Abstract

Evolutionary Psychology www.epjournal.net – 2007. 5(3): 632-641 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Book Review Missed Connections: Integrating Proximate and Ultimate Explanations in Cognitive Neuroscience A review of Steven M. Platek, Julian Paul Keenan, and Todd K. Shackelford (Eds.), Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007, 616 pp. US$65 ISBN: 978-0-262-16241-8 (cloth). Robert O. Deaner, Department of Psychology, Grand Valley State University, MI. Email: robert.deaner@gmail.com (Corresponding author) Stephen V. Shepherd, Department of Neurobiology, Duke University Medical Center, NC. Email: svs@duke.edu As readers of this journal will happily attest, evolutionary thinking now penetrates and energizes virtually all areas of psychology (Gaulin and McBurney, 2003; Buss, 2005, 2007; Gray, 2006). As readers may also recognize, an exciting recent trend is that scholars are bringing evolutionary thinking to fields that might appear even further from its purview, including law (Jones, 2004), religion (e.g., Boyer, 2001; Atran, 2002; Wilson, 2003), history (Smail, 2007), aesthetics (e.g., Dissanyake, 1994; Miller, 2000), literature (e.g., Carroll, 1994; Gottschall and Wilson, 2005; Barash and Barash, 2005), and morality (e.g., Hauser, 2006; Haidt, 2007). In this new volume, Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (hereafter ECN), editors Platek, Keenan and Shackelford go the other way, bringing evolutionary thinking to an area where most people would