Regular psych vs. evolutionary psych

I have been taking a self-directed home study course in evolutionary psychology. I didn’t learn evolutionary psychology in college. When my copy of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind 3^rd ed. by David Buss arrived I put it beside a copy of Exploring Psychology: Sixth Edition in Modules by David Myers.

I made a side-by-side comparison of regular old psychology with new evolutionary psychology – both thoroughly secular texts. I started at the top – with consciousness. Myers’ index has 7 entries on consciousness; Evolutionary Psychology has zero entries on consciousness. What about happiness? -- 6 entries in plain psychology; zero in evolution.

Personality is covered extensively in the Myers text. The evolutionary text explains that “evolutionary psychology is now grappling with ways to incorporate individual differences and species-typical psychological mechanism within a unified conceptual framework.” Dreams - zero. Intelligence- zero.

Love is discussed in both texts. Evolutionary psychology explains love it in terms of waist-to-hip ratios and mate-switching hypotheses. Mating behavior gets 42 entries in Buss. 

I wondered, “if Darwin’s idea transformed everything, why is the evolutionary psychology text so thin and sketchy?” Why are evolutionary explanations of human psychology so shallow and why has it taken so long for evolutionary thought to penetrate psychology?" It is because the implications are so astonishing.

Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist and co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA Francis Crick explained it well when he wrote:  “your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. You‘re nothing but a pack of neurons. There is no ‘you’ separable or separate from your body. More specifically, there is no ‘you’ separable from your brain.”

The full implications of evolutionary naturalism means that all our emotions serve ultimately sole to help assure our genes survive to the next generations. ALL mental powers and capacities - love (of people, art, music, literature), language, sexual preference, faith (or lack therof), dreams, motivation, consciousness, and our of self exists ultimately for gene-level survival and reproduction.

I think its pretty significant to think that the theory of evolution hinges, not on the fossil record, but on a belief that everything human, all humanity throughout human history must be explainable by variation, survival and reproductive advantages in an unbroken line backwards through to the Pleistocene era (the a blink of a geologic eye).