (Shackelford & Buss, 1997). Proposed design features include sensitivity to the social context of marriages, such as sexlinked components of mate value (Buss & Shackelford, 1997), as well as sex differences in the weighting given to cues to sexual versus emotional infidelity, corresponding to the different adaptive problems ancestral men and women confronted (Buss et al., 1999). This is not genetic determinism; it's a precisely specified form of interactionism.” Page 444. "Several commentators present arguments for plasticity and adaptability, and these words have intuitive resonance. Clearly humans learn, grow, develop new patterns, and adjust to changing circumstances. Clearly the human brain can do things it was not "designed" to do, including reading, writing, pecking on typewriters, and surfing the Internet. Evolutionary psychology does not propose a rigid, robotic set of "instincts" that manifest themselves invariantly in behavior, nor does it propose that existing psychological mechanisms cannot be coopted for new uses during a person's life. In our view, however, words like plasticity can be misleading and often obscure more than they clarify. Plasticity connotes lack of form, a shapeless mass that can be molded and fashioned into nearly anything, but surely that's not an accurate description of the human brain. No amount of higher education will cause a human brain to suddenly develop the echolocation abilities of bats, the elaborate olfactory sensitivity of dogs, or the web-spinning ability of spiders. Without specifying more precisely which features of the environment the brain responds to and in which predictable ways it responds, invocations of plasticity or adaptability constitute theoretical hand waving. According to the central tenets of evolutionary psychology, human behavior is indeed flexible, but our intuitions mislead us about the source of that flexibility. Flexibility is not achieved because the human brain is a formless plastic lump or because the brain is a general information processor (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Flexibility is achieved because of the elaborate suite of specific evolved mechanisms humans possess, activated in designed sequences in different combinations from an astonishingly complex menu. Flexibility is achieved because of the tremendous complexity, precision, and number of evolved psychological mechanisms. Invoking plasticity to explain this precision and complexity obscures more than it clarifies.” Page 444. FROM: Buss, D.M., & Greiling, H. (1999). Adaptive individual differences. Journal of Personality. Some evolutionary biologists have focused on species-typical adaptations, ignoring individual differences except in their role of providing the raw materials on which natural selection operates. Individual differences, particularly those that are heritable, are sometimes relegated to secondary status because they are thought to originate primarily through nonselection…. Recently, the possibility that some individual differences are adaptively patterned and themselves products of recurrent selection has been vigorously re-examined within mainstream biology…. And the newer discipline of evolutionary psychology…. Indeed, the emerging field of evolutionary psychology is now grappling with ways to incorporate individual differences and species-typical psychological mechanisms within a unified conceptual framework. Pages 210-211 "Early experiential calibration. Individuals who share a common evolved psychology can experience different early environmental events that channel them into alternative strategies. According to this conception, each person comes equipped with two or more potential strategies within that person’s repertoire. From this species typical menu, one strategy is selected based on early environmental experiences. These early experiences, in essence, “lock in” a person to one strategy to the exclusion of others that could have been pursued had the environmental input been different. Pages 215 All theories of environmental influence, including this one [referring to the Belsky Draper hypothesis], ultimately rest on a foundation of evolved psychological mechanisms, whether they are acknowledged as such or not (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). Contrary to views that perpetuate the false dichotomies of nature/nurture or genetic/environmental, evolved psychological mechanisms are necessarily entailed by theories of environmental influence (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). In this particular case, the implicit psychological mechanisms are specifically designed to take as input information about the presence and reliability of paternal resources, process that input via an evolved set of decision rules, develop one of two possible psychological models of the social world, and pursue one of two alternative mating strategies as output of these mechanisms. Pages 214-215. See also discussions of Low’s (1989) sex linked socialization hypothesis and attachment theory, 215-220 "Enduring situational evocation. Many human adaptations respond to immediately encountered environmental contingencies rather than being “set in plaster” by early environmental events…. Consider a man who is married to a woman who has a higher perceived “mate value” on the mating market than he does (Frank, 1988; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990)…. His enduring relationship with his wide may lower his threshold for jealousy compared with the man who is equal to, or higher than, hi wide in perceived mate value. As a consequence, the lower mate value man may get jealous more easily, worry about his wife’s activities, and strive to sequester her more intensely…. From an adaptationist perspective, a mechanism for adjusting one’s threshold for jealousy would have resulted from thousands of selective events in the evolutionary past in which a mate value discrepancy, on average, was associated with a greater likelihood of a partner’s infidelity or defection. Pages 220-221 "Alternative niche picking or strategic specialization. From an evolutionary perspective, competition is keenest among those pursuing the same strategy. As one niche becomes more and more crowded with competitors, success can suffer compared with those seeking alternative niches (Maynard Smith, 1982; Wilson, 1994). Selection can favor mechanisms that cause some individuals to seek niches where competition is less intense, and hence where the average payoff may be higher” Pages 224 "Adaptive self-assessment of heritable qualities. Tooby and Cosmides (1990) coined the term reactive heritability to describe evolved psychological mechanisms designed to take as input heritable qualities as a guide to strategic solutions…. Evolved mechanisms, in this view, are not only attuned to recurrent features of the external world, such as the reliability of parental provisioning, but can also be attuned to the evaluation of self (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990; Wengrat, 1984). Pages 225. Barrett, H. C., Frederick, D. A., Haselton, M. G., & Kurzban, R. (2006). Can manipulations of cognitive load be used to test evolutionary hypotheses? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(3), 513-518. [PDF Format] Evolutionary psychologists have been explicit about what they mean by modularity, and this does not include a commitment to automaticity (e.g., see Pinker, 1997, pp. 27?31). In fact, somewhat ironically, evolutionary psychologists have argued against automaticity as a design feature of certain cognitive mechanisms in domains in which many social psychologists have committed themselves to automaticity, such as automatic categorization of individuals by race (Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001). Instead, evolutionary psychologists have proposed that individual cognitive systems will have design features that reflect their function; features like automaticity, encapsulation, and speed could be features of some systems (e.g., snake detection), but only when such features are appropriate for the problems the system evolved to solve (Barrett & Kurzban, in press; Sperber, 1994, 2005; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). These are not features that are likely to be appropriate for a system regulating jealousy reactions. Fodor (1983) claimed that modular systems should accept only narrow classes of inputs (usually, only perceptual ones) and should process these automatically. Evolutionary psychologists have argued, on the other hand, that many evolved inference and decisionmaking systems should be expected to use background knowledge and contextual information, stored in what Fodor (1983) would call “central” systems, as part of their normal operation (Barrett, 2005; Sperber, 1994, 2005; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). We believe that this is also the case for a jealousy system, which would be close to useless if it had to rely only on direct perceptual evidence of infidelity. Instead, as we will argue in more detail below, it is likely that a specialized jealousy system, if it exists, would have evolved to rely heavily on background knowledge and contextual information?including information generated by deliberative or so-called central processes?in generating jealousy. Page 515 As the use of evolutionary theory in psychology matures, it is particularly important that tests of evolutionary hypotheses be based on sound logic derived from evolutionary theory and from reasonable evolutionary assumptions. They should not import notions external to the hypothesis itself and not directly warranted by it. In particular, a variety of folk or informal theories have not yet been purged from psychology, including the idea that natural selection creates innate reflexes that cause humans to act automatically, like zombies. Manydichotomies, such as innate versus learned, evolved versus cultural, and instinctual versus conscious, are simply not licensed by the logic of evolutionary theory and cannot be the basis of logically sound tests of evolutionary hypotheses. Page 517 Haselton, M. G. & Gangestad, S. W. (2006). Conditional expression of women’s desires and men’s mate guarding across the ovulatory cycle. Hormones and Behavior, 49, 509-518. [PDF Format] Across myriad species, the psychological mechanisms underlying mating behavior appear to produce conditional strategies. The leading explanation for conditional strategies is specialized psychological design shaped through selection (see, e.g., Thornhill, 1990). Such design leads an organism to vary its behaviors in response to features that recurrently covaried with the relative payoffs of alternative tactics in ancestral conditions. Behavioral ecologists have documented adaptive, conditional mating strategies in a wide variety of species that guide the allocation of effort to mating versus parenting, the production of male versus female offspring, the number offspring produced, and the timing of reproduction within the lifespan, to name a few (for examples, see Alcock, 2001). Page 509 Women's reproductive biology has imposed heavy obligatory costs of parental investment and strong selection for a discriminating sexual psychology. This proposal, coupled with the fact that the period of maximal fertility within a woman's cycle is fleetingly brief, suggests that the expression of a woman's mating adaptations may be sensitive to or contingent upon her fertility status. This study provided evidence for this general thesis. Specifically, we predicted and found that women with partners low in sexual-versus-investment attractiveness would be those for whom the ovulatory increase in extra-pair desires is greatest. Our finding is bolstered by another recent study, which found that women paired with long-term partners who are relatively asymmetrical report greater increases in extra-pair attraction midcycle compared to women with symmetrical partners (Gangestad et al., 2005b). In concert, these two sets of findings provide a key piece of evidence for the good genes model of human extra-pair mating. This study also provided evidence for shifting conflicts of interest between women and their primary partners. Women reported their partners to be more jealous and possessive and themselves to feel greater power in their relationships at midcycle, effects also moderated by male sexual attractiveness? ovulatory shifts were greater for women with partners low in sexual attractiveness relative to investment attractiveness, as the good genes hypothesis predicts. As male jealousy was reported by female partners, we cannot be certain that changes in male behavior are actual rather than merely perceived, though other evidence indicates that partners' reports of jealousy tend to agree (Gangestad et al., 2002; Dobash et al., 1998). Page 515 At a more general level, the results of this study provide further evidence for the subtlety and intricacy of adaptive design for mating in humans. They suggest that ovulatory cycle shifts in female sexual interests and male mate guarding are themselves dependent upon contextual cues, including characteristics of the partner. It is not at all evident that this adaptive information processing could be achieved by general cognitive abilities not structured or specialized to solve particular adaptive problems specific to mating and differentiated by sex (cf. Wood and Eagly, 2002). These findings provide evidence, therefore, for the basic premise that humans possess domain-specific adaptations dedicated to sex-specific problems of mating (Buss, 1991; Symons, 1979; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992). Page 517 Kurzban, R. & Haselton, M. G. (2006). Making hay out of straw: Real and imagined debates in evolutionary psychology. In J. Barkow (Ed.), Missing the revolution: Evolutionary perspectives on culture and society. New York: Oxford University Press. [PDF Format] ****Note, no page numbers are given because these were drawn from the unpublished version of the paper. [They cite some evolutionary psychologists in there article]: [Cited quote 1]: "…every feature of every phenotype is fully and equally codetermined By the interaction of the organism’s genes … and its ontogenetic environments…" (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, p. 83) [Cited quote 2]: "…every part of every organism emerges only via interactions among genes, gene products, and myriad environmental phenomena…" (Symons, 1992, p. 140) "…every part of human intelligence involves culture and learning…" (Pinker, 1997, p. 33) [Cited quote 3]: "…it is a complete misconception to think that an adaptationist perspective denies or in the least minimizes the role of the environment in human development, psychology, behavior, or social life…" (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, p. 87) Evolutionary psychologists do not merely acknowledge the undeniable influences of the environment?many of their research programs have focused on the specifics of how people respond contingently to its features. Critics who assume either explicitly or implicitly that biological approaches imply behavioral fixity infer that societal variation presents a problem for evolutionary psychology. Two recent articles critical of Buss’s (1989) evolutionary hypotheses about sex differences in mate preferences are illustrative. At issue was Buss’s finding that, relative to women, men across 37 geographic regions spanning 6 continents and 5 islands placed a greater emphasis on physical attractiveness in a mate, whereas women placed a greater emphasis on ambition, status, and access to resources (Buss, 1989). Based on social structural theory (Eagly, 1987) and related accounts, Eagly and Wood (1999) proposed that women’s preferences for mates with access to resources might be driven cross-societally by institutions that varied in the extent to which women were permitted to acquire resources. To test this hypothesis, Eagly and Wood correlated measures of gender inequity with mate preferences measured by Buss (1989). Kasser and Sharma (1999) conducted a similar analysis using measures of gender disparity in educational access and reproductive rights. In both studies, the authors found that these measures predicted the size of the sex differences in some of the mate preferences they investigated. By contrasting evolutionary and social structural hypotheses, the authors implied that patterned cross-societal variation predicted by the social structural accounts weakened evolutionary accounts of sex differences in mate preferences. Kasser and Sharma (1999) suggested that their findings were “counter to the strong evolutionary position that culture has a negligible effect on females’ mate preferences.” They further explained that “a more parsimonious explanation can be made without recourse to evolutionary mechanisms” (p. 376). In their title, “Evolved dispositions versus social roles,” Eagly and Wood (1999) intimated that support for social roles hypotheses called into question evolutionary theorizing?which, by their rendering, entails “claims of invariance across cultures in sex-differentiated behavior" (p.420). These conclusions hinge critically on the idea that societal variability predictions flow from social structural accounts but not from evolutionary accounts. However, evolutionary psychologists contend that adaptations are structured to respond contingently to local social and ecological factors (see Cronk, this volume). For example, in 1989, evolutionist Bobbi Low proposed that natural selection might have shaped parental socialization of boys and girls to respond contingently to variation in 1) the prevalence of polygyny and 2) sex differences in resource control. This account successfully predicted that parents across societies would alter their child rearing practices to encourage female achievement and aggression as female control of resources increased (Low, 1989), a prediction similar to that advanced by Eagly & Wood (1999). Many evolutionary psychologists endorse the view that there is a universal human nature. However, universal psychological mechanisms can and do generate variable behavior as a result of their design to respond adaptively to environmental circumstances (Barkow, 1989; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). In fact, as Barkow (1989) has pointed out, given the broad range of environments humans were likely to have experienced over evolutionary history, a rigid and unresponsive psychology would constitute an exceptionally poor design. In short, cross-societal variation itself does not present a problem for evolutionary psychology. The only way in which societal variability challenges evolutionary psychologists is the same way it challenges all social scientists: its likely causes are many and complex, making hypothesis formulation and testing a formidable (but not impossible) task. It is very difficult to understand how critics come to attribute hyperadaptationism to evolutionary psychologists, as they endorse Gould’s pluralism explicitly and frequently. Here are some representative examples: "In addition to adaptations, the evolutionary process commonly produces two other outcomes visible in the designs of organisms: (1) concomitants or by-products of adaptations (recently nicknamed “spandrels”; Gould & Lewontin, 1979); and (2) random effects." (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p.62) "Organisms can be understood only as interactions among adaptations, byproducts of adaptations, and noise…" (Pinker, 1998, p. 174). "…the evolutionary process produces three products: naturally selected features (adaptations), by-products of naturally selected features, and a residue of noise" (Buss et al., 1998, p. 537). Other evolutionary psychologists have made similar statements (see Dennett, 1995, p. 537; Daly and Wilson, 1988, p. 12). Not only do evolutionary psychologists acknowledge the existence of by-products and noise, they explicitly test by-product hypotheses (e.g., Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001; Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). In addition, they acknowledge that adaptationist claims must be backed by evidence: “To show that an organism has cognitive procedures that are adaptations… One must also show that their design features are not more parsimoniously explained as by-products…”(Cosmides & Tooby, 1992, p. 180). FROM: Hill, S. E. & Ryan, M. J. (in press). The Role of Female Quality in the Mate Copying Behavior of Sailfin Mollies. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Biology Letters. Female mate choice copying is a type of non-independent mate choice, in which females observe a sexualinteraction between a male and another female (referred to as the model female) and preferentially choose that male for a mate (Pruett-Jones 1992). Most evidence for copying comes from polygynous fishes such as the guppy, Poecilia reticulata (Dugatkin 1992, 1996), medaka, Oryzias latipes (Grant & Green 1996) and sailfin molly, Poecilia latipinna (Schlupp et al. 1994; Witte & Ryan 1998, 2002). Copying is typically understood to benefit females by decreasing time and energy required to find suitable mates and lessening predation and injury risks while doing so (Slagsvold et al. 1988; Gibson & Ho¨glund 1992; Sto¨hr 1998).