The Big Picture of Evolution and Human Behavior

Today I was in a workshop on designing and sequencing writing and research assignments here at Grinnell College, where I’ve just started. The workshop leader asked us to think about the big-picture idea we want students to take away from our courses. In thinking about a course I’ll be offering this semester — titled Evolution and Human Behavior — here’s what I wrote:

The key interest of scholarship is to know better who we are as a species: why we are the way we are and not some other way, why we feel and think and do what we do, and why people in various places and times sometimes — or oftentimes — feel, think, or do things differently. All the disciplines and approaches offer tools and paths to build this understanding.

Not long ago, a few individuals came across a set of ideas (building on a long history of other ideas) that led to a new approach to these questions. Darwin’s famous quote, “There is grandeur in this view of life,” is relevant today in the social sciences. There’s grandeur, there’s excitement, and there is potential in this integrative, evolutionarily informed approach to understanding our species.

Evolutionary social science is integrating and revolutionizing our understanding of who we are. It gives us a unique framework to approach our oldest, most interesting, and most puzzling questions, integrating the tools of many approaches, including philosophy, biology, psychology, anthropology, engineering, economics, and so on. It can also help us understand our world, and who we are as individuals and communities, in new ways.

If you’re interested in the “why” questions, this approach often gets us the most powerful explanations with the fewest moving parts¹. The world is a product of long-run processes, and life is shaped by both complex and deceptively simple processes. Our minds are included in this. The revolution of evolutionary social science is still taking off, and stands to offer future generations useful answers to some of our oldest questions.

So the takeaway from this course is that an evolutionary perspective can lead to a type of understanding you don’t get to otherwise. It can lead to asking questions you wouldn’t think to ask otherwise — and therefore to an understanding of humanity, of ourselves, of our societies, that we won’t necessarily get to otherwise.

Credit to David Pinsof for this phrasing being in my mind at the moment. ↩

Footnotes