The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

The Handbook advances the claim that evolutionary psychology is not merely a subdiscipline of psychology but a metatheoretical framework capable of integrating the entire field. Buss and his contributors argue that the mind consists of numerous domain-specific adaptations—mechanisms designed by natural selection to solve recurrent problems of survival, mating, parenting, and group living. This framework rejects the Standard Social Science Model, which treats the mind as a general-purpose learning device shaped primarily by culture. The Handbook's structure embodies this argument, organizing knowledge around adaptive problems rather than traditional psychological categories like cognition, emotion, or personality, and demonstrating how the evolutionary lens unifies findings across anthropology, medicine, law, and literature.

The 2015 second edition expands from one volume to two, reflecting the field's rapid growth over the intervening decade. Volume 1: Foundations covers conceptual foundations, methods, survival, mating, parenting, and group living. Volume 2: Integrations extends the framework into culture, coordination, interfaces with traditional psychology disciplines, and practical applications in public policy, consumer psychology, organizational leadership, and law. The second edition adds new chapters on the behavioral immune system, cultural evolution, religion, evolutionary genetics, and endocrinology, while dropping some earlier chapters. Contributors in the second edition include Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Martin Daly, and others, making it the most comprehensive single reference in the field.

Domain specificity is the conceptual spine of the Handbook's argument. Buss and contributors contend that the mind is not a general-purpose computer but a collection of specialized mechanisms, each designed to process specific inputs and generate specific outputs relevant to a particular adaptive problem. Pascal Boyer and H. Clark Barrett's chapter on intuitive ontology and domain specificity argues that humans possess distinct cognitive systems for reasoning about physical objects, living kinds, and minds, each with its own inferential rules. This contrasts with domain-general theories that posit broad learning or reasoning capacities. The domain-specificity thesis underlies the Handbook's organization: chapters are grouped by adaptive domain—survival, mating, parenting, group living—rather than by traditional psychological faculties.

Edward H. Hagen's chapter on controversial issues directly addresses the field's critics, including concerns about adaptationism, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and the testability of evolutionary hypotheses. The Handbook acknowledges these debates rather than dismissing them, but frames evolutionary psychology as a progressive research program that has generated novel predictions and survived empirical testing. Contributors argue that critics often mischaracterize the field as genetically deterministic or as ignoring cultural variation. The Handbook's response emphasizes that evolutionary psychology posits evolved mechanisms that are sensitive to environmental input and cultural context—the adaptations are for plasticity, not fixed behavior. This framing positions the field as complementary to cultural and developmental approaches rather than opposed to them.

The Handbook popularized and systematized the concept of evolutionary psychology as a metatheoretical framework. This is more ambitious than merely cataloging findings; it proposes that all psychological science—cognitive, social, developmental, personality, clinical—can be integrated under a single explanatory logic: the logic of evolved adaptations. Buss argues that traditional psychological disciplines are organized around proximate mechanisms and phenomena, while evolutionary psychology provides the ultimate-level explanation of why those mechanisms exist. The Handbook demonstrates this integration in sections on evolutionary cognitive, social, developmental, and personality psychology, and extends it to anthropology, genetics, endocrinology, political psychology, and literary study. This metatheoretical claim distinguishes the Handbook from other reference works that treat evolutionary psychology as one specialty among many.

The Handbook extends the framework established in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, edited by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. That 1992 volume introduced the concept of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness and laid the theoretical groundwork for domain-specific modularity. The Handbook, particularly the 2005 first edition, consolidated and expanded that framework, adding chapters on survival, parenting, kinship, and applications to law and literature that were absent from the earlier work. The Handbook functions as the field's comprehensive reference, while The Adapted Mind remains the foundational manifesto. Many contributors appear in both volumes, including Cosmides and Tooby, whose chapter on conceptual foundations serves as a bridge between the two projects.