Class notes
Evolutionary Psychology (Mayr, Dawkins, & a bit of Leakey)
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This is a summary of the readings for Mayr, Dawkins, and Leakey
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SDRPERNST MAYR
In What Kind of World Do We Live?
Answers can be categorized into three classes:
1. A world of infinite duration
● Aristotle → world had always been in existence
● Other philosophers:
○ It’s constant and had never changed
○ It’s going through different stages (“cycling”) but would always return to an earlier stage
● Problem: no beginning
2. A constant world of short duration
● Creationism & Christian view
● Belief in a supreme being, an all-powerful God → created the entire world as described in
Genesis
○ All animals and plants are perfectly adapted to each other and their environment
○ Everything in the world today is still as it was when it was created
● Problem= In conflict with finding of science
● Things started to change a little, beginning with the rise of evolutionism
○ Started with the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century
■ Copernican Revolution → earth is not the center of the universe
■ Geology → age of the earth
■ Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck → evolutionary theory (1809)
■ BUT biblical worldview still prevailed until 1859
● Scala naturae (the Great Chain of Being)
○ Compromised science and the biblical worldview
○ “All entities in this world were arranged in an ascending ladder, beginning with
such inanimate objects as rocks and minerals, rising through lichens, mosses,
and plants, and through corals and other lower animals to higher animals, and
from them through mammals up to primates and man.”
○ Also viewed the world and never changing and simply to reflect the mind of the
creator who had ordered everything in a sequence that led toward perfection
3. An evolving world
● Eventually, the evidence for the conclusion that the world is not constant became so
overwhelming that it could no longer be denied; hence, the evolving world view
● The world is of long duration and is forever changing/evolving
● What kind of change?
○ Regular changes → day/night, tides (lunar cycle), seasons, years, etc.
○ Irregular → tectonic plates, severity of wind, aperiodic climatic changes (El Nino, ice ages,
etc.), periods of prosperity in a given nation's economy
○ Evolution → change with a directional component
■ Scala naturae could be converted into a biological escalator → organic world as a whole
moved from the simplest organisms to ever more complex ones, culminating in man
● Proposed by Lamarck
○ Evolution → consists of a change from the simple to the complex and from the
lower to the higher (always directional, particularly toward every greater
perfection)
● Later, a consensus on what evolution is emerged:
○ “Evolution is change in the properties of populations of organisms over time.”
■ Unit of evolution: population (note: unit of selection: individual)
■ Genes, individuals, and species also play a role, but it is the change in populations that
characterizes organic evolution
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, SDRP
Darwin and Darwinism
● Darwin (12 February 1809)
● Saw that there are two aspects of evolution (independent of each other):
○ Anagenesis
■ “Upward” movement of a phyletic lineage → its gradual change from an ancestral to a derived
condition
○ Cladogenesis
■ Splitting of evolutionary lineages or the origin of new branches (clades) of the phylogenetic
tree
■ Always begins with an event of speciation, but the new clade may become an important
branch of the phylogenetic tree by diverging increasingly from the ancestral type
How and Why Does Evolution Take Place?
The Retarding Influence of Widely Held Philosophical Views
● People, until about 80 years after the Origin of Species (1859), were still resisting the ideas of Darwin.
The reason for this was due to the universally held philosophical ideas in the worldview of Darwin’s
opponents.
● Darwin introduced four new concepts:
○ Population thinking
○ Natural selection
○ Chance
○ History (time)
● Ideas during Darwin’s time:
1. Typological Thinking (Essentialism)
● Essentialism → all seemingly variable phenomena of nature could be sorted into classes,
with each class being characterized by its definition (its essence)
● This essence is constant (invariable) and sharply demarcated against all other such
essences
● E.g. The class of trees → defined by a trunk and leafy crown
● Variation among members of a class are accidental and irrelevant
● Essentialism is the basis of saltation theories of evolution (see later)
2. Population Thinking (Darwin)
● What we find among living organisms are variable populations, not constant classes/types
○ Every species is composed of numerous local populations wherein every individual is
uniquely different from every other individual
● Favors the acceptance of gradualism
3. Finalism (Aristotle)
● Belief that the living world has the propensity to move toward “ever greater perfection”
○ Evolution moved necessarily from mower to higher, from primitive to advanced, from
simple to complex, from imperfect to perfect.
● Believed in the existence of some built-in-force to drive evolution
What Evolves?
● Population
○ Individuals do not evolve in e genetic sense in a life course, but does in a phenotypic sense
○ Population iois the lowest level of living organizations to evolve
■ It is the most important site of evolution
■ Evolution is best understood as the genetic turnover of the individuals of every
population from generation to generation
○ Particularly, it is the local Population (deme) → consists of the community of potentially
interbreeding individuals of a species at a given locality
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