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+--- Thread: Why Social Science Needs Evolutionary Theory (/thread-6548.html)
Why Social Science Needs Evolutionary Theory - C C - Dec 26, 2018
http://nautil.us/blog/-why-social-science-needs-evolutionary-theory
EXCERPT: . . . Evolution has shaped the human body, but it also shaped the human brain, so evolutionary principles are indispensable for understanding our psychology. Yet many students, teachers, and even social scientists struggle to see how our evolutionary history significantly shapes our cognition and behavior today. “Learning” and “culture” do not explain behavior so completely that turning to ideas from evolution is unnecessary. The lack of willingness to view human cognition and behavior as within the purview of evolutionary processes has prevented evolution from being fully integrated into the social science curriculum.
[...] Take the conformity bias. It is a universal proclivity of all human psychology—even very young children imitate the behavior of others and conform to group norms. Yet beliefs about conformity vary substantially between populations.
[...] Recent discoveries in the field of cultural evolution have demonstrated that our technological complexity is the outcome of our species’ capacity for cumulative culture.
[...] Applying evolutionary theory to social science has the potential to transform education and, through it, society. For example, evolutionary perspectives can help social scientists understand, and eventually address, common social problems. Schoolyard bullying provides one example. Without an evolutionary understanding of the phenomenon, interventions are likely to be ineffective, since they misdiagnose the causes of bullying.
[...] If “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky argued in 1973, then nothing in human psychology, behavior, and culture does either. Social scientific research should reflect this fact....
MORE: http://nautil.us/blog/-why-social-science-needs-evolutionary-theory
RE: Why Social Science Needs Evolutionary Theory - Syne - Dec 26, 2018
Evolutionary psychology would completely undermine most the current and dearly held social science precepts.