The Evolutionary Explanation of What?

Evolutionary Explanation of Psychopaths

Psychopaths are brutal individuals, having no empathetic concern for others. Initially, the existence of psychopaths seems to be a mystery from an evolutionary point of view. On close examination, however, it can be accommodated by evolutionary theory. Brutal individuals excelled meek individuals in the desperate circumstances where they had to fight their competitors over natural resources for...

Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation

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Explanation Versus Meta-Explanation: What Makes a Case More Convincing

Comparative analysis of the roles of explanation and meta explanation is conducted assessing the validity of explanation exchanged between human agents. Meta explanation links the overall structure of a current scenario with that of previously learned scenarios of multi agent interaction. The scenario structure includes communicative actions of involved agents and argumentation attack relations...

Evolutionary Psychology and the Explanation of Ethnic Phenomena

In a recent series of articles, Hislope (1998, 2000) and Harvey (2000a, 2000b) have raised questions about the usefulness of “evolutionary theory” especially for any purpose other than identifying “distal” causes of ethnic phenomena. This article responds to those views and argues that evolutionary psychology shows great promise in contributing to the explanation of contemporary ethnic identiti...

Evolutionary Psychology and the challenge of adaptive explanation