Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evolutionary Analysis In Law: An Introduction And Application To Child Abuse, Owen D. Jones

Owen Jones

For contemporary biologists, behavior - like physical form - evolves. Although evolutionary processes do not dictate behavior in any inflexible sense, they nonetheless contribute significantly to the prevalence of various behavioral predispositions that, in turn, tend to yield observable patterns of behavior within every known species.

This Article explores the implications for law of evolved behavioral predispositions in humans, urging both caution and optimism.

Part I of the Article provides A Primer in Law-Relevant Evolutionary Biology, assuming no prior knowledge in the subject. Part II coins the term evolutionary analysis in law and proposes a model for conducting it. That …

Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown

Culum Brown, PhD

Whether fish feel pain is a hot political topic. The consequences of our denial are huge given the billions of fish that are slaughtered annually for human consumption. The economic costs of changing our commercial fishery harvest practices are also likely to be great. Key outlines a structure-function analogy of pain in humans, tries to force that template on the rest of the vertebrate kingdom, and fails. His target article has so far elicited 34 commentaries from scientific experts from a broad range of disciplines; only three of these support his position. The broad consensus from the scientific community is …

Is Your Learning Style Paranoid?, Kirby Farrell

kirby farrell

We learn—and grow—by engaging with anomalies: new things that don't fit our familiar categories. It's a gut process, not just a philosophical choice. Anxiety can make us paranoid about what's new and strange. Knowing that can spur fascination and help us to adapt.

Incest Taboos And Kinship: A Biological Or A Cultural Story?, Dwight W. Read

Dwight W Read

Peace And The Human Animal: Toward Integration Of Comparative Evolutionary Psychology And Peace Studies., Nancy Dess

Nancy K Dess

Peace is arguably the problem of the 21st century. Peacefulness is not uniquely human, but a dearth of it among humans disproportionately threatens people and other animals around the globe. The urgent need for peace—if not immediately, everywhere, at any cost, then soon, as a pervasive norm—coincides with unprecedented scholarly attention to peace and to the implications of evolution for psychological functioning in the context of complex sociality. The time is ripe to integrate evolutionary perspectives into peace studies. Toward that end, this chapter describes potential impediments to an evolutionary peace project, provides a basic lexical and conceptual tool kit, …

Cultural Assimilation: The Political Economy Of Psychology As An Evolutionary Game Theoretic Dynamic, Atin Basu Choudhary, Dave Cotting

Atin Basu Choudhary

In this paper, we model the interaction between idiocentric and allocentric immigrants in two settings – in a society that is predominantly collectivist and in a society that is predominantly individualist. Immigrants, either allocentric or idiocentric, can also be entity theorists (fixed mindset) or incremental theorists (growth mindset). We use evolutionary game theory to model how the host country cultural environment places selective pressure on the cultures of immigrant populations. This has implications for how well immigrants assimilate into their host country. Our results show: (a) depending on the initial ratio of allocentric and idiocentric immigrants, assimilation is either complete …

The Diverse Neurogeography Of Emotional Experience: Form Follows Function, Christoper Sharpley, Vicki Bitsika

Vicki Bitsika

The experience of emotion underlies emotional expression and consequent action. Although several theoretical models of emotion have suggested that emotional expression is reciprocally involved with sensory inputs and behavioural responses to environmental stimuli, these discussions have largely focused upon fear and its survival value to the organism. By describing research studies across a wide range of emotions and the specific brain regions that are associated with those emotions, this review raises the hypothesis that the “form” of emotional experience neurogeography has followed the “function” associated with developing complex emotional and behavioural responses to challenging environmental stimuli. This separation of emotions …

The Evolution Of Child Fire Involvement, Rebekah Doley

Rebekah Doley

Extract:

In a legal context the term “arson” is often not applied to child fire-setting because it is generally accepted that children as young as 10 years cannot form an “intention” to commit a crime. Sometimes the term “fire-play” is used as an alternative, yet many child development specialists and educators see this as a misnomer because, the word “play” connotes positive, learning activities. Statistically, however, it seems a consistent trend world-wide that a significant number of deliberately lit fires are started by juveniles. It raises the question, then, whether these young people have “always” lit fires or whether this …

Access To Another Mind: Naturalistic Theories Require Naturalistic Data, Mark A. Krause, Gordon Burghardt

Gordon Burghardt

If there is to be a natural theory of consciousness that would satisfy both philosophers and scientists, it must be based on naturalistic data and minimal clutter accumulated from semantic arguments. Carruthers offers a 'natural' theory of consciousness that is rather myopic. To explore the evolutionary basis of consciousness, a natural theory should include comparative psychological and neurological data that encompass nonlinguistic measures. Such an approach could provide a clearer picture of the adaptive function, mechanisms, and origins of consciousness.