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Nigel Nicholson1,2
The paper argues that evolutionary psychology offers a radical and challenging new perspective on human nature and organizational society. Its roots in a convergence of insights and scientific discoveries from diverse natural and human sciences are described, and how it seeks to avoid common fallacies of earlier biological reasoning about human society. Recurrent themes in human nature and their manifestations are summarized, including sex and personality differences, cognitive and affective biases, social orientations, and preferred modes of social exchange. The paper concludes that we suffer the consequences of poor fit between our inherited natures and many of the constructed environments in organizational society, but that new emerging forms of organization may present us with the opportunities for social relations closer to the ancestral paradigms of our psychology.
KEY WORDS: evolution; individual differences; community culture; change.
INTRODUCTION
The far-reaching implications for our understanding of human nature and society of Darwin's "dangerous" idea-the theory of natural selection (Dennett, 1995) have been vigorously debated by philosophers and scientists since its inception. Evolutionary psychology (EP) presents a new integrated perspective on this debate, by synthesizing knowledge from wide-ranging sources about the origin of our species, and by identifying how the evolved biogenetic themes in our psychology continue to penetrate every area of our lives and experience. My purpose in this paper is to describe these themes and consider how they relate to contemporary issues in organizational society.
I do so against the background of an explosion of interest and publication in the area. Centers for the study of the discipline are being founded at universities around the world. At the London School of Economics, one of these, the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences, has been hosting since 1995 a series of Darwin seminars, to increasingly packed houses, and drawing together scholars from many different fields. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the area is its capacity to bring together in common cause people from the natural and social sciences. This is highly unusual and quite new. We have been much more accustomed to perceiving and working within the boundaries of our disciplines, unable or unwilling to find true interdisciplinary partnership beyond them, hampered by incommensurate assumptions and...