Introduction

This volume brings together essays by scientists and humanists representing many disciplines but united in a common purpose: to explore the possibilities of understanding the imagination–both how it operates and what it makes–as the product of evolution. I stress the phrase “explore the possibilities.” Few of these contributors would call themselves evolutionary psychologists, but the storm of opposition that EP has aroused and the way that opposition has taken up arms is a cautionary tale about how academic debate can be sidetracked by search-and-destroy operations. In works like Hilary and Stephen Rose’s recent Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Harmony Books, 2000), contributors often freeze their target in order to shoot at it.