Most theories of crime have not explored intensively biological and especially evolutionary explanations for criminal behavior. Ellis presents a valuable new perspective that proposes that physiological mechanisms shaped by evolutionary forces can provide insights into the causes of crime and sex differences in the patterns of crime. We discuss other theories and research relevant to Ellis’s th...

Evolutionary psychology is the study of human cognitive structures and the resultant behaviors in the light of evolutionary theory. The methodology, results and very existence of evolutionary psychology have been objected to on both ethical and scientific grounds. This essay attempts to address some of the most important objections to evolutionary psychology and show them to be either of legiti...

The principles of evolutionary psychology and the traditional assumptions of social psychology are highly compatible. Both disciplines trace observed behavioral variability to situational variability. Both assume that psychological mechanisms sensitive to social information are central to causal accounts of social behavior. Questions about the origins and functions of these psychological mechan...

Previously we (Vonk and Shackelford, 2012, in press) proposed an integration of comparative psychology and evolutionary psychology into a new field of "comparative evolutionary psychology." This integrative discipline incorporates principles from ethology, ecology, biology, anthropology, and psychology, broadly defined. We present in this special issue a collection of original empirical and the...

David M. Buss received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, and has taught at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas at Austin. He has received the American Psychological Foundation Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions and the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientist Lecturer Award and has been a...

Psychological Inquiry An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t775648164 Evolutionary Psychology Is a Metatheory for Psychology Joshua D. Duntley a; David M. Buss b a The Richard Stockton College, Pomona, New Jersey b The University of...

Evolutionary psychology has been proposed as a metatheory for the social sciences. In this paper, the different ways in which scholars have used the concept of a metatheory in the field of evolutionary psychology is reviewed. These different ways include evolutionary psychology as a unification of different subdisciplines, as a nomological network of evidence, as Lakatosian hard core, as a tool...

This commentary is a rejoinder to the Buss and Schmitt (2011) and Eagly and Wood (2011) commentaries concerning how evolutionary psychology and feminism might fit together. This rejoinder provides one path toward uniting these perspectives in psychological literature by accomplishing three tasks. First, this rejoinder addresses and removes conceptual confusions offered by Buss and Schmitt (2011...

After a century of intermittent dialogue between psychology and evolutionary biology, the outline of a synthesis between the two disciplines now appears to be emerging. The current form of this synthesis, known as narrow evolutionary psychology (Barkow et al., 1992; Buss, 1999), is the union of two specific frameworks from evolutionary biology and psychology. Specifically, narrow evolutionary p...