THE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the humanmind and brain, as Darwin himself was the first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural scie...

In recent years evolutionary psychologists have developed and defended the Massive Modularity Hypothesis, which maintains that our cognitive architecture—including the part that subserves 'central processing'—is largely or perhaps even entirely composed of innate, domain-specific computational mechanisms or 'modules'. In this paper I argue for two claims. First, I show that the two main argumen...

What makes a face attractive and why do we have the preferences we do? Emergence of preferences early in development and cross-cultural agreement on attractiveness challenge a long-held view that our preferences reflect arbitrary standards of beauty set by cultures. Averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism are good candidates for biologically based standards of beauty. A critical review and...

Irrational Emotions "A human being is a bundle of useless passions." John-Paul Sartre, Philosopher " Show me a guy who has feelings, and I'll show you a sucker. " Frank Sinatra, Singer and Movie Star Emotional Wisdom "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." Blaise Pascal, Philosopher "Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you."

Homo sapiens is increasingly being studied within the evolutionary (adaptationist, selectionist) framework favoured by animal behaviour researchers. There are various labels for such work, including evolutionary psychology, human behavioural ecology and human sociobiology. Collectively, we call these areas 'human evolutionary psychology' (HEP) because their shared objective is an evolutionary u...

A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be (a) heritable and (b) ‘quasi-independent’ from other heritable traits. They must be heritable because there can be no selection for traits that are not. They must be quasi-independent from other heritable traits, since adaptive variations in a specific cognitive capacity could have no distinctive consequen...

The Cutting Edge features news relevant to anthropologists and anthropological practice. In addition to material provided by Special AN Correspondents, submissions from the membership at large are welcomed for consideration. Please send short articles (500-700 wordr) to the Anthropology Newsletter Editor, 4350 N Fairfar Dr, Suite 640, Arlington, VA 22203; 7031528I902 ext 3005; f a r 70315283.54...

The evolutionary study of the mind in the twentieth century has been marked by three self-conscious movements: classical ethology, sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology (capitalized to indicate that it functions here as a proper name). Classical ethology was established in the years immediately before the Second World War, primarily by Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen (Burckhardt, 1983). Int...

Researchers in the social and behavioral sciences are increasingly using evolutionary insights to test novel hypotheses about human psychology. Because evolutionary perspectives are relatively new to psychology and most researchers do not receive formal training in this endeavor, there remains ambiguity about "best practices" for implementing evolutionary principles. This article provides resea...

The old dogma has always been that the most complex aspects of human emotions are driven by culture; Germans and English are thought to be straight-laced whereas Italians and Indians are effusive. Yet in the last two decades there has been a growing realization that even though culture plays a major role in the final expression of human nature, there must be a basic scaffolding specified by gen...