From Darwin to Eternity

Evolutionary moral psychology.
by Michael Price, Ph.D.

The Simplest Way to Fix Banking: End Bonuses

EU countries are currently considering placing strict limitations on the size of banker bonuses. Is this a good idea? If you value the survival of (Western?) civilization, then the answer in yes. Read More

Punish the Shirkers! Especially the Low-status Ones

When politicians speak of punishing freeloaders, they portray it as a matter of fairness. But their moralizing is too often undermined by a status-based selectivity that isn’t fair at all: low-status people don't freeload more than high-status people, but they're more likely to get punished for it. Why does this bias exist? Read More

Why Cheaters Win

Human nature is adapted for cheating, but it's also adapted for fair play. How can we create environments in which our adaptations for fairness are allowed to prevail? Read More

Does "Group Selection" Explain Behavior in Investment Banks?

The relevance of group selection to human affairs is one of the most contentious issues in behavioral science. How well does group selection explain behavior in organizations like investment banks? Either pretty well or pretty terribly, depending on what you mean by "group selection". Read More

Resolving the Debate about Group Selection in Humans

Is "group selection" necessary for explaining human cooperation? This question can be answered only via appeals to the evidence, and the evidence suggests that individuals are exquisitely designed both to harvest the benefits of cooperation in groups, and also to minimize the costs of being exploited by free riders. Read More

Morality: What is it Good For?

People are passionate about morality, but morality is too important to leave to passion alone. In order to be more rational about morality, we need to consider the origins, nature, and usefulness of morality, and doing so requires an evolutionary perspective. Read More

Self-Interest as God’s Interest

In order to persuade others to join their cause, people often portray their own interests as the interests of some higher-level entity such as society, humanity, or God. Why is this such a common rhetorical strategy, and why does it frequently backfire? Read More

What's Your Social Status? Depends Who You Ask

In complex societies such as our own, it’s possible to be high status in one segment of society while being low status in another. When diverse status communities co-exist in this way, is it good or bad for society? And why do such different definitions of “high status” emerge in the first place? Read More

The Dark Side of Altruism

The mobster Jimmy Burke was renowned both for his spectacular generosity and his terrifying cruelty. How could two traits that seem so different co-exist in the same person? The answer to this question has important implications for our understanding of human altruism. Read More

Why Evolutionary Psychology Is Unlikely to Be Wrong

Are evolutionary psychology's core assumptions radical and extraordinary? Many people still think so. From a biological perspective, however, it would actually be far more extraordinary if these assumptions were wrong than if they were right. Read More

Is Sexual Promiscuity More Natural than Commitment?

The basic argument of the popular book Sex at Dawn is that human sexual nature is essentially promiscuous. This book is provocative, fun to read, and deeply flawed. Here are a few key things it gets wrong. Read More

Why Banks (and Regular People) Take Stupid Risks

Risk-taking is seen as a bad thing in many contexts (e.g. banking), but over human evolutionary history, risky behavior has on balance paid off. If evolution "wants" us to take risks, why does our risky behavior so often lead to disaster? Read More

Was Monogamy Established for the Benefit of Women?

By 1,000 years ago, monogamy had replaced polygamy as the accepted marriage system in most of Europe. Did this change benefit one sex more than the other? Although people often think of polygamy as a system that advantages all men over all women, the reality is not so simple. Read More

Why We Think Monogamy Is Normal

For most of human existence, men and women have regarded polygamy as a normal and often advantageous marriage arrangement. In modern Western societies, however, monogamy is seen as normal and polygamy as an "exotic exception". How and why did this transition occur? Read More

Are People "Naturally" Polygamous?

Western civilization is both fascinated and repelled by the idea that a man could have more than one wife at a time. In the USA, polygamy-themed shows like Big Love and Sister Wives have attracted much attention, as has the trial of polygamist Warren Jeffs. Read More

How Science Can Help Us Be More Rational About Morality

We are, as a species, remarkably preoccupied with making rules about how people ought to behave. This moralistic tendency is not an inherently good or bad quality, it's simply a fact of human nature. But it would be nice if people could be more rational in the way that they create moral rules. Read More

The Real Reason Men Cause More Sex Scandals Than Women

As sex scandals involving powerful men seem to be getting increasingly commonplace (Edwards, Lee, Schwarzenegger, Strauss-Kahn, Weiner, etc.), many have been asking: Why are men so much more likely than women to cause these scandals? Why, in other words, are men so much more willing than women to risk losing their careers and families in order to pursue new mating opportunities? Read More

Mental Evolution and the Freedom to Change

Welcome to my first post. I specialize in evolutionary psychology (EP), which means I use evolutionary theory to try to understand human nature. More specifically, I'm interested in the cognitive mechanisms that allowed human ancestors to solve adaptive problems in the evolutionary past, and which currently enable the behavior of modern humans. Read More

Michael Price, Ph.D., is a lecturer at the psychology department at Brunel University, West London. He is also the co-director at the Centre for Culture and Evolutionary Psychology.

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Evolutionary Moral Psychology.

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