This volume aims to clarify the epistemic potential of applying evolutionary thinking outside biology, and provides a survey of the current state of the art in research on relevant topics in the life sciences, the philosophy of science, and the various areas of evolutionary research outside the life sciences. By bringing together chapters by evolutionary biologists, systematic biologists, philosophers of biology, philosophers of social science, complex systems modelers, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, linguists, historians, and educators, the volume examines evolutionary thinking within and outside the life sciences from a multidisciplinary perspective. While the chapters written by biologists and philosophers of science address theoretical aspects of the guiding questions and aims of the volume, the chapters written by researchers from the other areas approach them from the perspective of applying evolutionary thinking to non-biological phenomena. Taken together, the chapters in this volume do not only show how evolutionary thinking can be fruitfully applied in various areas of investigation, but also highlight numerous open problems, unanswered questions, and issues on which more clarity is needed. As such, the volume can serve as a starting point for future research on the application of evolutionary thinking across disciplines.

“Carter Phipps brilliantly expands our understanding of evolution by showing us that a new science is emerging—one that will holistically integrate our understanding of consciousness, cosmology, and evolution.” —Deepak Chopra Blending cutting-edge ideas with incisive spiritual insights, Evolutionaries is the first popular presentation of an emerging school of thought called “evolutionary spirituality.” Carter Phipps, the former executive editor of EnlightenNext magazine, asserts that evolution is not only a scientific but also a spiritual idea in a book whose message has the power to bring new meaning and purpose to life as we know it. Readers will be fascinated and enlightened by Evolutionaries, a book which Deepak Chopra, the world-renowned author of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes, Jesus, and Buddha, says “is going to help create a worldview that will influence our vision of the future direction of evolution and also our role in consciously participating in it.”

Charles Darwin changed the course of scientific thinking by showing how evolution accounts for the stunning diversity and biological complexity of life on earth. Recently, there has also been increased interest in the social sciences in how Darwinian theory can explain human culture. Covering a wide range of topics, including fads, public policy, the spread of religion, and herd behavior in markets, Alex Mesoudi shows that human culture is itself an evolutionary process that exhibits the key Darwinian mechanisms of variation, competition, and inheritance. This cross-disciplinary volume focuses on the ways cultural phenomena can be studied scientifically—from theoretical modeling to lab experiments, archaeological fieldwork to ethnographic studies—and shows how apparently disparate methods can complement one another to the mutual benefit of the various social science disciplines. Along the way, the book reveals how new insights arise from looking at culture from an evolutionary angle. Cultural Evolution provides a thought-provoking argument that Darwinian evolutionary theory can both unify different branches of inquiry and enhance understanding of human behavior.

A complete account of evolutionary thought in the social, environmental and policy sciences, creating bridges with biology.

Citing an 1859 letter that accused Charles Darwin of failing to acknowledge his scientific predecessors, a chronicle of the collective history of evolution dedicates each chapter to an evolutionary thinker, from Aristotle and da Vinci to Denis Diderot to the naturalists of the Jardin de Plantes. 20,000 first printing.

Where did we come from? What is our connection with other life forms? What are the mechanisms of mind that define what it means to be a human being? In the seventh edition of this revolutionary textbook, David M. Buss examines human behavior from an evolutionary perspective, providing students with the conceptual tools needed to study evolutionary psychology and apply them to empirical research on the human mind. Content is organised by topic, beginning with the challenges of survival, mating, parenting, and kinship; progressing to challenges of group living, including cooperation, aggression, sexual conflict and status, prestige, and social hierarchies. Key features of this edition include: • Updated and enhanced material based on an explosion of new theories and research, including dozens of new references. • Expanded coverage of topics including socioecology, behavior, emotions, and gender. • Exploration of evolutionary mismatches in several domains such as survival, kinship, and mating, including a discussion of internet dating. With a wealth of student-friendly pedagogy including critical thinking questions and case study boxes supporting the application of evolutionary psychology to real-world situations, this is an invaluable resource for undergraduates studying psychology, biology, and anthropology. The textbook is also supported by a range of instructor resources, including PowerPoint slides, a test bank, and an instructor’s manual, to help students achieve their higher learning goals.

Tim Lewens explores what it means to take an evolutionary approach to cultural change, and why this approach is often treated with suspicion. He makes an original case for the value of evolutionary thinking for students of culture, and shows why the concerns of sceptics should not dismissed as mere prejudice, confusion, or ignorance.

Evolutionary theory is one of the most wide-ranging and inspiring scientific ideas, and it offers a battery of methods that can be used to interpret human behaviour. However, researchers disagree about the best ways to use evolution to explore humanity, and a number of schools of thought have emerged. Sense and Nonsense, third edition, provides an introduction to the ideas, methods and findings of five such schools, namely sociobiology, human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution. In this revised and updated edition of their successful monograph, Brown and Lala provide a balanced and rigorous analysis that scrutinises both the evolutionary arguments and the allegations of the critics, carefully guiding the reader through the mire of confusing terminology, claim, and counter-claim, and polemical statements. This readable and informative introductory book will be of use to undergraduate and postgraduate students (for example in psychology, anthropology and zoology), as well as experts on one approach who would like to know more about the other perspectives and lay-persons interested in evolutionary explanations of human behaviour. Having completed the book, the reader will feel better placed to assess the legitimacy of claims made about human behaviour under the name of evolution and to make judgements as to what is sense and what is nonsense.

The Riddle of Organismal Agency brings together historians, philosophers, and scientists for an interdisciplinary re-assessment of one of the long-standing problems in the scientific understanding of life. Marshalling insights from diverse sciences including physiology, comparative psychology, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology, the book provides an up-to-date survey of approaches to non-human organisms as agents, capable of performing activities serving their own goals such as surviving or reproducing, and whose doings in the world are thus to be explained teleologically. From an Integrated History and Philosophy of Science perspective, the book contributes to a better conceptual and theoretical understanding of organismal agency, advancing some suggestions on how to study it empirically and how to frame it in relation to wider scientific and philosophical traditions. It also provides new historical entry points for examining the deployment, trajectories, and challenges of agential views of organisms in the history of biology and philosophy. This book will be of interest to philosophers of biology; historians of science; biologists interested in analysing the active roles of organisms in development, ecological interactions, and evolution; philosophers and practitioners of the cognitive sciences; and philosophers and historians of philosophy working on purposiveness and teleology.

Decision making cuts across most areas of intellectual enquiry and academic endeavor. The classical view of individual human thinkers choosing among options remains important and instructive, but the contributors to this volume broaden this perspective to characterize the decision making behavior of groups, non-human organisms and even non-living objects and mathematical constructs. A diverse array of methods is brought to bear-mathematical, computational, subjective, neurobiological, evolutionary, and cultural. We can often identify best or optimal decisions and decision making processes, but observed responses may deviate markedly from these, to a large extent because the environment in which decisions must be made is constantly changing. Moreover, decision making can be highly constrained by institutions, natural and social context, and capabilities. Studies of the mechanisms underlying decisions by humans and other organisms are just beginning to gain traction and shape our thinking. Though decision making has fundamental similarities across the diverse array of entities considered to be making them, there are large differences of degree (if not kind) that relate to the question of human uniqueness. From this survey of views and approaches, we converge on a tentative agenda for accelerating development of a new field that includes advancing the dialog between the sciences and the humanities, developing a defensible classification scheme for decision making and decision makers, addressing the role of morality and justice, and moving advances into applications-the rapidly developing field of decision support.