Former LSE Philosophy PhD student and current CPNSS Research Associate, Andrew Goldfinch, has recently published his book, Rethinking Evolutionary Psychology.

In this book, Goldfinch dramatically reframes the way we think about evolutionary psychology. Rather than follow the standard way of thinking about evolutionary psychology as a paradigm and a pretender metatheory of the evolutionary behavioural sciences, Goldfinch argues that evolutionary psychology is better thought of as a heuristic research programme within the evolutionary behavioural sciences. Elucidating evolutionary psychology as a heuristic illuminates those aspects of adaptationist methodology in psychology that deserve serious attention. It reveals evolutionary psychology to be a unique set of concepts, research strategies and recipes for generating new and bold discoveries in psychology; a searchlight that can identify and chart plausible and unexplored research trajectories; a constrained yet creative way to win new facts that would otherwise be lost to the infinite space of random trial and error.

Rethinking Evolutionary Psychology is available now from Palgrave Macmillan.