The phylogeny and ontogeny of adaptations (commentary)

Locke and Bogin rightly point to the absence of ontogeny in theories of language evolution. However, they overly rely upon ontogenetic data to isolate components of the language faculty. Only an adaptationist analysis, of the sort seen in evolutionary psychology, can carve language at its joints and lead to testable predictions about how language works

Evolutionary Health Psychology

For the last decade and a half the discipline of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) has been developing with great success. The first collection of significant papers was published in 1992 (Barkow et al.) and recently a landmark handbook has been produced summing the progress so far, as well as setting an agenda for future study (Buss, 2005). Unlike other areas within Psychology, EP extends its interest to all behaviours, rightly seeing them as part of an evolved phenotype, and health has not escaped attention, most notably in a paper by Eaton et al. (2002) about evolutionary health promotion. In this essay I will outline Eaton et al.’s position and then go on to suggest ways of further extending their perspective, concluding with some comments about the impact of Evolutionary Health Psychology on social policy

On sociosexual cognitive architecture (Commentary)

Schmitt has equivocated about the underlying psychology of sociosexuality but from the data presented in his target article it would appear that he has drawn out the underlying cognitive architecture. This paper describes this architecture and discusses two emerging hypotheses about heterosexual and homosexual male sociosexuality

Psychology, Biology and the Market Place

This article is a response to Response to John Radford’s “Psychology in its place”. The author argues that psychologists should pay attention to those in the human evolutionary behavioural sciences because academic psychology must be allowed to pursue scientific methods and follow particular interests as the market of ideas dictates in the interests of intellectual progress