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AbstractUtilizing an evolutionary perspective has proven fruitful in a number of areas of interest outside of the standard psychological or anthropological topics. This includes a wide range of fields from applied disciplines such as law, criminology, medicine, and marketing, to the study of the imagined worlds found in art and literature, the domains of the humanities. A number of excellent books, as well as numerous articles, detail the impressive work done in applying evolutionary insights to the study of art and literature. This article focuses on evolutionarily informed explorations of popular culture, an area that, only relatively recently, has benefited from research taking this approach. The existing scholarship in this area will be reviewed, and future directions and challenges highlighted.

Kin terms such as "brothers," "sisters," and "motherland" are frequently used in both political and patriotic speech. Johnson (1986, 1987) has argued that this use of kin terms in patriotic or rhetorical speech can be predicted on the basis of evolutionary psychology. He has suggested that the human inclination toward nepotistic behavior can be called forth by the successful manipulation of kin terminology. In this study, two hypotheses were examined concerning the evocativeness of kin terminology in political speech and the influence of birth order on the effectiveness of such terminology. The first hypothesis was that kin terms would be more effective than more distant relationship terms (like "friend") in evoking a positive response. Kin terms elevated agreement with the views expressed in the speech that the subjects heard. The second hypothesis, that middleborns would be less likely to respond to such kin term usage than first or lastborns, was based on previous work on birth order and family relations (Salmon and Daly, in press). And in fact, middleborns were less likely to be influenced by the use of kin terms than first or lastborns in this study.

This volume's aim is to start the process of using theory and findings of evolutionary psychology to help make the world a better place to live. Taking evolutionary psychology explicitly into applied areas, it includes a reasonable scope of applications from pornography to psychopaths and from morality to sex differences in the workplace.

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the "science wars" over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines.