Cassidy Angela
Leeds University Business School, Maurice Keyworth Building, Leeds LS2 9JT, England.
Hist Psychol. 2007 May;10(2):199-226. doi: 10.1037/1093-4510.10.2.199.
This article outlines the major threads of controversy around the emerging subject of evolutionary psychology in the U.K. mass media during the 1990s. Much of this controversy centered on the role of evolution in shaping human gender roles and sexualities, contributing to the subject's mass appeal. This case is used to illustrate the argument that in theorizing about evolution and humans, "human nature" and "human origins" both provide a flexible resource for making arguments about how people do and should relate to one another and that such theorizing is therefore reflective of how power is held (and contested) in society. In the case of popular evolutionary psychology, shifts in the U.K. political landscape during the 1990s combined with changes in gender and sexual politics to create a situation where evolutionary theorizing about humans became more acceptable than it had been in the past. This was particularly true in left-liberal media, where a newfound compatibility between certain aspects of Darwinism and feminism created a very different space for debating gender, sexuality, and the role of human nature in today's society.
本文概述了20世纪90年代英国大众媒体围绕新兴的进化心理学主题产生的主要争议点。这场争议大多集中在进化在塑造人类性别角色和性取向方面的作用，这也促成了该主题对大众的吸引力。此案例用于说明这样一个观点：在关于进化与人类的理论探讨中，“人性”和“人类起源”都为论证人们如何相互关联以及应该如何相互关联提供了灵活的资源，因此这种理论探讨反映了社会中权力的持有（以及争夺）方式。就大众进化心理学而言，20世纪90年代英国政治格局的变化，再加上性别和性政治的变革，营造出一种氛围，即关于人类的进化理论比过去更容易被接受。在左倾自由派媒体中尤其如此，在那里，达尔文主义的某些方面与女权主义之间新发现的兼容性为讨论性别、性取向以及人性在当今社会中的作用创造了一个截然不同的空间。
