Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology at UT

Dr. Kremer turned me onto Dr. Buss at UT and I registered to receive the Evolution and Human Behavior Journal. I was green with envy for the folks that got to go the 2005 Conference at UT. Steven Pinker was the keynote and Robert Trivers was a speaker. There is a paywall on the journal but that is typical of academic research. There was a review of a book on the Price Equation in the current issue. EvoPsyc WIN.

The good news here is the preponderance of non-Blank Slate thinking that replaces fuzzy introspection in the old psychology and the lack of thought in post-modern accounts of human striving. The science is in - imagination is a heterogeneous process started 3,500,000,000 years ago that still uses, where it can, ancient means for making guesses about what happens next. Single cells behave semi-autonomously as a thin soup of organic compounds surrounded by a membrane delineating the internal life from the cosmic environment. Using the tricks of multicultural organisms, our phenotypes include several billion specialized cells in an optimum admixture of bones, guts and brains. Invertebrates good tricks support vertebrate good tricks. Memory works on a single neuron. Vast interconnections of neurons form meta-neurological structures of the fish, the amphibian, the reptile and the early mammals. The lemur brain and the primate brain do much of the heavy lifting of human cognition. Only a thin layer of cortical structure provides the full flower of imagination.

Resistance is useless, it's evolutionary psychology or nothing.