Regular psych vs. evolutionary psych

I have been taking a self-directed home study course in evolutionary psychology. I didn’t learn evolutionary psychology in college. When my copy of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind 3^rd ed. by David Buss arrived I put it beside a copy of Exploring Psychology: Sixth Edition in Modules by David Myers.

I made a side-by-side comparison of regular old psychology with new evolutionary psychology – both thoroughly secular texts. I started at the top – with consciousness. Myers’ index has 7 entries on consciousness; Evolutionary Psychology has zero entries on consciousness. What about happiness? -- 6 entries in plain psychology; zero in evolution.

Personality is covered extensively in the Myers text. The evolutionary text explains that “evolutionary psychology is now grappling with ways to incorporate individual differences and species-typical psychological mechanism within a unified conceptual framework.” Dreams - zero. Intelligence- zero.

Love is discussed in both texts. Evolutionary psychology explains love it in terms of waist-to-hip ratios and mate-switching hypotheses. Mating behavior gets 42 entries in Buss. 

I wondered, “if Darwin’s idea transformed everything, why is the evolutionary psychology text so thin and sketchy?” Why are evolutionary explanations of human psychology so shallow and why has it taken so long for evolutionary thought to penetrate psychology?" It is because the implications are so astonishing.

Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist and co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA Francis Crick explained it well when he wrote:  “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. You‘re nothing but a pack of neurons. There is no ‘you’ separable or separate from your body. More specifically, there is no ‘you’ separable from your brain.”

The full implications of evolutionary naturalism means that all our emotions serve ultimately sole to help assure our genes survive to the next generations. ALL mental powers and capacities - love (of people, art, music, literature), language, sexual preference, faith (or lack therof), dreams, motivation, consciousness, and our of self exists ultimately for gene-level survival and reproduction.

I think its pretty significant to think that the theory of evolution hinges, not on the fossil record, but on a belief that everything human, all humanity throughout human history must be explainable by variation, survival and reproductive advantages in an unbroken line backwards through to the Pleistocene era (the a blink of a geologic eye).

A Christian Weltanshauung and Psychology - The Nature of Mankind (Dualism)

What differentiates humans from the animals?  Are we just advanced animals, with more complex mental lives? Christianity brings with it belief that we are spiritual beings. Christians believe in a form of dualism, meaning “of two natures.” We have a physical body and physical brain, but we also have a spiritual nature that is somehow distinct from the body, but that operates in unity with the body. The Bible is clear that there is something about us that makes us special - distinct from the animals.

We are made in the image of God.

René Descartes is famous in the history of psychology and philosophy for “Cartesian dualism.”

Descartes applied deductive reasoning to support his worldview belief that Mankind is made of body and soul. Though distinct, the body and soul interact with one another. Descartes believed that the physical and spiritual connected at the conarium (pineal gland). 

Cartesian dualism was not a new idea. Descartes, like Christians and others for centuries, believed that human nature was both physical and spiritual.  The ancient Greeks thought our spiritual and physical natures connected in the lungs (after all, when you quit breathing you die) and Hippocrates, who was ahead of his time, thought it happened in the brain.

Naturalistic worldviews are monistic, meaning of one nature.

A Christian Weltanshauung and Psychology – The Nature Of Mankind (#1)

Psychology is interested in what it means to be human. Worldview beliefs about the nature of Mankind flow from your beliefs about  God and the accuracy of the Bible. The Bible has much to say about what it means to be human. Biblical anthropology is an important part of the Christian worldview and is fundamental to studying psychology.

Biblical Anthropology or the Biblical Doctrine of Man is the study of what the Bible says about what it means to be human, what is human nature, and what does in means to have psuche. Biblical anthropology is interested in what it means to be the purposeful creation of God -- made in His image and likeness.

In Genesis we learn that God formed man of the dust of the ground. We are part of the natural order. As such, we have much in common with the animals. We have brains and bodies. Physically, we are like the animals, we even share DNA with animals. We are born, we grow old, and our bodies eventually die

However, like God and unlike the animals, we are spiritual beings. Unlike the animals, we have moral discernment, freedom to choose, and responsibility for our behavior. We are creative and we exercise dominion. We experience guilt, grace, and love. We were created to be in relationships, with God and with families and in societies. We have consciousness, a mind, and a soul.