Thursday, September 17, 2009

Sociobiology Vs. Evolutionary Psychology

In class two days ago, my professor drew two flowcharts to illustrate the differences between traditional sociobiology as created by E.O. Wilson in the late 1970s versus Evolutionary Psychology as it is understood today.

Here's the Sociobio flowchart:
This is a pretty clear flowchart in my mind, and it can account for the behavior of most animals, except for the most cognitively developed apes, plus probably dolphins, whales, and elephants.
Evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, must take cognition into effect (given the cognitive revolution, which was taking place about the same time historically as the creation of Sociobiology and thus could not have had a huge effect on its construction and application to humans), among many other things.

Here's Evo Psych:

I felt a sort-of religious awe when I saw this flow chart, which seems to account for and map out nearly ever aspect of psychology (excepting sensation and perception, and probably personality theory). What I particularly like about this chart is that it shuts up two major criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology:
  1. The classic Anthropologist's critique, which says that Evolutionary Psychology is reductionistic of human behavior. This flow chart is hardly reductive, especially as compared to the sociobiological map. I firmly believe that when anthropologists are critiquing evolutionary psychology, they're actually critiquing Sociobiology and aren't aware of the major differences.
  2. It also quiets Lickliter's and Honeycutt's critique, which says that EP is does not account for possible changes relating to human development. Clearly this is fallacious, as there has always been Evolutionary Developmental Psychology, and this clearly lays that out.
Anyway, I was so inspired by these charts that I simply had to share them with the world.

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