Charlie Kirk & The Psychology of Evolution (#350)

Religion on the Mind

In this week’s Top of Mind segment, I address the Charlie Kirk assassination through cognitive distortions, calling out the all-or-nothing thinking that's turning him into either a blessed martyr or democracy's destroyer when the reality is more nuanced. I also push back against the dangerous idea that speech equals violence, pointing out that Kirk's murder serves as a stark reminder that actual bullets—not words—constitute real violence.

For this week’s main episode, I’m going solo. I start by sharing how my own faith deconstruction included grappling with evolution. From questioning young earth creationism to eventually embracing evolutionary theory by my late twenties, and how evolution informs my therapeutic practice.

Then, I go into how psychology has fully embraced evolutionary explanations across five key areas:

attachment theory (which appears across species and helped our ancestors survive through bonding),
shame (as an evolved social conscience that keeps us aligned with group norms),
sexual jealousy (as mate-guarding behavior found throughout the animal kingdom),
anxiety (as an overactive alarm system that kept our ancestors alive through hypervigilance), and
depression (as either energy conservation during adverse conditions or analytical rumination for solving complex problems.)

These evolutionary frameworks help reduce client shame by showing that their struggles aren't personal defects but rather ancient survival systems that are now mismatched to our modern world.

In the Patreon-only portion, I dive deeper into attachment research with macaques, the neuroscience of shame and anxiety across species, mate-guarding behaviors from chimpanzees to humans, and two competing theories of depression—the hibernation model and analytical rumination hypothesis.

Episodes Mentioned:

Episode with Adrian Wyard | To Accept Theistic Evolution (#2)

To Trust Science (#28)

Evolution Myths & Long Lifespans in Genesis (#36)

Who’s Afraid of Evolutionary Psychology? (#47)

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