Final Exam Flashcards
What were the two evolutionary psychological explanations for religiosity proposed by Kanazawa?
- Religiosity as the byproduct of animistic bias
- Religiosity as a tertiary adaptation
What is a type 1 error?
False positive
What is a type 2 error?
False negative
Explain the idea, proposed by Kanazawa, that religion is a byproduct of animistic bias
Kanazawa suggests that religion is a byproduct of the human tendency to see ambiguous events as being personal, animate, and intentional
Are primary adaptations domain-specific or domain-general?
Domain-specific
Are higher-level adaptations domain-specific or domain-general?
Domain-general
What is the “Singularity”?
A future period where technological advancement will happen so fast that humans will be irreversibly altered; brain and computer power will be combined
The “Singularity” is suggested by whom?
Kurzweil
What does Kurzweil suggest will result from the jump in technological advancement?
There will be no distinguishable difference between man and machine, biological and mechanical, etc.
Why are we so unaware of the imminent supposed burst in technological advancement?
Because so few people consider that the growth is exponential
Kurzweil suggested that the first half of the 21st century would be characterized by what three overlapping revolutions?
- Genetics
- Nanotechnology
- Robotics
Gene expression
The process by which cellular components produce proteins according to a genetic blueprint
Gene expression is controlled by what?
Peptides and short RNA strands
What can RNA interference do?
Turn off a gene by destroying the messenger RNA expressing it
What technologies are considered nanotechnologies?
Any technology in which a machine’s key features are measured by fewer than 100 nanometers
Which of the three revolutions outlined by Kurzweil is suggested to be the most profound?
Robotics
The human brain is how many standard deviations above the line predicting brain size from body size for primates?
Two to three standard deviations
What was one of the first hunter-gatherer groups whose life history was ever studied?
The !Kang San of southern Africa
Describe the !Kang San people of southern Africa
- Monogamous
- Musical
- Carefully spaced children (~4 years)
The !Kang people might have even migrated into Africa from where?
Asia
Describe the Ache of Paraguay
- Forest dwellers
- Lived in isolation until 1972
- Devastated by epidemics caught from missionaries
What does Mace suggest are the essential features of the human life history?
- Growth
- Mortality
- Fertility
Why are phenotypic correlations problematic?
Because heterogeneity in a population can obscure true relationships between life history variables
Human interbirth intervals are around how many years?
2.5-3.5 years
What is the grandmother hypothesis?
The idea that menopause exists so that women can help their children reproduce
Stabilizing selection
Acts against both extremes in a distribution to keep population average
Directional selection
Acts against one extreme of a phenotype (ie. shifts toward the other)
Disruptive (“diversifying”) selection
Acts against intermediate phenotypes (i.e. split in distributions toward extreme values)
Purifying selection (aka negative selection)
Conserves fixed trains and weeds out mutations at key loci
When does sexually antagonistic selection occur?
When the optimal phenotype is not the same for male and female offspring
What is the assumption of the adaptationist stance?
Phenotypes are adaptively constructed so we can hypothesize about how they increased ancestral fitness; if something common in species then it is probably designed that way because it solved an adaptive problem in an ancestral context
What are the strengths of the adaptationist stance?
- Can test different adaptationist hypotheses of adaptive origins
- Adaptationist hypotheses are fairly straightforward to test
What is reverse engineering?
Looking at how something works and thinking about what function would cause it to have this design
What are the limitations of the adaptationist stance?
- Well-acknowledged constraints on optimal designs and genes underwriting them
Pleiotropy
Distinct phenotypic effects from same allele
Phylogeny fallacy
Belief that specification for an organism’s particular phenotypic outcomes can exist independently of an in advance of real time developmental processes
What are the two sources of mortality?
- Senescence
- Extrinsic mortality
Senescence
Breakdown in biological function occurring as we reach maximum age
Intrinsic mortality
Death due to organism’s aging processes (“natural causes”)
Extrinsic mortality
Death due to environmental causes beyond your control
How long did the documented longest living human life?
122 years and 164 days
Disposable soma theory
Reproductive success higher when forgoing perfect self-repair in favour of reproduction
Trivers-Willard hypothesis
In bad times, it’s better to have daughters, but in good times, it’s better to have sons
Bateman’s principle
Males gain more of a reproductive advantage from each individual mating partner than females do
Variance in reproductive success is greater in what sex?
Males
What are the only other species with menopause?
Pilot whales and killer whales
Direct reciprocity
Help if benefit to other is greater than the cost to self
Indirect reciprocity
Help those who have helped others in the past
What are some of the benefits for women of long-term mating?
- Physical protection for themselves and their children
- Recurrent supply of provisions
- Help with the socialization, training, and influence of their children
What are some of the benefits for men of long-term mating?
- Increasing their ability to attract a desirable mate
- Increasing their paternity certainty by prolonged proximity and sexual access
- Increasing the survival of their children
- Increasing the reproductive success of their children
- Increasing state sand coalition allies through their wife’s extended kin
What % of mammalian species are monogamous?
3-5%
What are two common tactics men use in the “battleground” of pre-mating sexual conflict?
- Deception
- Sexual persistence
What are common tactics women use in the “battleground” of pre-mating sexual conflict?
- Frequency of sexual intercourse
- Expenditures of pooled economic resources
- Effort devoted to one set of kind vs the other
- Amount of parental investment each allocates
- Mating effort diverted to others outside the primary mateship
Men are particularly threatened by what kind of potential mate poachers?
Those who have superior job prospects, financial resources, and physical strength
Women are particularly threatened by what kind of potential mate poachers?
Those who surpass them in facial or bodily attractiveness
What kind of mating pattern do humans have?
Anisogamy
Anisogamy
2 sexes, fixed gamete sizes
Smith’s “Twofold Cost of Males”
- Cost one: individual asexual clones reproduce twice as fast
- Cost two: asexual females twice fitness of sexual ones due to genetic relation
Red Queen Hypothesis
Asexual reproduction will create essentially clones, because they have the same DNA, whereas sexual reproduction will create varied beings with different DNA
Sexual dimorphism
Phenotypic differences between females and males of same species
Sexual conflict theory
Potential selection for conflict in all phases of mating
Fisher’s sexy son hypothesis
Any slight preference for ornament creates a positive feedback loop
The social-brain hypothesis is an explanation for what?
The fact that monkeys and apes have unusually large brains compared with all other mammals and birds
What is the explanation for large brains in primates according to social-brain hypothesis?
Primates need large brains because they live in usually complex societies that involve many interdependent relationships that change dynamically
According to SBH, how can the typical group size for a species be predicted?
From the size of its neocortex (especially the frontal lobe)
Humans typically have how many belief states?
5
Our social world naturally consists of how many individuals?
Approx. 150
Monogamy
Males and females have one mate only (at least per mating season)
Polygyny
A male and several females (harem)
Polyandry
A female and several males
Promiscuity
Multi-male (& multi-female)
