Below is a list of readings suggested for people interested in learning more about evolutionary psychology and the issues that surround it compiled by the members of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology. Note that this is not an exhaustive list. Apologies for any incomplete or omitted references.
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The Cognitive Cultural Studies Project (CCSP) is directed by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama and is conducted through the University of Oregon Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences (ICDS), in collaboration with the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology (CEP).
Michelle Scalise Sugiyama’s webpage available here
For general introductions to the field of evolutionary psychology:
Barkow J.H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby J.(1992).(eds.) The Adapted Mind:Evolutionary Psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford, Oxford University Press
Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. NY: Norton.
Williams, G.C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Daly, M. & Wilson, M. (1984). Sex, Evolution, & Behavior. Second Edition. Boston: Willard Grant.
Introductions to the field through more specific topics:
Symons, D. (1979). The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Daly, M. & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. New York: Aldine DeGruyter.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Buss, David M. (1994). The evolution of desire : Strategies of human mating. New York : BasicBooks.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. NY: Morrow.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gazzaniga, M.S. (Ed). (1995) The Cognitive Neurosciences. (Section on Evolutionary Approaches). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gazzaniga, M.S. (Ed). (2000) The New Cognitive Neurosciences. (Section on Evolutionary Approaches). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P., and the ABC Research Group (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. NY: Oxford University Press.
Introduction to Evolutionary Biology: Adaptationism and Selectionist Thinking:
Williams, G.C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Dawkins, R. (1976/1989). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (1982). The Extended Phenotype. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.
Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W.W.Norton & Co.
Maynard Smith, J. (1982). Evolution and the theory of games. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cronin, H. (1993). The Ant and the Peacock. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Krebs, J.R. & Davies, N.B. (1987). An introduction to behavioural ecology. Oxford: Blackwell scientific publications.
Krebs, J.R. & Davies, N.B. (eds.) (1984). Behavioral ecology: An evolutionary approach. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
Other relevant articles, books, and collections:
Boyer, P. (1993). The naturalness of religious ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brown, D. (1991). Human Universals. NY: Free Press.
Brown, D. (1988). History, Hierarchy, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness. Tucson: University of Arizona.
Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1987). From evolution to behavior: Evolutionary psychology as the missing link. In J. Dupre (Ed.), The latest on the best: Essays on evolution and optimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 277-306.
Cosmides, L. & Tooby J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange, in J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides,& J. Tooby (eds.) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species. London: Murray.
Gould, J.L. & Marler, P. (1987). Learning by instinct. Scientific American, 256(1), 74-85.
Hagen, E. H. (1999). The Functions of Postpartum Depression. Evolution and Human Behavior, 20, 325-359.
Hirschfeld, L. (1996). Race in the making : Cognition, culture, and the child’s construction of human kinds. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Hirschfeld, L.A. & Gelman, S.A. (eds) (1994). Mapping the Mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. (esp. chapters 2, 4, 7, 9)
Marks, I. (1987). Fears, phobias, and rituals. NY: Oxford Unversity Press.
Mithen, S. (199). The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. NY: Thames on Hudson
Nesse, R. & Williams, G. (1994). Why we get sick: The new science of Darwinian medicine. NY: Random House.
Ridley, M. (1993). The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. NY: MacMillan.
Ridley, M. (1996). The Origin of Virtue. NY:Viking.
Sperber, D. (1990). The epidemiology of beliefs. In C. Fraser and G. Gaskell (Eds.), The social psychological study of widespread beliefs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Symons, D. (1987). If we’re all Darwinians, what’s the fuss about? in C.B. Crawford, M.F Smith, & D.L. Krebs (Eds.), Sociobiology and psychology: Ideas, issues, and applications (pp. 121-146). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Symons, D. (1992). On the use and misuse of Darwinism, in J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides,& J. Tooby (eds.) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Symons, D. (1993). The stuff that dreams aren’t made of: Why wake-state and dream-state sensory experiences differ. Cognition, 47, 181-217.
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1990). On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: the role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of Personality, 58, 17-67.
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1990). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and sociobiology, 11, 375-424.
Tooby J. & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture, in J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides,& J. Tooby (eds.) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Tooby J. & DeVore, I. (1987). The reconstruction of hominid behavioral evolution through strategic modeling. In: Primate Models of Hominid Behavior, W. Kinzey (Ed.). New York: SUNY Press.
Trivers, R.L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35-57.
Trivers, R.L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man 1871-1971. Chicago: Aldine.
Wakefield, J. (1999). Evolutionary vs. Prototype Analyses of the Concept of Disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 108, 374-399.
Whiten, A. and Byrne, R. (1997). Machiavellian intelligence II: extensions and evaluations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Williams, G. C. & Nesse, R. M. (1991). The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine. Quarterly Review of Biology, 66, 1-22.
Wright, R. (1994). The Moral Animal. Vintage Books.
Readings on Domain Specificity
Folk Biology
Atran, S. (1990). The cognitive foundations of natural history. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Keil, F. (1991). The Emergence of Theoretical Beliefs as Constraints on Concepts. In S. Carey & R. Gelman (eds.) The Epigenesis of Mind: Essays on Biology and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaumassociates.
Naive Physics
Leslie, A.M. (1988). The necessity of illusion: Perception and thought in infancy. In L. Weiskrantz, (Ed.), Thought without language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 185-210.
Premack, D. (1990). The infant’s theory of self-propelled objects. Cognition, 36, 1-16.
Spelke, E.S. (1988). The origins of physical knowledge. In L. Weiskrantz (Ed.), Thought without language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 168-184.
Spelke, E.S. (1990). Principles of Object Perception. Cognitive Science, 14, 29- 56.
Folk Psychology and Theory of Mind
Astington, J.W., Harris, P.L., & Olson, D.R. (Eds.). (1988). Developing theories of mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (esp. Leslie chapter: Current Directions in Psychological Science)
Baron-Cohen, S. (1994) How to build a baby that can read minds: Cognitive mechanisms in mindreading. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitives, 13(4), 1-40.
Leslie, A.M. (1992). Pretense, Autism, and the Theory-of-Mind Module. Current Directions in psychological Science, 1, 18-21.
Language
Bloom, P. (1993). Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Markman, E.M. (1990). Constraints children place on word meaning. Cognitive Science, 14, 57-77.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: Morrow.
Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1992). Natural Language and Natural Selection. In Barkow J.H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Judgment under uncertainty
Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P., and the ABC Research Group (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. NY: Oxford University Press.
Gigerenzer, G. (1991). How to Make Cognitive Illusions Disappear: Beyond “Heuristics and Biases” European Review of Social Psychology, vol. 2, 83-115.
Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all?: Rethinking some conclusions of the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition, 58, 1-73.
Applications to cultural transmission
Boyer P. (1992). Causal Thinking and Its Anthropological Misrepresentation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 22(2), 187-213.
Boyer P. (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion, Los Angeles/Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brown, D. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Sperber, D. (1985). Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an epidemiology of representations. Man 20: 73-89.
Hunter-Gatherer Studies
Kaplan, H. & Hill, K (1985). Food Sharing among Ache Foragers: Tests of Explanatory Hypothesis. Current Anthropology, 26, 223-239.
Lee, R.B. & DeVore I. (Eds.) (1968). Man the hunter. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.
Lee, R.B. & DeVore, I. (Eds.) (1976). Kalahari hunter-gatherers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shostak, M. (1981). Nisa: The life and words of a !Kung woman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Smith, E. A. & Winterhalder, B. (1992). Evolutionary ecology and human behavior. NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
Antagonistic/Touchstones
Gould, S.J. & Lewontin, R.C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marcos and the Panglossian program: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 205, 581-598.
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P. & Tversky, A. (eds.) Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Unless otherwise indicated, all materials on this web site are copyright 1999-2011 Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
