Summary
Contents
Subject index
Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Development, Second Edition considers the role of evolutionary theory in the field of developmental psychology to examine key topics of individual human development. This unique book fills an important gap in the literature, applying evolutionary models to human development by focusing on central development issues. The book emphasizes both domain-general evolved psychological mechanisms and domain-specific processes. The text also integrates behavior-genetic research with evolutionary and developmental principles. Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Development provides state-of-the-art groundwork in evolutionary theory as viewed by leading thinkers in the field.
Evolutionary Studies of Cooperation, Competition, and Altruism: A Twin-Based Approach
Evolutionary Studies of Cooperation, Competition, and Altruism: A Twin-Based Approach
The goal of the present chapter is to demonstrate the usefulness and importance of examining human developmental data from the joint perspectives of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. Behavioral genetics is concerned with the degree to which genetic and environmental variation underlie individual differences in behavioral traits. It offers a wide range of informative research designs capitalizing on the relative genetic relatedness and rearing circumstances of family members. Evolutionary psychology is concerned with across-species uniformities, in particular, the origins and functions of adaptations influencing behavioral patterns and strategies. It also tests the predictive power of broad theories originating in the field of evolutionary biology, such as Trivers's (1972) evolutionary theory of sexual selection and Hamilton's (1964) kin selection theory. Kin selection theory, which explains cooperation with reference to the relative genetic relatedness of the interactants, is especially relevant to the material to be reviewed.
Author's Note: The writing of this chapter was supported, in part, by an award from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH Grant 1 R01 MH63351), an American Fellowship from the American Association for University Women, and a California State University Senior Faculty Research Award.
These perspectives are not intended to replace other theories and approaches; rather, this chapter purports to illustrate, via empirical analyses of twin and adoption data, how a union of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology can enrich current theoretical and empirical efforts in the behavioral sciences. It will do so via a review of twins and adoption methods and findings.
Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology: Coming Together
The goals and objectives of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology differ broadly, as indicated above, yet their common interests have been generally neglected. Mealey (2001) has pointed out that both disciplines are concerned with the concept of kinship. Specifically, identifying traits showing heritable adaptive variation and determining how heritable and nonheritable differences map onto life history strategies would engage the research interests of individuals working within both areas. Evolutionary psychology offers behavioral genetics an additional perspective for interpreting findings, for example, on sex differences in heritability for some traits. Mealey and Segal (1993) found greater genetic influence on reproduction-related behaviors in male than female monozygotic (MZ) twins reared apart. This outcome is consistent with evolutionary expectations that females are more likely than males to be reproductively successful under adverse conditions. Last, behavioral genetics offers evolutionary psychology a rich assortment of research methods for assessing a range of novel hypotheses (Buss, 1984; Scarr, 1995; Segal & MacDonald, 1998; also see Segal, 1993, 2000a, and references therein).
Social Behavior: Genetic and Evolutionary Analyses
This section reviews special subdisciplines of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology that bear importantly upon the empirical studies to be reviewed. They include social genetic and kinship genetic theory.
Genetics of Social Behavior
Social genetics is the subdiscipline of behavioral genetics that combines genetic, developmental, and social influences on behavior. It is concerned with the proximal effects of genes on social behavior and organization, with attention to the ecological and evolutionary circumstances of organisms (Hahn, 1990). It has been recognized that almost all behavior expressed by highly social species occurs within social relationships (Scott, 1989, 1997). A key observation is that the genetic backgrounds of social partners may differentially affect individual and joint behaviors (Hahn, 1990).
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