Biology 14 The Evolution of Human Nature Spring, 2011
Description.This course is about the behavioral and psychological adaptations that humans have evolved for living and competing in social groups and how these adaptations have caused cultural evolution. We begin with a general description of the evolution and development of behavior (including that of humans) and of the principles of genetics, developmental biology and population biology that are required to understand how the theory of natural selectionexplains evolution in general and social evolution in particular. We then consider specific extensions of the theory of natural selection that provide a unified explanation for animal and human social evolution. These natural selection mechanisms---the core of “evolutionary social theory”--- include kin selection, reciprocal altruism, parent-offspring conflict, parental investment and sexual selection, the evolution and parental manipulation of sex ratios and evolutionarily stable strategies. These ideas will be illustrated by films and by examples from animals and humans.
The mating systems and social behavior of our nearest relatives (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans) will be briefly described and compared with ours. Then comes themost important part of the course: a discussion of how evolutionary social theories explain our behavioral adaptations, cultural evolution and history. It is especially important to understand (from a consideration of the how behavior develops and evolves) that the so-called distinction between “nature and nurture” or “instinct and learning” or “biology and culture” is largely meaningless and irrelevant to the question of whether evolutionary social theories can explain human behavioral and cultural evolution. The human behaviors to be considered include the instinct to learn/ create language, kinship and nepotism, systems of reciprocity and exchange (reciprocal altruism), the human mating system (sexual selection, mating competition, mate choice, marriage, divorce), incest taboos, the inheritance of wealth and power, homicide, parent-offspring conflict, aggression and bonding within and between the sexes, egalitarian and patriarchal societies, socioeconomic hierarchies, primitive and modern warfare, self awareness and self deception, religions, moral and legal systems and their supportive emotions, and the creation and appreciation of music, art and literature.
Contact, office hours.I checkemail often, phone messages seldom: ,542-2073. My office is room 140, McGuire Life Sciences Building (just to the left, inside the ground floor door(nearest Merrill Science Center)from the parking lot in back of the building). Office hours are by appointment. The best “office hour time” is to join me for lunch in the Sebring (faculty) dining room (entrance is just to the right of Valentine’s campus-side entrance). If you have a Valentine meal plan you may have lunch at Sebring by charging it on your card (at no extra cost); if you do not have a meal plan then your lunch is on the Bio Department. I am allowed to bring up to 3 students to lunch every day. “Lunch office hours” are after class TTH and any time between 12:15 to 1:15 PM on MWF. Other times (in my office) are by arrangement.
Assigned work and grades.This course is not about memorizing formulas and facts, so there are no in class exams or quizzes with T/F and multiple choice answers. The assigned work will consist of two problem sets and four or five essays (including the final), evenly distributed over the semester. The final essay will be around 12 doublespaced, typewritten pages in length, and the others will be 6 to 8 pages.For the final essayassignment you will be able to choose among several general topics, or you may want to write on a more specific topic of interest to you. If you wish to write on a more specific topic, you must discuss the topic with me.
These assignments are “open book” and will be given out in class and posted at the course website 10 days to 2 weeks before they are due.The final essay will be due on May 13 at noon. Your course grade will be based mainly on the essays, but your problem sets will also be considered, mainly with regard to whether you made an effort to understand them and do them correctly. Altogether, then, the course might be best described as a “reading and writing course in science” in which your understanding of the ideasis shown by your ability to discuss, evaluate and extend them in writing.
If you have any difficulties with the problem sets you are asked to see me; this assures that you understand the problems and their solutions. Collaboration with others has too often led to students copying each other’s work without understanding it. This is cheating in two senses: first, students turn in work that is not their own and second, a student cheats him/herself out of understanding the problems and their general importance.
For students who feel a strong aversion to quantitative problems and quantitative reasoning, this course is a painless opportunity to learn something about such approaches in evolutionary biology. The “quantitative reasoning” required tounderstand the importantideas in this course does not---and need not---go beyond elementary arithmetic and algebra. The only consequence of having difficulties with the problem sets is that you get more instruction on how to do them.
How the College Honor Code Applies to Biology 14.In preparing and writing your problem sets and essays you may discuss your ideas with others, of course, but it is a violation of the honor code for you to (1) allow another student to read or copy your preliminary or final writing,(2) read, copy or paraphrase another person’s work or writing and turn it in as your own, (3) copy sentences from any source without proper attribution. If a quotation is from assigned reading you need only give the author and the title of the article or book; page numbers are not necessary. When you quote from any other source please include the author, article and page number. You may discuss your essay (or anything else about the course) with me during office hours and/or over lunch, but I do not read, edit or look at preliminary drafts or outlines of essays. For problem sets you may have as much help as you need.
Class meetings and handouts. The class meetings, TTH 11:30 AM to 12:50 PM, will include lectures, films, discussion and guest speakers. The films will illustrate ideas from lectures and reading. Class handouts include (1) explanations of ideas that may not be fully covered in class, (2) assigned reading articles and (3) explanations of how to do problem sets. You will definitely need these handouts in order to understand the lectures, reading, and problem sets and to prepare essay assignments; these handouts also they lessen the need to take lecture notes so that you can concentrate on understanding what is being said and illustrated.You will find that attending the lectures makes learning the material in the course and doing the problemsets and writing essaysmuch more efficient and inclusive.
Reading. Assigned reading is of 5 sorts: (1) required books on sale at Amherst Book Store and listed below, (2) in a text by Goldsmith & Zimmerman (Biology, Evolution and Human Nature) that is recommended for purchase, but will be available on “print reserve” (PR) at the Merrill Science Library reserve desk (11 copies), (3) individual articles and chapters in books on reserve at the science library, also listed as “PR” for “print reserve”, (4) articles handed out in class, (5) Articles and chapters of books on electronic reserve, “ER”, at:
Books required (on sale at The Amherst Bookstore and online)
McEwan, Enduring Love
Orwell, Animal Farm
Wrangham and Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence.
Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
Books recommended (on sale at Amherst Books), but available on reserve at the Merrill Science Library: Goldsmith and Zimmerman (“G&Z”), Biology, Evolution and Human Nature (a text in which there will be a lot of assigned reading)and Trivers, Natural Selection and Social Theory (a collectionof foundational papers by the most important social theorist of the 20th century, with amusing, autobiographical anecdotes about how the papers were written).
Information about the field. Evolution and Human Behavior and the Journal of Human Nature are two journals in the field, and they are available on line; past paper issues are in the Keefe Merrill Science Library. The Human Behavior and Evolution Society, is a professional organization of scholars in the field that includes anthropologists, behavioral ecologists, psychologists (developmental, social, cognitive, evolutionary), linguists, philosophers, lawyers, political scientists, economists, medical doctors, psychiatrists and literary scholars. The website has lots of information and links, including to abstracts of talks at the society’s annual meetings (which have become increasingly about evolutionary psychology).
Another website, the Human Nature Review, , has lots of recent articles and links, and the website of the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law, SEAL, has a lot of information and many links. It is a scholarly society of lawyers and judges (mostly) founded by an Amherst student, Owen Jones ’85, Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, has many links; they are interested in “ interdisciplinary exploration of issues at the intersection of law, biology, and evolutionary theory”.
Several articles in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, edited by David Buss and on reserve at the Merrill Science Library, will be assigned in this course, but there are many other review articles—of every field of psychology to which evolutionary analysis applies--- that may be of interest to you. Also, there will be copies of the latest edition (2008) of Buss’ general text, Evolutionary Psychology, on reserve (PR).
The University of California at Santa Barbara has several leading people in the area of evolutionary psychology, starting with two of the founders of the field, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. They have founded a Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UCSB whose website is: are many links there to their many important publications. Links to additional sites and authors are also to be found in the assigned reading.
Using the web to find information and articles. Some students are unaware of the research tools available on the web. A primary source is Google Scholar where you can search for a topic (e.g., “Neolithic warfare”, “male aggression in chimpanzees”, “sex in bonobos”, “evolutionary aesthetics”, “evolution of morality”) or for the writings of individual scholars. For example, if you search for “rl trivers” at Google Scholar you will get all of the journal and book articles he has written; many of them will be in paper or electronic journals that are available online through the College’s subscriptions, so once signed in you can click on the article and up it comes. Note also that each article listed has a number in parentheses below it; this is the number of articles that refer to it, and if you click on that, up come all of those articles—hence the expanding web!
Another source of the most recent articles on a subject is the website of individual researchers. So if you google “rl trivers” on the web you can get to his website and find links to his and related articles. Most researchers are associated with a university, and their websites can be accessed through that of their home institution. Some researchers have their own separate websites where their publications are available for downloading.
Schedule of Class Meetings and Readings.We may get behind or ahead (in lecture) of the assigned reading schedule. It is more efficient in understanding the assigned reading to wait until pertinent background material is discussed in class, so you will be told in class when you could profitably get on with specific readings.
Jan.25,27; Feb.1,3
Background in evolutionary theory, animal behavior, genetics and population biology.
a. evolution and development of behavior, G&Z, chapter 11, Pinker, The Language Instinct
chapters 1,2,3,11, on print reserve (PR). Pinker, The Blank Slate, chapters 1-4, on PR.
Tooby and Cosmides, “nature and nurture: an adaptationist perspective”, p.30 to 36, in
Buss, ed., Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, on PR & ER. Spiegel, ALife Without Fear, ER
b.introduction: evolution by natural selection. Nicholas Humphrey, The Illusion of Beauty, on ER, a
beautiful essay and introduction to evolutionary thinking about human behavior )(and science in
general. The original BBC broadcast of this essay (which includes the Chopin prelude) is on
electronic reserve (ER).Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out,
Yoon, Luminous 3-D jungle is a biologist’s
dream,
(If you have not seen Avatar see it. Here is a science journalist who has it right, not at all common)
c. genes and elementary population genetics, G&Z, chapter 4 (ignore boxes and
figures on pages 99-101), on PR if you did not buy it. Levels and mechanisms of natural
selection, G&Z, ch.5: p.110, levels of selection through p.123, on PR. Dawkins, God’s
Utility Function, on ER. Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron, (when everyone is finally equal),ER.
d.population demography and the evolution of life history strategies.
e. evolution of sex
f. evolution of senescence. Diamond, Why we grow old and die, In Diamond, The Third
Chimpanzee,ER, and Vonnegut, Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, (what would happen
if we did not grow old and die), ER.
Feb 8,10,15,17
Natural selection and social behavior. In addition to the assigned reading below read G&Z, ch.6: Evolutionary Social Theory, on PR if you did not buy it. This chapter outlines the 5 principal extensions of the theory of natural selection that explain the evolution of social behavior in all animals (and plants, by the way). The author of 4 of those theories (c, d, e and f) is Robert Trivers; the classic papers on
each are in his book, Natural Selection and Social Theory (on PR and ER).
a. costs and benefits of living in groups
b. kin selection, nepotism. Mock, Drummond & Stinson, Avian Siblicide,and Hrdy,
Infanticide as a Primate Reproductive Strategy, both in Sherman & Alcock,
Exploring Animal Behavior, PR ER. G&Z, Ch.7, The Success of the Social Insects.
c. reciprocal altruism. The evolution of reciprocal altruism. In Trivers, Natural Selection and
Social Theory, PR ER.
d. parent-offspring conflict.Parent-offspring conflict, in Trivers, Natural Selection and
Social Theory, PR and ER. RecommendedHaig, Genetic conflicts in human Pregnancy, ER.
e. parental investment and sexual selection. Parental Investment and Sexual Selection, in
Trivers, Natural Selection and Social Theory, PR ER.
f. evolution and manipulation of sex ratios. Natural Selection of Parental Ability to
Manipulate the Sex Ratio of Offspring. In Trivers, Natural Selection and Social Theory,
PR ER.
g. evolutionary stable strategies and game theory.
Feb.22,24; March 1,3 Social groups of carnivores, apes and humans (films on lions, chimpanzees)
a. carnivores: individual versus group hunting and territoriality. Packer & Pusey, Divided we
fall: cooperation among lions, ER. A more general article on the lion project:
b. apes and humans: mating and social systems, secondary sexual traits. G&Z, ch. 13,
Wrangham & Peterson, Demonic Male: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence,required book.
March 8, 10 Human physical evolution, G&Z, ch.12: The Physical Record of Human Origins
a. primate, ape and human adaptations---morphological, sensory, social
b. genetic and fossil evidence of human evolution
c. gathering, hunting, running and cooking. Wrangham, Catching Fire: How cooking Made Us
Human. A brand new, compelling and testable theory that cooking was the major initial adaptation
(“behavioral/ cultural”) that led our bipedal ape-like ancestors to invade and exploit new food
sources on the open savannah.Recommended: Bramble and Lieberman, Endurance distance
running adaptations in the genus Homo(besides increase in brain size and reduction of tooth size,
adaptations to long distance/endurance runningcharacterized the evolution of the genus Homo from
earlier ancestors), ER.A short version on the theory that we are born to run:
March 22 to May 5 Humans: biocultural evolution and history
a. biological and cultural evolution compared, G&Z, Ch. 14, 313-320. Pinker, Forward to
Buss, editor, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, xi to xvi, PR, ER. A
splendid introduction to evolutionary psychology.
b. general features of human cultures of interest to anthropologists and evolutionary
biologists: kinship, marriage, nepotism, reciprocity and exchange, inheritance, descent.
Brown, Human Universals, PR and ER, p.1-38, 88-156.
c. the mating system (monogamy, polygyny, polyandry). G&Z, 321-324.
d. male and female mating strategies. Chapters 4,5 and 6 of Buss, 2008, Evolutionary
Psychology, men’s and women’s long term and short term mating strategies, PR.
Recommended for further interest: Schmitt, Fundamentals of human mating
Strategies, 258-280; Sugiyama, Physical attractiveness in adaptationist perspective, 292-
330; Campbell & Ellis, Commitment, love and mate retention, 419-438, all in Buss, editor,
Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, on PR. Schmitt and Sugiyama articles also on ER.
e. sexual selection, mate guarding and the origins of patriarchy. G&Z, 327-333. Smuts, Male
aggression against women: an evolutionary perspective,on ER. Smuts, Evolutionary
origins of patriarchy ,on ER. Emily Martin, The egg and the sperm: how science has
constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles, on ER. Tavris,
Misreading the gender gap, NYT editorial, ER, class handout. Campbell, Feminism and
Evolutionary Psychology, in Barkow, editor, Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for
Social Scientists, p.63-92, on ER. Recommended for further interest: Malamuth et.al.
Sexual Coercion, 394-414, in Buss, Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology,on PR.
f. cooperation and conflict within the family. Chapters 7 and 8, Problems of parenting and
kinship, in Buss, Evolutionary Psychology, 2008, on PR. Case, Lin, McLanahan,
Educational attainment in blended families, on ER (one of several studies by the health