Behaviour explained by its history and its substrate.
8 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
James M. Dabbs & Mary G. Dabbs · 2000
Synthesises decades of research linking testosterone to dominance, risk-taking and status-seeking across species and social contexts, while…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Chimpanzees: Self-Recognition
Gordon G. Gallup · 1970
Marks chimpanzees with an odourless dye while they are anaesthetised and finds they touch the mark on their own body after seeing it in a mirror, the…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour
W. D. Hamilton · 1964
Shows that a gene for helping relatives can spread by natural selection whenever the benefit to the recipient, discounted by the degree of…
+7 more at this level
12 of 15 works
James M. Dabbs & Mary G. Dabbs
Synthesises decades of research linking testosterone to dominance, risk-taking and status-seeking across species and social contexts, while cautioning the hormone shifts behaviour along existing tendencies rather than creating new ones.
Robert Plomin
Argues DNA is the most consistent predictor of who we become across psychological traits, and that polygenic scores will increasingly let genetic differences be measured directly - a claim critics say runs ahead of what the evidence supports.
Gordon G. Gallup
Marks chimpanzees with an odourless dye while they are anaesthetised and finds they touch the mark on their own body after seeing it in a mirror, the original evidence that a non-human animal can recognise itself.
David M. Buss
Across 37 cultures on six continents, women placed more value than men on a mate's resource-earning potential and men placed more value than women on youth and physical attractiveness, a pattern Buss interprets as evidence for evolved, sex-differentiated mating psychology rather than one culture's convention.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jaak Panksepp & Jules B. Panksepp
Lists seven recurring methodological failures in evolutionary psychology, from unfalsifiable just-so stories to neglect of actual brain mechanisms, arguing the field too often substitutes narrative plausibility for evidence.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Dana R. Carney, Amy J. C. Cuddy & Andy J. Yap
Reported that holding an expansive body posture for two minutes raised testosterone, lowered cortisol and increased risk tolerance, a finding that became one of psychology's most popular claims before a large pre-registered replication found no hormonal effect at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jaime C. Confer et al.
Answers the most common objections to evolutionary psychology - unfalsifiability, genetic determinism, ignoring culture - and argues the field's methods are no less rigorous than the rest of psychology's, even where its specific hypotheses remain contested.
W. D. Hamilton
Shows that a gene for helping relatives can spread by natural selection whenever the benefit to the recipient, discounted by the degree of relatedness, exceeds the cost to the helper - the formal rule underlying kin selection.
Robert L. Trivers
Shows that natural selection can favour helping a non-relative, provided the help is likely to be repaid later, and derives from this the psychology needed to sustain it - emotions like gratitude, guilt and moralistic aggression against cheaters.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert L. Trivers
Argues the sex that invests more in offspring becomes the choosier one in mate selection and the less-investing sex competes harder for mating access, a single principle from which most sex differences in animal - including human - mating behaviour can be derived.
Richard C. Lewontin
Argues a heritability estimate describes variance within one population under one set of environments and says nothing about what caused any individual's trait or what would happen if the environment changed, a distinction routinely lost when heritability is popularised.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David Premack & Guy Woodruff
Poses the question that named the field: whether a chimpanzee watching a human actor with a problem attributes to that actor unobservable states like purpose and knowledge, and reports experimental evidence that at least this one chimpanzee did.
link checked 17 Sept 2026