This seminar explores the claim that the mind is an evolved device. Given the contemporary intellectual landscape, this means seriously engaging the emergent, and often conflicted and conflictual, field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology (and this seminar) approaches the mind as an unusual device in that it is constituted of multiple, functionally-specific sub-mechanisms. That is, the mind is a toolbox of specialized cognitive systems, each of which evolved to meet recurrent problems our ancestors (both near and distant) encountered in the environments they (then-) inhabited. In the seminar we will focus on those special-purpose systems that enabled and shaped human social life. Some of these are quite recent from an evolutionary perspective (e.g., language). Others are more ancient (e.g., adaptations to group living, including the capacities to cooperate and to engage in within-species violence). Still others are a combination of the two (e.g., the less-than-optimal repurposing among upright-walking hominids of spines that originally evolved in quadrupedal creatures). Among the questions addressed in the seminar are: What can an evolutionary perspective tell us about the way human minds are organized? What role does learning play in the development and expression of evolved mechanisms? What was the nature and specificity of the physical and social environments in which uniquely human cognitive systems evolved? What are the continuities and discontinuities between human social cognition and the social cognition of other animals? Is evolutionary theory equivalent to biogenetic determinism? What can the natural history of evolved systems reveal about contemporary beliefs and behaviors such as racial thinking, nationalism, and warfare? That is, can we use evolutionary theory to inform current debates about human experience?