Scott Barry Kaufman recently reviewed Glenn Geher and Nicole Wedberg's Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin's Guide to Living a Richer Life in Scientific American. The review is based on Kaufman's introduction to the book, but goes beyond just framing and describing the book. He adds a valuable critique of the writers's approach. In concluding he writes that "...those working within the field of positive evolutionary psychology should look not only at the individual parts that may have increased reproductive fitness in our distant past, but also at the whole person, right here, right now, listening to their dreams, desires, priorities, and conflicts and helping them become something greater than the sum of their parts."
To that I would like to add that we need not only to look at the whole person, but to see every person as a member of a social group. Humans are social animals and can only be understood in a social context, and it is in that context that Kaufman's call for a discussion of "meaning" becomes, well, meaningful.
Scott Barry Kaufman: Toward a Positive Evolutionary Psychology (Scientific American, August 30, 2019)
