Foreword by Helen Fisher, Biological Anthropologist, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University
With breakthroughs in genetics in the 1930s and 40s, Mendel’s theory of genetic inheritance and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection became integrated. With this “modern synthesis,” as it is hailed, our intellectual forebears finally began to understand how speciation and evolution actually work. But I have come to believe we are now in the midst of a far greater synthesis of scientific ideas.
Researchers have begun to understand some of the brain pathways associated with feelings of romantic love, attachment, social conformity, and religiosity. Others have uncovered some of the neurochemistry of trust, altruism, and wanderlust. Some of the genes linked with curiosity and creativity have been established. The mental machinery that guides our mating strategies is becoming understood. And with inroads into epigenetics, scientists have begun to show how environmental forces turn genes on and off, affecting how we—and our offspring—are likely to behave. The nature/nurture argument is dead. We are witnessing the true fusion of biology and culture, of psychology and brain architecture, of personality, neurochemistry, genetics and evolution, of brain and mind.
This synthesis is not complete. Some therapists cling to the concept that we emerged from the womb as “blank slates,” that our childhood makes us who we are. Some psychologists still overlook the importance of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other forms of brain research, regarding the brain as just a standard toolbox that can tell us nothing about what makes us tick. Many neuroscientists study brain activity without considering why these activation patterns evolved. And many deride evolutionary psychology as a ream of just-so stories.
I find this narrow focus strange, for both practical and intellectual reasons. I work regularly with the press. And in my 30 years of fielding their queries, I have never once found a journalist who resisted the evolutionary, neurochemical, or genetic approaches to explaining why we do the things we do; journalists and many others outside the scientific community want holistic explanations. Moreover, uncovering the biological foundations of human behavior does not threaten the social sciences. On the contrary, I suspect that the more we come to understand the biological and evolutionary forces that drive human cognition and conduct, the more we will discover the powerful role that culture plays in sculpting human action.
Regardless of these naysayers, the growing fusion of the social and biological sciences is ushering in a vastly wider and deeper view of humanity. And this book by Geher and Kaufman is a wonderful contribution to this new synthesis.
Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller has written that “the mind evolved by moonlight.” He was referring to Darwin’s brilliant idea of sexual selection, the concept that many of our thoughts, feelings, motivations, and aptitudes evolved to win the mating game. Take poetry. One doesn’t need the poetic skills of Shakespeare, Frost, Baudelaire, or Akhmatova to survive another day. Like the peacock’s elaborate tail feathers, our outsized poetic talents (and many other seemingly unnecessary human capacities) most likely evolved to enchant a potential mating partner. Those forebears who were more talented with words, song, or some other exaggerated human trait won more sex, bore more young, and passed along their extravagant abilities to us.
Geher and Kaufman go further down this road. Using data from many disciplines, including evolutionary biology, behavior genetics, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, developmental psychology, social psychology, and personality psychology, they discuss the myriad unconscious neural mechanisms and evolutionary forces that prime us to do the things we do. I agree with them when they write in their preface that “human mating is arguably the single most important behavioral domain of human functioning.” To this end, they neatly unclothe many of our human sexual motivations, stripping them of the standard psychological explanations, then dressing them in their true evolutionary garb.
We are living in a thrilling time of scientific discovery. “Ah-ha” is on the lips of many who investigate the mental machinery of human thought and action. And I suspect that when our descendants look back, they will regard the modern synthesis of the 1930s and 40s as just the first step in the emergence of a far broader scientific synthesis—in which those of many disparate disciplines shed light on that ultimate palimpsest, the human mind. Darwin would tip a glass to Geher and Kaufman for their contribution to this growing enlightenment.