August 18, 2003
Publications
New textbook probes 'The Origins of Mind'
Bruce Bridgeman, professor of psychology and psychobiology, has published
a new textbook, Psychology & Evolution: The Origins of Mind
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003).
Evolutionary
psychology, writes Bridgeman, “applies the principles of biological
evolution to the great questions of psychology: What are the bases of
experience, behavior, mind, and memory, of development and social interaction?
Where do they come from, and what are they for?”
Bridgeman uses evolutionary theory to help elucidate the foundations
of human perceptions, experiences, and behaviors. Some of the topics addressed
in the book include:
• Uses and misuses of evolution
• Courtship and reproductive adaptations
• Language development
• Perception, memory, and consciousness
• Mental illness
In the “Evolutionary Psychiatry” chapter, Bridgeman writes
about addictive drugs: “The evolutionary history of addictive drugs
suggests that addicts are not freaks of nature, suffering from some bizarre
abnormality, nor are they diseased. They are just relatively normal people
faced with a temptation that evolution has not prepared them to handle.”
Considered the “long-lost stepchild of the biological sciences,”
psychology is beginning to take its place as the biological science of
human behavior and experience, writes Bridgeman. Given the strides of
genetics and molecular biology, it is time to apply this “new biology”
to the field of psychology, says Bridgeman, whose book grew out of a seminar
on psychology and evolutionary theory he has taught at UCSC since the
early 1980s.
