PSY 292: Evolutionary Psychology

Buss Chapter 3: Combating the Hostile Forces of Nature

1. What is folk biology?
2. What is the adaptive problem in food acquisition?
3. What is neophobia in rats?
4. Give examples of the importance of food selection in humans: sharing, social interactions, language.
5. What adaptations do humans have to prevent food poisoning? How dies disgust fit in? Can it be suppressed?
6. What is the antimicrobial hypothesis? Be familiar with the work of Sherman and colleagues. How does their study exemplify the type of hypothesis testing in EP?
7. Why does Buss say that human use of alcohol is a by-product of evolution?
8. What is the Embryo-protection hypothesis? Be able to describe the study by Fleishman and Fessler, 2007, and relate it to this hypothesis.
9. The Hunting Hypothesis has been advanced to help us understand human evolution. Relate it to tool use, social behavior. How does our physiology show our reliance on meat?
10. Differentiate the following hypotheses related to hunting: provisioning hypothesis and showoff hypothesis.
11. What is the gathering hypothesis? The scavenger hypothesis?
12. Why is the hunting hypothesis stronger than the others according to Buss?
13. What gender differences in spatial abilities support the evolution of division of labor by gender?
14. What is biophilia?
15. What is the savannah hypothesis related to landscape and habitat preferences?
16. What are Orians and colleagues’ stages of habitat selection?
17. Differentiate fear and phobia.
18. What are the ways that fear and anxiety can promote protection?
19. What are common human fears? How do these relate to phobias? How does this relate to the idea of preparedness?
20. What are antipredator adaptations in human children?
21. What is Darwinian medicine? What are evolved human natural defenses for fighting disease?
22. What is senescence? What is pleiotrophy?
23. Be familiar with the section on suicide (pp. 101-102).