On Our Minds: How Evolutionary Psychology Is Reshaping the Nature Versus Nurture Debate

By Eric M. Gander

There is no question more fundamental to human existence than that posed by the nature-versus-nurture debate. For much of the past century, it was widely believed that there was no essential human nature and that people could be educated or socialized to thrive in almost any imaginable culture. Today, that orthodoxy is being directly and forcefully challenged by a new science of the mind: evolutionary psychology. Like the theory of evolution itself, the implications of evolutionary psychology are provocative and unsettling. Rather than viewing the human mind as a mysterious black box or a blank slate, evolutionary psychologists see it as a physical organ that has evolved to process certain types of information in certain ways that enables us to thrive only in certain types of cultures.

In On Our Minds, Eric M. Gander examines all sides of the public debate between evolutionary psychologists and their critics. Paying particularly close attention to the popular science writings of Steven Pinker, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould, Gander traces the history of the controversy, succinctly summarizes the claims and theories of the evolutionary psychologists, dissects the various arguments deployed by each side, and considers in detail the far-reaching ramifications--social, cultural, and political--of this debate. Gander's lucid and highly readable account concludes that evolutionary psychology now holds the potential to answer our oldest and most profound moral and philosophical questions, fundamentally changing our self-perception as a species.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801873878
• ISBN13: 9780801873874
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.3"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A general review of evolutionnary psychology trends

The book is a critical review of the ideas around evol. psychology. The first chapters of the book try to convince the reader that the mind is divided into modules, genetically shaped during the human evolution some 100,000 years ago. Then the last chapters discuss some "modules" specifically, such as the "altruism" module and "mate selection module". But the very first chapters are devoted to the polemics between the pros and cons of sociobiology in general and the heritability of intelligence. The author has much sympathy for Stephen Pinker and Herrnstein (the author of The Bell Curve) and much less for Stephen J. Gould and his followers ( treating them as "communists"). But very honestly, he displays all sides of the debate whitout derogatory deformations. Over all, the author has an easy stlye. I found it instructive.