Adil Zeshan

"THE TABULA OF human nature was never rasa and it is now being read”. Thus wrote William Hamilton, who ranks among the greatest of Charles Darwin’s intellectual heirs. Decades later, Darwinian psychology emerged in the wake of many stellar contributions by evolutionary biologists, forged upon the insights into natural selection's sculpting of the human mind, arguably evolution's most intricate creation. The intellectual pursuit of human nature is a journey into a book full of wonders, a journey that spans a whole world and millions of years in time.

What is the nature of our human nature? This fascinating question has echoed through the centuries, encountering the best of mankind’s deep reflections in some, and the worst sorts of ostracism in others. Surely it is no accident that wherever genuine inquiry into seeking out the elusive answer has met with suppression, that portion of mankind has walked in the long, dark shadows accompanying immense human suffering of the most terrible kind.

Thanks to a new science of the mind, evolutionary psychology, the key to understanding ourselves is now increasingly less mysterious. The fleeting surface experiences of our daily lives all depend on a hidden universal human nature that has extraordinarily deep roots, stretching back into the uncharted mists of time. Human nature is not genetically predetermined; to think otherwise gratuitously trivialises the very essence of the Darwinian argument. We know that the fixed rules underlying our psychological mechanisms, which are embedded deeply within us, can, and do, generate a virtually infinite number of behavioural outcomes, simply through changes in the contexts and environments in which our psychological mechanisms operate. The vast array of behaviours, both the familiar and the peculiar, of our fellow humans throughout recorded history, whether current, recent, or ancient, is the greatest occurring natural experiment testifying in favour of the deep facultative spirit of our human nature.

Darwinian psychology is psychology that takes Darwin seriously. All of culture and psychology, I venture to say, is biology. Live organisms, which psychologists focus their studies on, are biological machines and so accordingly conform to biological principles. Given that the unifying principle in all of biology is the principle of evolution by natural selection, it follows that the behaviour of living organisms must be explicable in terms of evolution by natural selection. This is a potent idea, for it carries with it the seeds of immense explanatory power. Just as with evolutionary biology, among the many charms of adopting a Darwinian inquiry into the intricacies of the human mind is not in just simply appreciating the blend of adaptive sophistication and substandard improvisation present in its very structure, but also in understanding the deep-seated context in which both forms exist and operate. This Darwinian psychology is the broad canvas under which I intend to situate this blog.