Deck 1: Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology

Question 1

"(It) is not a place or a habitat, or even a time period. It is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of ancestral environments encountered by members of ancestral populations, weighted by their frequency and fitness-consequences." What is being referred to here?

A) The Great Chain of being
B) The Upper Pleistocene
C) The stone age
D) The EEA

Answer 1

The EEA

Question 2

SSSM means:

A) Standard social science mechanism
B) Standard social science model
C) Standard social science module
D) Special social science model

Answer 2

Standard social science model

Question 3

Natural Selection depends on:

A) The inheritance of acquired characteristics
B) Heritable variation and differential reproduction
C) Both a and b
D) Neither a nor b

Answer 3

Heritable variation and differential reproduction

Question 4

Evolution was first proposed by

A) The Ancient Greeks
B) The Babylonians
C) Erasmus Darwin
D) Charles Darwin

Question 5

Which of the following is a core principle of evolutionary psychology?

A) All behaviours are adaptive
B) All behaviours are hard-wired
C) Culture and learning are of little importance
D) None of the above

Question 6

The Modularity of Mind was published in 1983 by:

A) Maynard-Smith
B) Dawkins
C) Tooby & Cosmides
D) Fodor

Question 7

The term 'evolutionary psychology' was first coined by

A) Charles Darwin
B) E.O. Wilson
C) Richard Dawkins
D) John Tooby and Leda Cosmides

Question 8

Eugenics refers to

A) The process of genetic transmission
B) Selective breeding for the good of the species
C) Indiscriminate genocide
D) The inheritance of acquired characteristics

Question 9

Which of the following is an ultimate question?

A) Why do we find faeces disgusting?
B) How does schizophrenia develop?
C) Are men better at spatial tasks than women?
D) Which part of the brain is responsible for love?

Question 10

The 'Spandrel's of San Marco' (Gould & Lewontin, 1979) is a criticism of what?

A) Innateness
B) Inheritance
C) Adaptationism
D) Determinism

Question 11

What is the naturalistic fallacy?

A) Something must be good because it is natural
B) Something must be natural because it is good
C) We can understand nature by experimentation
D) We cannot understand nature by experimentation

Question 12

Which of the following is NOT an assumption of the cultural relativist (or SSSM) tradition?

A) Culture is an autonomous force
B) Learning processes are domain specific
C) Humans are born blank slates
D) Human behaviour is infinitely malleable

Question 13

Breland and Breland (1961) found that

A) Animals can be trained to do almost anything
B) Learning is a species-general process
C) Learning is constrained by species-specific 'instincts'
D) Positive reinforcement is more effective than punishment

Question 14

Phrenology is most similar to which of Tooby and Cosmides's principles?

A) Adaptiveness
B) Innateness
C) Modularity
D) The EEA

Question 15

If a plant with a white flower is crossed with a plant with a red flower and we find the offspring are all either white or red never pink this is evidence for

A) The particulate nature of inheritance
B) The blending nature of inheritance
C) Incomplete dominance
D) Heterozygous advantage

Question 16

The view that the mind is made up of domain-specific mental modules is central to what?

A) All evolutionary psychology
B) Sociobiology
C) Behavioural ecology
D) The Santa-Barbara School

Question 17

Who suggested 'biology will cannibalise psychology':

A) Dawkins
B) Wilson
C) Thornhill & Parker
D) Trivers

Question 18

What is the Great Chain of being?

A) The view that there is a natural hierarchy in life
B) Another term for decent with modification
C) The view that one can trace all organisms back to a single common ancestor
D) The fact that all creatures are genetically related to one another

Question 19

The modern synthesis is a combination of the work of which two people?

A) Darwin and Mendel
B) Darwin and Wallace
C) Lamark and Mendel
D) Dawkins and Darwin

Question 20

The EEA refers to:

A) Ecological environment of adaptation
B) Evolutionary environment of adaptation
C) Environment of evolutionary adaptation
D) Evolutionary ecology of adaptation