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TEST BANK For Evolutionary Psychology : The New Science of the Mind 6th Edition By David Buss All Chapters A+
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TEST BANK Evolutionary Psychology : The New Science of the Mind 6th Edition By David Buss - (All Chapters) Complete Guide A+
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Collegeaantekeningen van de hoorcolleges Evolutionary Foundations of Behaviour
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Learning objectives and criticalthinking questions
Chapter 1
Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, the reader will be able to:
◼ Identify the three essential ingredients of natural selection.
- Variation, inheritance and differential reproductive success.
1. organisms vary in all sorts of ways, such as in wing length, trunk strength, bone mass, cell
structure, fighting ability, defensive ability, and social cunning. Variation is essential for the
process of evolution to operate—it provides the “raw materials” for evolution.
2. only some of these variations are inherited—that is, passed down reliably from parents to
their offspring, who then pass them on to their offspring down through the generations.
Other variations, such as a wing deformity caused by an environmental accident, are not
inherited by offspring. Only those variations that are inherited play a role in the evolutionary
process.
3. Organisms with some heritable variants leave more offspring because those attributes help
with the tasks of survival or reproduction. In an environment in which the primary food
source might be nut-bearing trees or bushes, some finches with a particular shape of beak,
for example, might be better able to crack nuts and get at their meat than finches with other
shapes of beaks. More finches who have beaks better shaped for nut cracking survive than
those with beaks poorly shaped for nut cracking
◼ Define particulate inheritance.
Gregor Mendel showed that inheritance was “particulate” and not blended. That is, the qualities of
the parents are not blended with each other but rather are passed on intact to their offspring in
distinct packets called genes. Furthermore, parents must be born with the genes they pass on; genes
cannot be acquired by experience.
A gene is defined as the smallest discrete unit that is inherited by offspring intact, without being
broken up or blended—this was Mendel’s critical insight. Genotypes, in contrast, refer to the entire
collection of genes within an individual. Genotypes, unlike genes, are not passed down to offspring
intact. Rather, in sexually reproducing species such as our own, genotypes are broken up with ea
generation. Each of us inherits a random half of genes from our mother’s genotype and a random
half from our father’s genotype. The specific half of the genes we inherit from each parent, however,
is identical to half of those possessed by that parent because they get transmitted as a discrete
bundle, without modification
◼ List three common misunderstandings about evolutionary theory.
1. Human Behavior Is Genetically Determined
Genetic determinism is the doctrine that argues that behavior is controlled exclusively by genes, with
little or no role for environmental influence. Mu of the resistance to applying evolutionary theory
to the understanding of human behavior stems from the misconception that evolutionary theory
implies genetic determinism. Contrary to this misunderstanding, evolutionary theory represents a
truly interactionist framework. Human behavior cannot occur without two ingredients: (1) evolved
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,adaptations and (2) environmental input that triggers the development and activation of these
adaptations.
2. If It’s Evolutionary, We Cannot Change It
misunderstanding is that evolutionary theory implies that human behavior is impervious to change.
knowledge of our evolved social psychological adaptations along with the social inputs that activate
them gives us power to alter social behavior, if that is the desired goal. Knowledge about our evolved
psychological adaptations along with the social inputs that they were designed to be responsive to,
far from dooming us to an unchangeable fate, can have the liberating effect of paving the way for
changing behavior in areas in which change is desired. This does not mean that changing behavior is
simple or easy. More knowledge about our evolved psychology, however, gives us more power to
change.
3. Current Mechanisms Are Optimally Designed
One constraint on optimal design is evolutionary time lags. Recall that evolution refers to change
over time. Each change in the environment brings new selection pressures. Because evolutionary
change occurs slowly, requiring dozens or thousands of generations of recurrent selection pressure,
existing humans are necessarily designed for the previous environments of which they are a product.
A strong taste preference for fat and sugar, adaptive in a past environment of scarce food resources,
now leads to clogged arteries, Type 2 diabetes, and heart attacks. The lag in time between the
environment that fashioned our mechanisms (the huntergatherer past that formed much of our
selective environment) and today’s environment means that some of our existing evolved
mechanisms may not be optimally designed for the current environment.
All adaptations carry costs. Selection favors a mechanism when its benefits outweigh the costs
relative to other designs existent at the time. Humans have evolved mechanisms that are reasonably
good at solving adaptive problems efficiently, but they are not designed as optimally as they might be
if costs were not a constraint. Evolutionary time lags and the costs of adaptations are just two of the
many reasons why adaptations are not optimally designed (Williams, 1992).
◼ Identify when Neanderthals went extinct.
30 kya Neanderthals go extinct
Neanderthals
They lived through ice and cold, thriving all over Europe and the Middle East. Then something
dramatic happened 30,000 years ago. Neanderthals suddenly went extinct, after having flourished
through ice ages and sudden changes in resources for more than 170,000 years. their disappearance
strangely coincided with another key event: the sudden arrival of anatomically modern Homo
sapiens, called Homo sapiens sapiens.
There are two competing theories: the multiregional continuity theory (MRC) and the Out of Africa
theory (OOA).
1. According to the MRC, a er the first migration from Africa 1.8 million years ago, the different
groups of humans in different parts of the world slowly evolved in parallel with each other,
all gradually becoming modern humans (Wolpoff & Caspari, 1996; Wolpoff, Hawks, Frayer, &
Huntley, 2001). According to this theory, the emergence of modern humans did not occur in
a single area but rather occurred in different regions of the world wherever humans lived
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, (hence the term multiregional). The multiregional evolution of the different groups into the
anatomically modern human form occurred, according to MRC, as a consequence of gene
flow between the different groups, which interbred enough to prevent divergence into
separate species.
2. the OOA proposes that modern humans evolved quite recently in one location—Africa—and
then migrated into Europe and Asia, replacing all previous populations, including the
Neanderthals (Stringer & McKie, 1996). According to OOA, the different existing groups, such
as the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, had evolved into essentially different species, so
interbreeding was unlikely or rare. In short, OOA posits a single location of modern human
origins that occurred only recently, during the past 100,000 years, as contrasted with
multiple regions of human origins posited by MRC.
Three theories
1. The anatomical evidence suggests that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens differed
dramatically.
These large anatomic differences suggest that Neanderthals and early modern humans were
isolated from each other rather than mating with each other and possibly evolved into two
somewhat distinct species—findings that support the OOA
2. The archeological evidence—the tools and other artifacts le behind— shows that 100,000
years ago, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were quite similar. 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, a massive
transformation occurred, sometimes described as “a creative explosion”. The Neanderthals did not
partake. The “creative explosion” was almost exclusively limited to Homo sapiens. The archeological
evidence, in short, supports the OOA
3. Genetic evidence
First, the DNA evidence reveals that Neanderthal DNA is distinct from that of modern humans, and it
implies that the two lineages diverged perhaps 400,000 years ago or longer. This finding suggests
that substantial interbreeding between the two groups was unlikely, although some evidence points
to a small amount of interbreeding (Green et al., 2010). Second, if the DNA of modern humans
contained Neanderthal DNA, we would expect it to be most similar to living Europeans, who
currently reside in the Neanderthals’ former territory. But the Neanderthal DNA is no closer to that
of living Europeans than it is to the DNA of modern people living in other parts of the world. Third,
modern human populations show an exceptionally low amount of genetic variation, suggesting that
we all came from a relatively small population of more genetically homogeneous founding ancestors.
Fourth, there is more genetic variation among modern African populations than among populations
elsewhere in the world. THis is consistent with the view that modern Homo sapiens first evolved in
Africa, where it had a longer time to accumulate genetic diversity, and then a subset migrated and
colonized the new lands. Much of the genetic evidence, in short, supports the OOA.
◼ Explain why radical behaviorism went into scientific decline.
According to the principles of operant conditioning, because the monkeys were receiving their
primary reinforcement of food from the wire mothers, they should have become more attached to
the wire mother than to the terry cloth mother. Yet precisely the opposite occurred. e baby
monkeys would climb onto the wire mothers just for food but those to spend the rest of their time
with the terry cloth mothers. When frightened, the monkeys ran not to the food-reinforcing mother
but rather to the one that gave them “contact comfort.” Clearly, something was going on inside the
monkeys other than a response to the primary reinforcement of food.
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, Another problem with radical behaviorism came from John Garcia at the University of California at
Berkeley. In a series of studies, he gave rats some food, and then several hours later, he gave them a
dose of radiation that made them si (Garcia, Ervin, & Koelling, 1966). Although the nausea occurred
several hours after they ate, the rats generally learned in a single trial never to eat that type of food
—seemingly responsible for their illness— again. When Garcia paired the nausea with buzzers or
light flashes, however, he could not train the rats to avoid them. In other words, rats seem to come
into the world “preprogrammed” to learn some things easily, such as to avoid foods linked with
nausea, but find it extraordinarily difficult to learn other things.
The proposition that organisms come into this world “prepared” by evolution to learn some things
and not others was picked up by Martin Seligman. Seligman and his colleagues proposed that it was
indeed quite easy to “condition” people to develop certain types of fears—a fear of snakes, for
example—but extremely difficult to condition people to develop other, less natural fears such as fear
of electrical outlets or cars (Seligman & Hager, 1972). In summary, fundamental assumptions of
behaviorism were being violated, which suggested two important conclusions. First, rats, monkeys,
and even humans seemed predisposed to learn some things very easily and to not learn other things
at all. Second, the external environment is not the sole determinant of behavior. Something goes on
inside the minds and brains of organisms that must be taken into account when explaining behaviors.
Critical Thinking questions
1. Considering the three essential ingredients of natural selection, why would painting the leaves of a
tree pink not influence the pinkness of leaves of “baby trees” that develop from that parent tree’s
seeds?
2. Callus formation on the skin requires both the environmental input of repeated friction to the skin
and an evolved physiological callus-producing adaptation. How does this fact illustrate why “genetic
determinism” is a misconception about evolutionary theory?
3. Considering the fact that Neanderthals went extinct around the time of the appearance of modern
humans, explain what evidence might be gathered in the future to support the hypothesis that their
extinction was partly caused by killing.
4. Garcia demonstrated that rats could learn food aversions in a single trial separated by 24 hours.
Why did this and other findings lead to the decline of radical behaviorism?
Chapter 2 – The new science of evolutionary psychology
Learning Objectives After studying this chapter, the reader will be able to:
◼ Describe the three key products of evolution.
There are three products of the evolutionary process—adaptations, by products (or concomitants) of
adaptation, and random effects (or noise)
1. Adaptations
Inherited and reliably developing characteristics that came into existence through natural selection
because they helped to solve problems of survival or reproduction better than alternative designs
existing in the population during the period of their evolution; example: umbilical cord
2. By– products
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