STEM · Full roadmap · ~88 min read · 25 steps
🧬Evolutionary psychology, the honest version
Understand how evolution shapes the mind, and where the claims break down
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Unit 1
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Course overview
The one big idea
The mind is built by evolution to solve ancestral problems
A two-minute refresher on natural selection
Variation, heredity, differential reproduction
What counts as an adaptation
Adaptation versus byproduct versus noise
Genes care about copies, not just bodies
Inclusive fitness and kin selection (Hamilton)
Unit 2
The world the mind was built for
The environment of evolutionary adaptedness
When old wiring meets a new world
Evolutionary mismatch
Sexual selection, the other engine
Selection by mate choice and competition
Who pays more to reproduce
Parental investment theory (Trivers)
What the mate preference evidence actually shows
Mixed and contested findings
Unit 3
Modules: the mind as many tools
Domain-specific mental adaptations
The cheater detection experiment
Cosmides, Tooby, and the Wason selection task
Why strangers cooperate
Reciprocal altruism and tit-for-tat
Two flavors of helping
Kin altruism versus reciprocal altruism
Disgust as a guard system
Disgust as disease avoidance
Unit 4
Better safe than sorry
Error management theory
The jealousy debate
Jealousy research and its controversies
Is does not mean ought
The naturalistic fallacy
Just-so stories, the central criticism
Unfalsifiability and after-the-fact storytelling
Spandrels: not everything is an adaptation
Gould and Lewontin's critique
Unit 5
Replication and WEIRD samples
Reproducibility and unrepresentative subjects
Common mistakes to avoid
The traps that wreck casual evolutionary talk
What good evolutionary psychology looks like
Testable predictions and signs of design
A practice routine for thinking clearly
Turning the framework into a habit
Where to go next
Where to go next