文档介绍：In R. Burgess and K. MacDonald (Eds.), Evolutionary Perspectives on Human
Development, 2nd edition, pp. 21–72. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005.
**This document is an exact copy of the content of the paper. It closely resembles
the original in terms of pagination, but it is not exact.
22
THEORETICAL ISSUES IN THE STUDY
OF EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT
Kevin MacDonald and Scott L. Hershberger
When hen the first author wrote the introductory chapter of Sociobiological
ctives Perspectives on Human Development (MacDonald, 1988a), the basic
llllllllllllW approach was to attempt to integrate evolutionary thinking with
prominent strands of theory already influential in developmental psychology—
particularly social learning theory, cognitive developmental theory, behavior
ics, and ethology. The intent was not to provide an alternative to these
theoretical contributions, but to show how the revolution in evolutionary
thinking inaugurated by William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and G. C Williams
and culminating in E. O. Wilson’s (1975) Sociobiology could add richness and
insight into many areas of developmental psychology.
Whatever the merits of this approach, it soon became eclipsed by a much
more radical approach, that of evolutionary psychology (Tooby & Cosmides,
1992). Evolutionary psychology offered radical critiques of all of the theories
that traditionally held sway in developmental psychology. The attempt was not
to integrate and amend, but to overthrow and discard. The following describes
the program of evolutionary psychology and evaluates its critiques of influential
theories of development. The chapter concludes with an updated version of the
integrative approach adopted in the 1988 article. An important point is that the
big story of childhood is the development of the extraordinary human brain and
21
22 Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Development
our uniquely human domain-general cognitive abilities, w