Exercise 4 - summarize Goldfinch

Write a 250 word (max) summary of one section of Goldfinch, A. (2015). Rethinking evolutionary psychology. Palgrave Macmillan. Consider the summary guidelines we’ve discussed in class.

After class 3.1, I will :post a summary of the first sections of this reading, both to provide an example and to help you understand the reading. (It’s not intended as a perfect model for you to follow). Compare my summary to the original text to see how I expand certain parts (in order to help a reader follow the argument) while also condensing the text (by eliminating quotes and details).

Group A: summarize section 2.7.4 (pp. 64-68)

Group B: summarize section 2.7.5 (pp. 68-71)

Please review exercise guidelines, follow GenAI policy, and submit an updated workload report. Citations are not necessary for this exercise.

:x summary

Summary of Boyd, first three sections:

• Goldfinch suggests that evolutionary psychology is potentially useful for generating hypotheses to explain organisms’ traits. The method is to think of selection pressures as “problems” that can decrease an organism’s reproductive fitness and variations in traits as potential “solutions” to those problems that increase reproductive fitness (i.e., allow an organism to reproduce its genes at a higher rate). These problems and solutions can be proposed as testable hypotheses. Goldfinch then describes several objections to this method that many scholars have found to be sufficient reasons to reject evolutionary psychology.
• 2.7.1 No Stable Problems Objection: Goldfinch asks questions that challenge a certain evolutionary model in which stable environments are said to pose problems for species. Those species solve those problems by evolving traits that better match the stable environments in ways that increase their reproductive fitness. According to Goldfinch, Sterenly challenges this model by arguing that environments actually contain no stable problems. Sterenly argues that species’ changing traits also change the environment in which the species evolve. Thus, Sterenly argues, environments contain only dynamic problems, not stable problems as assumed by evolutionary psychology.
• 2.7.2 The Fine Grain Problem: Even if there are stable problems that evolution can solve, Goldfinch notes, it is not clear how we decide what counts as one problem vs. several problems. He describes Sterenly and Griffiths’ “grain problem” argument: it is impossible to know how detailed or fine-grained evolutionary problems are. For example, they ask whether mate selection is one problem or several distinct sub-problems, each with their own evolutionary solutions. The inability to offer non-arbitrary way to identify problems, they imply, creates a problem for evolutionary psychology. |
• 2.7.3 No Constraints Objection: Even if we ignore these two objections and assume that we can hypothesize how adaptive solutions might address adaptive problems, Goldfinch asks how we should limit the types of solutions we propose. He notes a long-standing worry that evolutionary psychology has few limits on the types of explanations it offers for how traits might be adaptive since there are so many ways that traits might affect organisms’ fitness. |