This project interrogates the claims made for the possibility of collapsing all the various disciplines into one discipline, probably physics, and surely a science, in the name of making clearer the relations between our various fields of knowledge. This is the aim of the radical reductionist, and I take E. O. Wilson's Consilience as exemplary of such attempts. Central to Wilson's method of achieving unity is the new science of evolutionary psychology - itself a re-working of the sociobiology with which Wilson first achieved notoriety. In the on-going project of explaining culture under a Darwinian description, the evolutionary psychologists have begun to suggest explanations for the popularity and content of narrative fiction. Because they are consonant with the rest of science, these biologistic accounts of fiction might be preferable to the accounts traditionally offered by Literary Studies. Consequently, there is a risk that the traditional practices of Literary Studies will be made redundant within the academy and gradually atrophy. The demand is that Literary Studies either makes itself rigorous like the sciences (as with such projects as Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism), or else forfeit its claims to produce knowledge. Aware of this threat, some literary critics embrace forms of relativism in an attempt to deny the unity or effectiveness of scientific knowledge and so neuter the threatened takeover. Among these forms of relativism, Richard Rorty's account seeks to collapse the hierarchy of disciplines and seemingly offers Literary Studies a means of retaining its distinctive approach without denying the effectiveness of scientific knowledge. I aim to show that Literary Studies need not become a science, and that such sciences as evolutionary psychology are neither as threatening as some had feared, nor as useful to literary study as some have hoped.

This study examined the distinguishing physiological characteristics of the disgust reaction across different domains. According to an evolutionary analysis, disgust is a heterogeneous emotion with features that are specific to three distinct domains: pathogens, sex, and morality. Each domain is predicted to take as input information specific to the adaptive problem it evolved to solve and regulate behavior accordingly. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether there are any adaptive physiological differences associated with the disgust response across domains. Participants were asked to imagine acts that elicit pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust. It was hypothesized that there would be both quantitative and qualitative differences in the physiological reactions based on the appropriate functional outputs for the social (moral and sexual) and nonsocial (pathogen) domains. Individual differences in self-report ratings of disgust as well as the role of religiosity in regulating social disgust were also explored. Results showed significant differences in parasympathetic influences on the heart in response to the sexual stimuli but not to the other domains. Also, the self-report ratings showed that females were more sensitive than males to the sexual stimuli but not to pathogens or moral acts. These results lend further support to the dissociation between the functional domains of disgust. Correlations between levels of religiosity and both subjective ratings of fear towards pathogens and levator labii activation when viewing pathogen stimuli were found. This study provides preliminary evidence of dissociations between different domains of disgust and provides a methodological guideline which can help inform future studies of disgust. Implications of the current findings are discussed, as well as limitations of the current methodology and avenues for further exploration.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains x, 125 p. Includes bibliographical references.

The present study, performed within the framework of evolutionary psychology, is an examination of the influence of hormonal fluctuations, associated with the phases of the menstrual cycle, on judgements of male and female facial attractiveness. It was hypothesized that women in the periovulatory phase would be more discriminating in rating male facial attractiveness than women in the early follicular phase, due to an increased likelihood of conceiving. Alternatively, if peri-ovulatory women are too selective, they may not fmd a mate; therefore, women in the peri-ovulatory phase could be more discriminating than women in the early-follicular phase. Judgements of female facial attractiveness were also examined as it may be associated with same sex competition. Lastly, salivary testosterone was analyzed in order to investigate the relationship between attractiveness ratings and testosterone levels, as testosterone is linked to women's libido and sexuality. To test these hypotheses, 129 undergraduate females who had regular and normally cycling menstrual cycles rated male and female facial attractiveness twice, once during the peri-ovulatory phase and again during the early-follicular phase. Menstrual phase had no significant influence on judgements of facial attractiveness of male and female faces. Female faces were rated as more attractive than male faces independent of phase, and the ratings were more variable for the female faces than the male faces. There was no difference in levels of salivary testosterone during the peri-ovulatory and the early follicular phase, and no significant correlations were obtained to support the hypothesis of a relationship between judgements of attractiveness and testosterone. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

Evolutionary psychology has recently developed out of dissatisfaction with the Standard Social Science Model utilised by mainstream psychology. This model focuses on culture and reason as the underlying cause of human behaviour and proposes that the mind is a 'general purpose learning device' (Siegert & Ward, 2002). Here the mind is seen as a blank slate at birth, which is subsequently influenced by experience, environment and culture. Biological variables are minimised or ignored. However it seems that all human behaviour cannot fully be explained by the focus on nurture in the Standard Social Science Model; sexual jealousy, parental investment, and mating preferences are examples which are not fully explained by learning or environmental experience. On the other hand, evolutionary psychology, founded on the principles of cognitive science and evolutionary biology, argues that a person's nature is the primary cause of their behaviour, with the influences of nurture being of lesser importance. According to these principles, evolutionary psychology has been very successful in providing explanations, for example in the areas of human mate selection and parental investment. However evolutionary psychology has received criticism on a number of counts, including its supposed reductionism, and, its reliance on 'just so' stories which are untestable, hypothesised scenarios which look to the past in order to explain the evolution of human behavioural features. With the above mentioned matters as background, this thesis investigated whether evolutionary psychology offers a new paradigm for integrating psychology with science, and if so, how it accomplishes this. In investigating this, conceptions of science, psychology, and evolutionary theory, in particular evolutionary psychology, were examined. More specifically, issues addresses included why evolutionary psychology is dissatisfied with the SSSM, the notion of the mind as blank slate, the nature-nurture paradigm, and the mind as a general purpose learning device. Two aspects of evolutionary theory are described, natural and sexual selection, in terms of their importance to evolutionary psychology. The main arguments of evolutionary psychology as a discipline are outlined, looking at its aims, and the ways in which it combines the disciplines of evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology toward a new integrative model for studying human behaviour. A case study demonstrates how evolutionary psychology offers a useful explanation of mate selection. This thesis then turns to the philosophy of science, setting out the differences between Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos' theories, and focusing on the latter's theory as a model of scientific philosophy which could be useful for evolutionary psychology, including discussing how this could be best achieved. This thesis then sets out various criticisms of evolutionary psychology, including the critique of domain-specific modularity, the focus on the Pleistocene period as problematic, the over-reliance on natural selection, just-so stories, the reductionism of evolutionary psychology, and that it is politically conservative. This thesis concludes that the attempt of evolutionary psychology to combine cognitive science and evolutionary theory has been successful in showing how the integration of psychology into the sciences is not only possible but inevitable.

Evolutionary psychology has recently developed out of dissatisfaction with the Standard Social Science Model utilised by mainstream psychology. This model focuses on culture and reason as the underlying cause of human behaviour and proposes that the mind is a 'general purpose learning device' (Siegert & Ward, 2002). Here the mind is seen as a blank slate at birth, which is subsequently influenced by experience, environment and culture. Biological variables are minimised or ignored. However it seems that all human behaviour cannot fully be explained by the focus on nurture in the Standard Social Science Model; sexual jealousy, parental investment, and mating preferences are examples which are not fully explained by learning or environmental experience. On the other hand, evolutionary psychology, founded on the principles of cognitive science and evolutionary biology, argues that a person's nature is the primary cause of their behaviour, with the influences of nurture being of lesser importance. According to these principles, evolutionary psychology has been very successful in providing explanations, for example in the areas of human mate selection and parental investment. However evolutionary psychology has received criticism on a number of counts, including its supposed reductionism, and, its reliance on 'just so' stories which are untestable, hypothesised scenarios which look to the past in order to explain the evolution of human behavioural features. With the above mentioned matters as background, this thesis investigated whether evolutionary psychology offers a new paradigm for integrating psychology with science, and if so, how it accomplishes this. In investigating this, conceptions of science, psychology, and evolutionary theory, in particular evolutionary psychology, were examined. More specifically, issues addresses included why evolutionary psychology is dissatisfied with the SSSM, the notion of the mind as blank slate, the nature-nurture paradigm, and the mind as a general purpose learning device. Two aspects of evolutionary theory are described, natural and sexual selection, in terms of their importance to evolutionary psychology. The main arguments of evolutionary psychology as a discipline are outlined, looking at its aims, and the ways in which it combines the disciplines of evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology toward a new integrative model for studying human behaviour. A case study demonstrates how evolutionary psychology offers a useful explanation of mate selection. This thesis then turns to the philosophy of science, setting out the differences between Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos' theories, and focusing on the latter's theory as a model of scientific philosophy which could be useful for evolutionary psychology, including discussing how this could be best achieved. This thesis then sets out various criticisms of evolutionary psychology, including the critique of domain-specific modularity, the focus on the Pleistocene period as problematic, the over-reliance on natural selection, just-so stories, the reductionism of evolutionary psychology, and that it is politically conservative. This thesis concludes that the attempt of evolutionary psychology to combine cognitive science and evolutionary theory has been successful in showing how the integration of psychology into the sciences is not only possible but inevitable.

Thesis (M.A.)--Humboldt State University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-63). Also available via Humboldt Digital Scholar.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, May 2008.

This thesis takes an evolutionary perspective on human psychology. To the extent that inherited tendencies shape behaviour, their design will be fitted to the social environments prevailing as Homo sapiens evolved, in foraging groups, the nearest modem equivalent being hunter-gatherers. From ethnographies of hunter-gatherers, food-sharing and counterdominance were identified as universal. Food-sharing was more thorough than is explicable purely by kinship or reciprocation; one functional effect was to even out the supply of valuable high-variance food. In contrast with the social systems of the other great apes, counter-dominance spread influence widely, preventing the emergence of dominant individuals who could obtain resources disproportionately. Potential paths for the evolution of egalitarian tendencies are discussed. Two falsifiable hypotheses were generated from this perspective. First, sharing will facilitate risk-taking. The predicted effect was confirmed at high risk levels, similar to those faced by hunters. Given that during evolution risk was reduced primarily by social means, social as well as rational factors are treated by the evolved brain as relevant to risky decisions. It is argued that this result may suggest a new perspective on the Group Polarisation experiments. The second hypothesis tested was that an egalitarian environment will produce beneficial effects on individual and social behaviour. The data collected were consistent with the hypothesis: a comparison between three Italian towns showed that measures of health (including cardiovascular mortality), education, social involvement, crime and social perceptions were significantly more positive where co-operatives employed a larger percentage of the population. The evolutionary perspective showed its value as a means of generating novel testable hypotheses.