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Evolutionary Thought in Psychology: A Brief History (Blackwell Brief Histories of Psychology) By Henry Plotkin

Evolutionary Thought in Psychology: A Brief History traces the history of evolutionary thought in psychology in an accessible and lively fashion and examines the complex and changing relations between psychology and evolutionary theory.

* First book to trace the history of evolutionary thinking in psychology from its beginnings to the present day in an accessible and lively fashion.

* Focuses on the rise of evolutionary theories begun by Lamarck and Darwin and the creation of the science of psychology.

* Explains evolutionary thought’s banishment by behaviorism and cultural anthropology in the early 20th century, along with its eventual re-emergence through ethology and sociobiology.

* Examines the complex and changing relations between psychology and evolutionary theory.

Summary: Pithy acount of how psychology dealt with evolutionary theory

Rating: 5

This is an amazingly compact summary of how psychology has alternately embraced and ignored developments in evolutionary theory over the past two centuries. The compactness is largely due to the superb writing, which often effortlessly compresses three points into a single short sentence. So good is the writing that when I tried to isolate extracts to illustrate this they started running into one another! Uncompressed, from another pen, I think this book could easily have run to 400 pages.

I found this book unusual in focusing on psychology alone. The familiar stages in its history took on a wholly new coloring when seen as either the embrace, or more interestingly the denial, of evolutionary theory. I've not seen the two stitched so tightly together, distinct from social science in general and social issues such as racism and eugenics.

The author boldly brings his account up close to the present, facilitating the weighing of how new developments in evolutionary theory such as evolutionary psychology contribute to psychology itself.

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Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123