This book asks whether evolution can help us to understand human behaviour and explores diverse evolutionary methods and arguments. It provides a short, readable introduction to the science behind the works of Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and Pinker. It is widely used in undergraduate courses around the world.

Human beings persist in an extraordinary range of ecological settings, in the process exhibiting enormous behavioural diversity, both within and between populations. People vary in their social, mating and parental behaviour and have diverse and elaborate beliefs, traditions, norms and institutions. The aim of this theme issue is to ask whether, and how, evolutionary theory can help us to understand this diversity. In this introductory article, we provide a background to the debate surrounding how best to understand behavioural diversity using (...) evolutionary models of human behaviour. In particular, we examine how diversity has been viewed by the main subdisciplines within the human evolutionary behavioural sciences, focusing in particular on the human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution approaches. In addition to differences in focus and methodology, these subdisciplines have traditionally varied in the emphasis placed on human universals, ecological factors and socially learned behaviour, and on how they have addressed the issue of genetic variation. We reaffirm that evolutionary theory provides an essential framework for understanding behavioural diversity within and between human populations, but argue that greater integration between the subfields is critical to developing a satisfactory understanding of diversity. (shrink)

I should like to offer my greatest thanks to Paul Griffiths for providing the opportunity for this exchange, and to commentators Gillian Brown, Steven Fuller, Stefan Linquist, and Erika Milam for their generous and thought-provoking comments. I shall do my best in this space to respond to some of their concerns.

Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie thoroughly evaluate the evidence for menstrual cycle shifts in ratings of several male characteristics and conclude that their analyses fail to provide supportive evidence for consistent cycle effects. The topic of menstrual cycle shifts in mate preferences has been strongly debated, with disagreements over both scientific content and practice. Here, we attempt to take a step back from these acrimonious exchanges and focus instead on how to interpret menstrual cycle shifts in mate preference tasks, independently (...) from the question of when, or if, task performance varies with cycle stage. A greater consideration of domain-general mechanisms could provide an opportunity for investigating how evolved predispositions interact with socially transmitted information in biasing women’s responses on mate preference tasks. (shrink)

First published in 1980, this book questions many of the assumptions that have accumulated around the subject of intonation as it occurs in spontaneous speech, as well as texts read aloud. The book suggests alternative ways of examining the subject and primarily uses data derived from Edinburgh speech, which is explicitly compared with descriptions of standard southern English.The book critically examines many conventional assumptions made about the formal features of intonation, particularly 'tonic' or primary stress', and about the functions of (...) intonation, specifically rising intonation. A model of intonation is presented which demonstrates that the limited resources of intonation are exploited by several different expressive systems. This approach is justified in detailed analysis of extensive stretches of speech, supported by instrumental analysis as well as by experiments which elicit judgements by both naïve and phonetically trained judges. (shrink)

What made the United States what it is began long before a shot was fired at a redcoat in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1775. The theories of reading developed by John Locke were the means by which a revolutionary attitude toward authority was disseminated throughout the British colonies in North America.

Gurven suggests that the tolerated scrounging model has limited relevance for explaining patterns of food transfers in human populations. However, this conclusion is based on a restricted interpretation of the tolerated scrounging model proposed originally by Blurton Jones (1987). Examples of food transfers in nonhuman primates illustrate that the assumptions of Gurven's tolerated scrounging model are open to question.