I am rather worried by the title of this book. Using the term “evolutionary psychology” somehow implies that there are pockets of creationist flat‐earther psychologists lurking around. Indeed, of course, there may very well be – probably sitting on some US state school board or the governing body of some of the new British city academies. In fact, “evolutionary psychology” is a quite sensible way of pulling together a wide range of disjointed ideas into a coherent framework for the behavioural sciences. Much of early psychology was based on the bizarre idea that the human brain is a “blank slate” at birth. In actual practice more and more research has shown that the human brain at, or even before birth, has an astonishing range of capabilities and predilections. The ability to recognise faces, for example, is built into the human brain – newborn babies will learn to recognise different objects that resemble faces far more quickly than they will learn to distinguish between objects that do not. Even outside flat‐earth circles, a great deal of energy has been expended on arguing over “nature” versus “nurture” in the study of human behaviour – an exercise about as sensible as arguing, when calculating the area of a rectangle, which is the more important measure to know, the height or the length. Human behaviour is a result of an interaction between in‐built genetic factors and the external environment. Any psychological theory based only on one of these is likely to be unrealistic.
Some sections of this book are little more than rehashes of old sociobiological ideas, and some of the chapters really belong in a biology textbook rather than in a book aimed at psychologists. Most of it can, however, be warmly recommended to readers at the advanced undergraduate or postgraduate level in psychology and its related disciplines, as a good source of original ideas. Conventional psychology trapped itself into a narrow and unreal cul‐de‐sac, partly under the influence of theorists such as B.F. Skinner, partly due to an obsession with appearing to be “scientific” rather than “social,” and partly due to an awareness of the intense controversy stirred up by suggesting that there are any innate differences between different people. Evolutionary psychology does, at the very least, suggest some ways of reconnecting psychology to the real world. Even in my own specialised area, the chapter on Evolutionary Psychology and Mental Health is going to be well worth drawing to the attention of those psychiatrists who leap over‐enthusiastically to the idea that there are simple genetic explanations for the complex disorders they have to treat. This is not really a public reference library book, and this is probably not the appropriate journal to discuss it in in depth, but all university libraries catering for the broad range of the behavioural sciences should certainly consider acquiring copies for their lending stock.
