Andreas De Block

The idea has recently taken root that evolutionary theory and social constructivism are less antagonistic than most theorists thought, and we have even seen attempts at integrating constructivist and evolutionary approaches to human thought and behaviour. We argue in this article that although the projected integration is possible, indeed valuable, the existing attempts have tended to be vague or overly simplistic about the claims of social constructivist. We proceed by examining how to give more precision and substance to the research programme of evolutionary social constructivism, a task we accomplish by focusing on the specific selection pressures that may have shaped the psychological and cultural mechanisms that give rise to social constructions. The benefit of such an integration for social constructivism is to have a solid foundation in the natural sciences. For evolutionists, evolutionary social constructivism offers a wider assortment of methods with which to study the interplay between culture and human nature.

Sublimation is usually defined as a defense-mechanism that desexualizes the sexual instincts. This desexualization then results in socio-cultural activities and psychic health. That means that sublimation is a crucial concept for psychoanalytic thinking, because it seems to connect the Freudian metapsychology with both applied psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy. However, in this article I argue that within Freud's theory sublimation is an empty and redundant concept. It is a redundant concept as far as it 'explains' the socio-cultural tendencies of human beings, since these tendencies can be easily understood as the outcome of other defense-mechanisms, such as repression and identification. For that matter, Freud's only example of the sublimation process — found in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood — is in fact no sublimation, but a classic example of repression followed by symptom-formation. Secondly 'sublimation' is an empty concept with regard to the psychoanalytic therapy, because in that context it is used to explain something that simply never happens, at least according to Freud, namely a perfect recovery and a completely 'terminable' analysis.

Both the so-called high priests of atheism and the proponents of Intelligent Design argue that the Darwinian theory of evolution is more problematic for theism than any other scientific theory. Against the grain of most contemporary philosophers and theologians, I contend that their arguments are largely correct. Moreover, neo-Darwinism is especially threatening the soft theism or deism, defended by Darwin and several of the most prominent Darwinian theorists. For the proponents of ID, this implies that a more theistic science is needed, whereas Dennett and Dawkins hold that the triumph of Darwinism as a science goes hand in hand with the death of theism. However, I contend that a reconciliation of today’s evolutionary theory with theism is possible. In order to substantiate this claim, I sketch out different intellectually legitimate ways to immunize theism against the many ‘Darwinian dangers’

Some evolutionary psychologists claim that humans are good at creating superstimuli, and that many pleasure technologies are detrimental to our reproductive fitness. Most of the evolutionary psychological literature makes use of some version of Lorenz and Tinbergen’s largely embryonic conceptual framework to make sense of supernormal stimulation and bias exploitation in humans. However, the early ethological concept “superstimulus” was intimately connected to other erstwhile core ethological notions, such as the innate releasing mechanism, sign stimuli and the fixed action pattern, notions that nowadays have, for the most part, been discarded by ethologists. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we will reconnect the discussion of superstimuli in humans with more recent theoretical ethological literature on stimulus selection and supernormal stimulation. This will allow for a reconceptualisation of evolutionary psychology’s formulation of (supernormal) stimulus selection in terms of domain-specificity and modularity. Second, we will argue that bias exploitation in a cultural species differs substantially from bias exploitation in non-cultural animals. We will explore several of those differences, and explicate why they put important constraints on the use of the superstimulus concept in the evolutionary social sciences.

Maladapting Minds discusses a number of reasons why philosophers of psychiatry should take an interest in evolutionary explanations of mental disorders and, more generally, in evolutionary thinking. First of all, there is the nascent field of evolutionary psychiatry. Unlike other psychiatrists, evolutionary psychiatrists engage with ultimate, rather than proximate, questions about mental illnesses. Being a young and youthful new discipline, evolutionary psychiatry allows for a nice case study in the philosophy of science. Secondly, philosophers of psychiatry have engaged with evolutionary theory because evolutionary considerations are often said to play a role in defining the concept of mental disorder. The basic question here is: Can the concept of mental disorder be given an objective definition, or is it rather a normative concept? Thirdly and finally, evolutionary thinking in psychiatry has often been a source of inspiration for a philosophical view on human nature. Thus evolutionary psychiatrists have suggested, for example, that man's vulnerability to mental disorders may well be one of the defining features of our species. Written by leading authors in philosophy, psychiatry, biology and psychology, this volume illustrates that many debates in contemporary philosophy of psychiatry are profoundly influenced by evolutionary approaches to mental disorders. Conversely, it also reveals how philosophers can help contribute to the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychiatry. It is important reading for a wide range of readers interested in mental health care and philosophy.

Evolutionary psychology and human sociobiology often reject the mere possibility of symbolic causality. Conversely, theories in which symbolic causality plays a central role tend to be both anti-nativist and anti-evolutionary. This article sketches how these apparent scientific rivals can be reconciled in the study of disgust. First, we argue that there are no good philosophical or evolutionary reasons to assume that symbolic causality is impossible. Then, we examine to what extent symbolic causality can be part of the theoretical toolbox of the evolutionary social sciences. This examination leads to the conclusion that it is possible to make evolutionary sense of Mary Douglas’s theory of disgust, and that her view of symbolic causality can and should inform evolutionary theories of (sociocultural) disgust.

Freud's anthropology is in fact little more than an amplified psychiatry. For Freud, the human being is in essence a sick animal. In this paper the author discusses why Freud made this so-called 'anthropological turn'. First it is shown that Freud wanted his psychoanalytic theory to be a 'Philosophy of Man'. Secondly it is argued that this can only be the case if the determinants of pathology, that psychoanalysis claimed to have discovered, are constitutive of human subjectivity. This means that the defensemechanisms and the partial sexual instincts interact in each of us and do so necessarily. Although Freud usually merely postulates the necessary character of this interaction, which always produces symptoms, one can nevertheless find some argumentation for this relation distributed in his work. The third part of this paper consists in an enumeration and explanation of the reasons Freud gives for the fact that we can never satisfy our sexual instincts and always have to rely on the substitutes he calls symptoms. Some of these reasons can be led back to the conflict between sexuality and culture, but most of them are determined in an organic way. If this Freudian intuition is true, the 'Philosophy of Man' should be replaced by the 'Philosophy of Psychopathology'

In 1984, Edward O. Wilson proposed the idea that natural selection has resulted in an adaptive love of life-forms and life–like processes (‘biophilia') in humans. To date, the idea of biophilia has been viewed as an ultimate explanation of many conservation attitudes in humans. In this paper, we contend that environmental ethics has little to gain from the biophilia hypothesis. First, the notion is open to various and even conflicting interpretations. Second, the empirical findings that do seem to corroborate a more well–defined version of the biophilia hypothesis can often be accounted for by alternative hypotheses. Third, the evolutionary reasoning behind the biophilia hypothesis tends to be unclear, and sometimes even inaccurate.