Product Description: With the discovery of conditioned reflexes by I. P. Pavlov, the possibilities for experimenting, following the example set by the classical, exact sciences, were made available to the behavioral sciences. Many psychologists hoped that the component parts of behavior had also been found from which the entire, multifaceted cosmos of behavior could then be constructed...read more

Product Description: The role of genetic inheritance dominates current evolutionary theory. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, several evolutionary theorists independently speculated that learned behaviors could also affect the direction and rate of evolutionary change...read more

Product Description: Reveals the innate characteristics of human intelligence Humans are the inheritors of millenia of animal evolution­­indeed, a mere 1.6 percent genetic difference separates us from our closest relative, the chimp­­and yet clearly human intelligence is a thing apart...read more

A collection of original essays by a leading neurobiologist and primatologist shares the author's insights into behavioral biology, in a volume that focuses on three primary topics, including the physiology of genes, the human body, and the factors that shape human social interaction. By the author of A Primate's Memoir. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

A psychologist offers a detailed study of the genetic underpinnings of human thought, looking at the small number of genes that contain the instructions for building the vastly complex human brain to determine how these genes work, common misconceptions about genes, and their implications for the future of genetic engineering. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Product Description: Alexander J. Field is the Michel and Mary Orradre Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University.

Challenges currently accepted practices that involve coercing or controlling teenagers, identifying seven negative behaviors that should be avoided by parents while demonstrating how to accomplish goals in a relationship with a teen by changing the adult's behavior. Reprint.

(view table of contents)

Product Description: A fascinating examination of what science can and cannot explain about human nature. Are humans unique? Can animals think as we do? Will machines ever have consciousness? What is free will? For centuries, attempts to answer these questions have been the stuff of both bar-room debates and intense theological and philosophical dispute...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Do our genes determine our behavior? Do humans occupy a unique position in evolution? To clarify these provoking questions, the author takes the reader on an ambitious and entertaining journey through a variety of scientific disciplines...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

(view table of contents)

Appropriate as a textbook for graduate courses, The Evolution and Function of Cognition provides a systematic and progressively inclusive integration of the facts and principles of cognitive psychology. It includes contributions of information processing and reaction, and emphasizes historical continuity. In addition, the book shows how evolutionary psychology fits in with the mainstream of thought in psychological theory. The Evolution and Function of Cognition will benefit scholars and researchers interested in the general topics of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science.

(view table of contents)

Product Description: A perceptive examination of the on-going debate over the influence of genetics in our lives. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In a further development of the nature-nurture debate, this collection of articles questions how the human mind influences the content and organization of culture. In the study of mental activity, can the effects of evolution and history be teased apart?Evolutionary psychologists argue that cultural transmission is constrained by our genetic inheritance. Few social and cultural anthropologists have found this argument to be relevant to their work and many would doubt its validity. This book uniquely pitches the arguments for innatism against ethnographic perspectives that call into question the theoretical foundations of orthodox evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Ultimately the aim of the debate is to create an original set of mutually compatible theories that will open up new areas for interdisciplinary research.

Product Description: The Defective Image develops the argument that Darwinism is predicated on a profound epistemological flaw and proposes to demonstrate that the limitations in Darwinism can be illustrated by its inability to furnish a credible explanation for communication...read more

Since Darwin's time, comparative psychologists have searched for a good way to compare cognition in humans and nonhuman primates. In Origins of Intelligence, Sue Parker and Michael McKinney offer such a framework and make a strong case for using human development theory (both Piagetian and neo-Piagetian) to study the evolution of intelligence across primate species. Their approach is comprehensive, covering a broad range of social, symbolic, physical, and logical domains, which fall under the all-encompassing and much-debated term intelligence.A widely held theory among developmental psychologists and social and biological anthropologists is that cognitive evolution in humans has occurred through juvenilization -- the gradual accentuation and lengthening of childhood in the evolutionary process. In this work, however, Parker and McKinney argue instead that new stages were added at the end of cognitive development in our hominid ancestors, coining the term adultification by terminal extension to explain this process.Drawing evidence from scores of studies on monkeys, great apes, and human children, this book provides unique insights into ontogenetic constraints that have interacted with selective forces to shape the evolution of cognitive development in our lineage. (view table of contents)