free essay on evolutionary psychology

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction

History and background

• Domain-specific mechanisms
• Searching across species for broad theoretical principles
• Controversy
• Where was science invented?
• When did science begin?

evolutionary psychology

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Academia.edu - Evolutionary Psychology: The Academic Debate
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Evolutionary Psychology
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Evolutionary and Differential Psychology: Conceptual Conflicts and the Path to Integration
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Evolutionary Psychology
• Table Of Contents

evolutionary psychology , the study of behaviour, thought, and feeling as viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology . Evolutionary psychologists presume all human behaviours reflect the influence of physical and psychological predispositions that helped human ancestors survive and reproduce. In the evolutionary view, any animal’s brain and body are composed of mechanisms designed to work together to facilitate success within the environments that were commonly encountered by that animal’s ancestors. Thus, a killer whale , though distantly related to a cow, would not do well with a cow’s brain, since the killer whale needs a brain designed to control a body that tracks prey in the ocean rather than eating grass in a meadow. Likewise, a bat, though also a mammal , needs a brain designed to run a tiny body that flies around catching insects at high speeds in the dark. Evolutionary psychologists ask: What are the implications of human evolutionary history (e.g., living in omnivorous and hierarchical primate groups populated by kin) for the design of the human mind?

Charles Darwin himself perhaps deserves the title of first evolutionary psychologist, as his observations laid the groundwork for the field of study that would emerge more than a century later. In 1873 he argued that human emotional expressions likely evolved in the same way as physical features (such as opposable thumbs and upright posture). Darwin presumed emotional expressions served the very useful function of communicating with other members of one’s own species. An angry facial expression signals a willingness to fight but leaves the observer an option to back off without either animal being hurt. Darwin’s view had a profound influence on the early development of psychology .

In 1890 William James’s classic text The Principles of Psychology used the term evolutionary psychology , and James argued that many human behaviours reflect the operation of instincts (inherited predispositions to respond to certain stimuli in adaptive ways). A prototypical instinct for James was a sneeze, the predisposition to respond with a rapid blast of air to clear away a nasal irritant.

In 1908 William McDougall adopted this perspective in his classic textbook An Introduction to Social Psychology . McDougall believed that many important social behaviours were motivated by instincts, but he viewed instincts as complex programs in which particular stimuli (e.g., social obstacles) lead to particular emotional states (e.g., anger) that in turn increase the likelihood of particular behaviours (e.g., aggression).

McDougall’s view of social behaviour as instinct-driven lost popularity as behaviourism began to dominate the field in the 1920s. According to the behaviourist view championed by John B. Watson (who publicly debated McDougall), the mind is mainly a blank slate, and behaviours are determined almost entirely by experiences after birth. Anthropological observation in the 20th century also contributed to the blank slate viewpoint. Anthropologists reported vastly different social norms in other cultures , and many social scientists made the logical error of presuming that wide cross-cultural variation must mean no constraints on human nature .

The blank slate viewpoint began to unravel in the face of numerous empirical findings in the second half of the 20th century. A more careful look at cross-cultural research revealed evidence of universal preferences and biases across the human species. For example, men the world over are attracted to women who are in the years of peak fertility, whereas women most commonly prefer men who can provide resources (which often translates into older males). As another example, males in more than 90 percent of other mammalian species contribute no resources to the offspring, yet all human cultures have long-term cooperative relationships between fathers and mothers in which the males contribute to offspring. Looked at from an even broader comparative perspective, these general human behaviour patterns reflect powerful principles that apply widely across the animal kingdom. For example, investment by fathers is more likely to be found in altricial species (those with helpless offspring, such as birds and humans) than in precocial species (whose young are mobile at birth, such as goats and many other mammals).

Modern evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology, which emerged in the late 1980s, is a synthesis of developments in several different fields, including ethology , cognitive psychology , evolutionary biology, anthropology , and social psychology . At the base of evolutionary psychology is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection . Darwin’s theory made it clear how an animal’s physical features can be shaped by the demands of recurrent problems posed by the environment . Seals are more closely related to dogs than to dolphins, but seals and dolphins share several physical features shaped by common problems of aquatic life (where fins and streamlined body shape assist in catching one’s dinner and reduce the chance of becoming dinner for an aquatic predator). Besides overt physical features designed by natural selection, animals also inherit central nervous systems designed to generate the behaviours needed to run those bodies. The behavioral inclinations of a bat would not work well in the body of a dolphin or a giraffe, and vice versa.

Zoologists and comparative psychologists have uncovered many behavioral and psychological mechanisms peculiarly suited to the demands of particular species. For example, dogs use smell for hunting, and, consequently, they have many more olfactory receptors than humans do and are thousands of times more sensitive to various odours. Humans, on the other hand, can see in colour, whereas dogs cannot; colour vision may be useful for detecting ripe fruit, something humans eat but canines do not. Bats have echolocation capacities allowing them to create the mental equivalent of a sonogram of the night world through which they must navigate at rapid speeds, searching for foods that include rapidly flying insects.

In addition to differences in sensory and perceptual capacities, natural selection has favoured many open-ended learning and memory biases designed to fit the ecological demands confronted by each species. For example, rats have poor vision and rely on taste and smell to find food at night. Consequently, they easily condition taste aversions to novel flavours but not to visual stimuli. Quail, on the other hand, have excellent vision and rely on visual cues in food choice, and they show the opposite learning bias—conditioning nausea more readily to visual cues than to tastes or smells.

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. Although here is a broad consensus among philosophers of biology that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise, this does not entail that these philosophers completely reject the relevance of evolutionary theory to human psychology. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. However, some philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.

In what follows I briefly explain evolutionary psychology’s relations to other work on the biology of human behavior and the cognitive sciences. Next I introduce the research tradition’s key theoretical concepts. In the following section I take up discussions about evolutionary psychology in the philosophy of mind, specifically focusing on the debate about the massive modularity thesis. I go on to review some of the criticisms of evolutionary psychology presented by philosophers of biology and assess some responses to those criticisms. I then go on to introduce some of evolutionary psychology’s contributions to moral psychology and human nature and, finally, briefly discuss the reach and impact of evolutionary psychology.

1. Evolutionary Psychology: One research tradition among the various biological approaches to explaining human behavior

2. evolutionary psychology’s theory and methods, 3. the massive modularity hypothesis, 4. philosophy of biology vs. evolutionary psychology, 5. moral psychology and evolutionary psychology, 6. human nature, 7. applications of evolutionary psychology and prospects for further debate, other internet resources, related entries.

This entry focuses on the specific approach to evolutionary psychology that is conventionally named by the capitalized phrase “Evolutionary Psychology”. This naming convention is David Buller’s (2000; 2005) idea. He introduces the convention to distinguish a particular research tradition (Laudan 1977) from other approaches to the biology of human behavior. [ 1 ] This research tradition is the focus here but lower case is used throughout as no other types of evolutionary psychology are discussed. Evolutionary psychology rests upon specific theoretical principles (presented in section 2 below) not all of which are shared by others working in the biology of human behavior (Laland & Brown 2002; Brown et al. 2011). For example, human behavioral ecologists present and defend explanatory hypotheses about human behavior that do not appeal to psychological mechanisms (e.g., Hawkes 1990; Hrdy 1999). Behavioral ecologists also believe that much of human behavior can be explained by appealing to evolution while rejecting the idea held by evolutionary psychologists that one period of our evolutionary history is the source of all our important psychological adaptations (Irons 1998). Developmental psychobiologists take yet another approach: they are anti-adaptationist. (Michel & Moore 1995; but see Bateson & Martin 1999; Bjorklund & Hernandez Blasi 2005 for examples of developmentalist work in an adaptationist vein.) These theorists believe that much of our behavior can be explained without appealing to a suite of specific psychological adaptations for that behavior. Instead they emphasize the role of development in the production of various human behavioral traits. From here on, “evolutionary psychology” refers to a specific research tradition among the many biological approaches to the study of human behavior.

Paul Griffiths argues that evolutionary psychology owes theoretical debt to both sociobiology and ethology (Griffiths 2006; Griffiths 2008). Evolutionary psychologists acknowledge their debt to sociobiology but point out that they add a dimension to sociobiology: psychological mechanisms. Human behaviors are not a direct product of natural selection but rather the product of psychological mechanisms that were selected for. The relation to ethology here is that in the nineteen fifties, ethologists proposed instincts or drives that underlie our behavior; [ 2 ] evolutionary psychology’s psychological mechanisms are the correlates to instincts or drives. Evolutionary psychology is also related to cognitive psychology and the cognitive sciences. The psychological mechanisms they invoke are computational, sometimes referred to as “Darwinian algorithms” or as “computational modules”. This overt cognitivism sets evolutionary psychology apart from much work in the neurosciences and from behavioral neuroendocrinology. In these fields internal mechanisms are proposed in explanations of human behavior but they are not construed in computational terms. David Marr’s (e.g., 1983) well known three part distinction is often invoked to distinguish the levels at which researchers focus their attention in the cognitive and neurosciences. Many neuroscientists and behavioral neuroendocrinologists work at the implementation level while cognitive psychologists work at the level of the computations that are implemented at the neurobiological level (see Griffiths 2006).

Evolutionary psychologists sometimes present their approach as potentially unifying, or providing a foundation for, all other work that purports to explain human behavior (e.g., Tooby & Cosmides 1992). This claim has been met with strong skepticism by many social scientists who see a role for a myriad of types of explanation of human behavior, some of which are not reducible to biological explanations of any sort. This discussion hangs on issues of reductionism in the social sciences. (Little 1991 has a nice introduction to these issues.) There are also reasons to believe that evolutionary psychology neither unifies nor provides foundations for closely neighboring fields such as behavioral ecology or developmental psychobiology. (See the related discussion in Downes 2005.) In other work, evolutionary psychologists present their approach as being consistent with or compatible with neighboring approaches such as behavioral ecology and developmental psychobiology. (See Buss’s introduction to Buss 2005.) The truth of this claim hangs on a careful examination of the theoretical tenets of evolutionary psychology and its neighboring fields. We now turn to evolutionary psychology’s theoretical tenets and revisit this discussion in section 4 below.

Influential evolutionary psychologists, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, provide the following list of the field’s theoretical tenets (Tooby & Cosmides 2005):

• The brain is a computer designed by natural selection to extract information from the environment.
• Individual human behavior is generated by this evolved computer in response to information it extracts from the environment. Understanding behavior requires articulating the cognitive programs that generate the behavior.
• The cognitive programs of the human brain are adaptations. They exist because they produced behavior in our ancestors that enabled them to survive and reproduce.
• The cognitive programs of the human brain may not be adaptive now; they were adaptive in ancestral environments.
• Natural selection ensures that the brain is composed of many different special purpose programs and not a domain general architecture.
• Describing the evolved computational architecture of our brains “allows a systematic understanding of cultural and social phenomena” (16–18).

Tenet 1 emphasizes the cognitivism that evolutionary psychologists are committed to. 1 in combination with 2 directs our attention as researchers not to parts of the brain but to the programs run by the brain. It is these programs—psychological mechanisms—that are products of natural selection. While they are products of natural selection, and hence adaptations, these programs need not be currently adaptive. Our behavior can be produced by underlying psychological mechanisms that arose to respond to particular circumstances in our ancestors’ environments. Tenet 5 presents what is often called the “massive modularity thesis” (see, e.g., Samuels 1998; Samuels 2000). There is a lot packed into this tenet and we will examine this thesis in some detail below in section 3. In brief, evolutionary psychologists maintain that there is an analogy between organs and psychological mechanisms or modules. Organs perform specific functions well and are products of natural selection. There are no general purpose organs, hearts pump blood and livers detoxify the body. The same goes for psychological mechanisms; they arise as responses to specific contingencies in the environment and are selected for to the extent that they contribute to the survival and reproduction of the organism. Just as there are no general purpose organs, there are no general purpose psychological mechanisms. Finally, tenet 6 introduces the reductionist or foundational vision of evolutionary psychology, discussed above.

There are numerous examples of the kinds of mechanisms that are hypothesized to underlie our behavior on the basis of research guided by these theoretical tenets: the cheater-detection module; the mind-reading module; the waist/hip ratio detection module; the snake fear module and so on. A closer look at the waist/hip ratio detection module illustrates the above theoretical tenets at work. Devendra Singh (Singh 1993; Singh & Luis 1995) presents the waist/hip ratio detection module as one of the suite of modules that underlies mate selection in humans. This one is a specifically male psychological mechanism. Men detect variations in waist/hip ratio in women. Men’s preferences are for women with waist/hip ratios closer to .7. Singh claims that the detection and preference suite are adaptations for choosing fertile mates. So our mate selection behavior is explained in part by the underlying psychological mechanism for waist/hip ratio preference that was selected for in earlier human environments.

What is important to note about the research guided by these theoretical tenets above is that all behavior is best explained in terms of underlying psychological mechanisms that are adaptations for solving a particular set of problems that humans faced at one time in our ancestry. Also, evolutionary psychologists stress that the mechanisms they focus on are universally distributed in humans and are not susceptible to much, if any, variation. They maintain that the mechanisms are a product of adaptation but are no longer under selection (Tooby & Cosmides 2005, 39–40). Clark Barrett’s (2015) accessible and wide ranging introduction to evolutionary psychology sustains this emphasis on evolved mechanisms as the main focus of evolutionary psychology research. Barrett also expands the scope of evolutionary psychology and notes the addition of research methods developed since Cosmides and Tooby first set out the parameters for research in the field. Some of Barrett’s proposals are discussed in sections 6 and 7 below. Todd Shackleford and Viviana Weekes-Shackleford (2017) have just completed a huge compendium of work in the evolutionarily based psychological sciences. In this volume a vast array of different research methods are presented and defended and there are a number of entries comparing the merits of alternative approaches to evolutionary psychology.

The methods for testing hypotheses in evolutionary psychology come mostly from psychology. For example, in Singh’s work, male subjects are presented with drawings of women with varying waist hip ratios and ask to give their preference rankings. In Buss’s work supporting several hypothesized mate selection mechanisms, he performed similar experiments on subjects, asking for their responses to various questions about features of desired mates (Buss 1990). Buss, Singh and other evolutionary psychologists emphasize the cross cultural validity of their results, claiming consistency in responses across a wide variety of human populations. (But see Yu & Shepard 1998; Gray et al. 2003 for alternate conflicting results to Singh’s.) For the most part standard psychological experimental methods are used to test hypotheses in evolutionary psychology. This has raised questions about the extent to which the evolutionary component of evolutionary psychologists’ hypotheses is being tested (see, e.g., Shapiro & Epstein 1998; Lloyd 1999; Lloyd & Feldman 2002). A response profile may be prevalent in a wide variety of subject populations but this says nothing about whether or not the response profile is a psychological mechanism that arose from a particular selective regimen.

Claims that the mind has a modular architecture, and even massively modular architecture, are widespread in cognitive science (see, e.g., Hirshfield & Gelman 1994). The massive modularity thesis is first and foremost a thesis about cognitive architecture. As defended by evolutionary psychologists, the thesis is also about the source of our cognitive architecture: the massively modular architecture is the result of natural selection acting to produce each of the many modules (see, e.g., Barrett & Kurzban 2006; Barrett 2012). Our cognitive architecture is composed of computational devices, that are innate and are adaptations (Samuels 1998; Samuels et al. 1999a; Samuels et al. 1999b; Samuels 2000). This massively modular architecture accounts for all of our sophisticated behavior. Our successful navigation of the world results from the action of one or more of our many modules.

Jerry Fodor was the first to mount a sustained philosophical defense of modularity as a theory of cognitive architecture (Fodor 1983). His modularity thesis is distinct from the massive modularity thesis in a number of important ways. Fodor argued that our “input systems” are modular—for example, components of our visual system, our speech detection system and so on—these parts of our mind are dedicated information processors, whose internal make-up is inaccessible to other related processors. The modular detection systems feed output to a central system, which is a kind of inference engine. The central system, on Fodor’s view is not modular. Fodor presents a large number of arguments against the possibility of modular central systems. For example, he argues that central systems, to the extent that they engage in something like scientific confirmation, are “Quinean” in that “the degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system” (Fodor 1983, 107). Fodor draws a bleak conclusion about the status of cognitive science from his examination of the character of central systems: cognitive science is impossible. So on Fodor’s view, the mind is partly modular and the part of the mind that is modular provides some subject matter for cognitive science.

A distinct thesis from Fodor’s, the massive modularity thesis, gets a sustained philosophical defense from Peter Carruthers (see especially Carruthers 2006). Carruthers is well aware that Fodor (see e.g. Fodor 2000) does not believe that central systems can be modular but he presents arguments from evolutionary psychologists and others that support the modularity thesis for the whole mind. Perhaps one of the reasons that there is so much philosophical interest in evolutionary psychology is that discussions about the status of the massive modularity thesis are highly theoretical. [ 3 ] Both evolutionary psychologists and philosophers present and consider arguments for and against the thesis rather than simply waiting until the empirical results come in. Richard Samuels (1998) speculates that argument rather than empirical data is relied on, because the various competing modularity theses about central systems are hard to pull apart empirically. Carruthers exemplifies this approach as he relies heavily on arguments for massive modularity often at the expense of specific empirical results that tell in favor of the thesis.

There are many arguments for the massive modularity thesis. Some are based upon considerations about how evolution must have acted; some are based on considerations about the nature of computation and some are versions of the poverty of the stimulus argument first presented by Chomsky in support of the existence of an innate universal grammar. (See Cowie 1999 for a nice presentation of the structure of poverty of the stimulus arguments.) Myriad versions of each of these arguments appear in the literature and many arguments for massive modularity mix and match components of each of the main strands of argumentation. Here we review a version of each type of argument.

Carruthers presents a clear outline of the first type of argument “the biological argument for massive modularity”: “(1) Biological systems are designed systems, constructed incrementally. (2) Such systems, when complex, need to have massively modular organization. (3) The human mind is a biological system and is complex. (4) So the human mind will be massively modularly in its organization” (Carruthers 2006, 25). An example of this argument is to appeal to the functional decomposition of organisms into organs “designed” for specific tasks, e.g. hearts, livers, kidneys. Each of these organs arises as a result of natural selection and the organs, acting together, contribute to the fitness of the organism. The functional decomposition is driven by the response to specific environmental stimuli. Rather than natural selection acting to produce general purpose organs, each specific environmental challenge is dealt with by a separate mechanism. All versions of this argument are arguments from analogy, relying on the key transitional premise that minds are a kind of biological system upon which natural selection acts.

The second type of argument makes no appeal to biological considerations whatsoever (although many evolutionary psychologists give these arguments a biological twist). Call this the computational argument, which unfolds as follows: minds are computational problem solving devices; there are specific types of solutions to specific types of problems; and so for minds to be (successful) general problem solving devices, they must consist of collections of specific problem solving devices, i.e. many computational modules. This type of argument is structurally similar to the biological argument (as Carruthers points out). The key idea is that there is no sense to the idea of a general problem solver and that no headway can be made in cognitive science without breaking down problems into their component parts.

The third type of argument involves a generalization of Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus argument for universal grammar. Many evolutionary psychologists (see, e.g., Tooby & Cosmides 1992) appeal to the idea that there is neither enough time, nor enough available information, for any given human to learn from scratch to successfully solve all of the problems that we face in the world. This first consideration supports the conclusion that the underlying mechanisms we use to solve the relevant problems are innate (for evolutionary psychologists “innate” is usually interchangeable with “product of natural selection” [ 4 ] ). If we invoke this argument across the whole range of problem sets that humans face and solve, we arrive at a huge set of innate mechanisms that subserve our problem solving abilities, which is another way of saying that we have a massively modular mind.

There are numerous responses to the many versions of each of these types of arguments and many take on the massive modularity thesis head on without considering a specific argument for it. I will defer consideration of responses to the first argument type until section 4 below, which focuses on issues of the nature of evolution and natural selection – topics in philosophy of biology.

The second type of argument is one side of a perennial debate in the philosophy of cognitive science. Fodor (2000, 68) takes this argument to rest on the unwarranted assumption that there is no domain-independent criterion of cognitive success, which he thinks requires an argument that evolutionary psychologists do not provide. Samuels (see esp. Samuels 1998) responds to evolutionary psychologists that arguments of this type do not sufficiently discriminate between a conclusion about domain specific processing mechanisms and domain specific knowledge or information. Samuels articulates what he calls the “library model of cognition” in which there is domain specific information or knowledge but domain general processing. The library model of cognition is not massively modular in the relevant sense but type two arguments support it. According to Samuels, evolutionary psychologists need something more than this type of argument to warrant their specific kind of conclusion about massive modularity. Buller (2005) introduces further worries for this type of argument by tackling the assumption that there can be no such thing as a domain general problem solving mechanism. Buller worries that in their attempt to support this claim, evolutionary psychologists fail to adequately characterize a domain general problem solver. For example, they fail to distinguish between a domain general problem solver and a domain specific problem solver that is over generalized. He offers the example of social learning as a domain general mechanism that would produce domain specific solutions to problems. He uses a nice biological analogy to drive this point home: the immune system is a domain general system in that it allows the body to respond to a wide variety of pathogens. While it is true that the immune system produces domain specific responses to pathogens in the form of specific antibodies, the antibodies are produced by one domain general system. These and many other respondents conclude that type two arguments do not adequately support the massive modularity thesis.

Fodor (2000) and Kim Sterelny (2003) provide different responses to type three arguments. Fodor’s response is that poverty of the stimulus type arguments support conclusions about innateness but not modularity and so these arguments can not be used to support the massive modularity thesis. He argues that the domain specificity and encapsulation of a mechanism and its innateness pull apart quite clearly, allowing for “perfectly general learning mechanisms” that are innate and “fully encapsulated mechanisms” that are single stimulus specific and everything in between. Sterelny responds to the generalizing move in type three arguments. He takes language to be the exception rather than the rule in the sense that while the postulation of an innate, domain specific module may be warranted to account for our language abilities, much of our other problem solving behavior can be accounted for without postulating such modules (Sterelny 2003, 200). [ 5 ] Sterelny’s counter requires invoking alternate explanations for our behavioral repertoire. For example, he accounts for folk psychology and folk biology by appealing to environmental factors, some of which are constructed by our forebears, that allow us to perform sophisticated cognitive tasks. If we can account for our success at various complex problem solving tasks, without appealing to modules, then the massive modularity thesis is undercut. Sterelny sharpens his response to massive modularity by adding more detail to his accounts of how many of our uniquely human traits may have evolved (see, e.g., Sterelny 2012). Sterelny introduces his “evolved apprentice” model to account for the evolution of many human traits that many assume require explanation in terms of massive modularity, for example, forming moral judgments. Cecilia Heyes adopts a similar approach to Sterenly in attacking massive modularity. Rather than presenting arguments against massive modularity, she offers alternative explanations of the development of folk psychology that do not rely on the massive modularity thesis (Heyes 2014a; Heyes 2014b).

Heyes and Sterelny not only reject massive modularity but also have little expectation that any modularity theses will bear fruit but there are many critics of the massive modularity thesis who allow for the possibility of some modularity of mind. Such critics of evolutionary psychology do not reject the possibility of any kind of modularity, they just reject the massive modularity thesis. There is considerable debate about the status of the massive modularity thesis and some of this debate centers around the characterization of modules. If modules have all the characteristics that Fodor (1983) first presented, then he may be right that central systems are not modular. Both Carruthers (2006) and Barrett and Kurzban (2006) present modified characterizations of modules, which they argue better serve the massive modularity thesis. There is no agreement on a workable characterization of modules for evolutionary psychology but there is agreement on the somewhat benign thesis that “the language of modularity affords useful conceptual groundwork in which productive debates surrounding cognitive systems can be framed” (Barrett and Kurzban 2006, 644).

Many philosophers have criticized evolutionary psychology. Most of these critics are philosophers of biology who argue that the research tradition suffers from an overly zealous form of adaptationism (Griffiths 1996; Richardson 1996; Grantham & Nichols 1999; Lloyd 1999; Richardson 2007), an untenable reductionism (Dupré 1999, 2001), a “bad empirical bet” about modules (Sterelny 1995; Sterelny & Griffiths 1999; Sterelny 2003), a fast and loose conception of fitness (Lloyd 1999; Lloyd & Feldman 2002); and most of the above and much more (Buller 2005). (See also Downes 2005.) [ 6 ] All of these philosophers share one version or other of Buller’s view: “I am unabashedly enthusiastic about efforts to apply evolutionary theory to human psychology” (2005, x). [ 7 ] But if philosophers of biology are not skeptical of the fundamental idea behind the project, as Buller’s quote indicates, what are they so critical of? What is at stake are differing views about how to best characterize evolution and hence how to generate evolutionary hypotheses and how to test evolutionary hypotheses. For evolutionary psychologists, the most interesting contribution that evolutionary theory makes is the explanation of apparent design in nature or the explanation of the production of complex organs by appeal to natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists generate evolutionary hypotheses by first finding apparent design in the world, say in our psychological make up, and then presenting a selective scenario that would have led to the production of the trait that exhibits apparent design. The hypotheses evolutionary psychologists generate, given that they are usually hypotheses about our psychological capacities, are tested by standard psychological methods. Philosophers of biology challenge evolutionary psychologists on both of these points. I introduce a few examples of criticisms in each of these two areas below and then look at some responses to philosophical criticisms of evolutionary psychology.

Adaptation is the one biological concept that is central to most debates over evolutionary psychology. Every theoretical work on evolutionary psychology presents the research tradition as being primarily focused on psychological adaptations and goes on to give an account of what adaptations are (see, e.g., Tooby & Cosmides 1992; Buss et al. 1998; Simpson & Campbell 2005; Tooby & Cosmides 2005). Much of the philosophical criticism of evolutionary psychology addresses its approach to adaptation or its form of adaptationism. Let us quickly review the basics from the perspective of philosophy of biology.

Here is how Elliott Sober defines an adaptation: “characteristic c is an adaptation for doing task t in a population if and only if members of the population now have c because, ancestrally, there was selection for having c and c conferred a fitness advantage because it performed task t ” (Sober 2000, 85). Sober makes a few further clarifications of the notion of adaptation that are helpful. First, we should distinguish between a trait that is adaptive and a trait that is an adaptation . Any number of traits can be adaptive without those traits being adaptations. A sea turtle’s forelegs are useful for digging in the sand to bury eggs but they are not adaptations for nest building (Sober 2000, 85). Also, traits can be adaptations without being currently adaptive for a given organism. Vestigial organs such as our appendix or vestigial eyes in cave dwelling organisms are examples of such traits (Sterelny and Griffiths 1999). Second, we should distinguish between ontogenic and phylogenetic adaptations (Sober 2000, 86). The adaptations of interest to evolutionary biologists are phylogenetic adaptations, which arise over evolutionary time and impact the fitness of the organism. Ontogenetic adaptations, including any behavior we learn in our lifetimes, can be adaptive to the extent that an organism benefits from them but they are not adaptations in the relevant sense. Finally, adaptation and function are closely related terms. On one of the prominent views of function—the etiological view of functions—adaptation and function are more or less coextensive; to ask for the function of an organ is to ask why it is present. On the Cummins view of functions adaptation and function are not coextensive, as on the Cummins view, to ask what an organ’s function is, is to ask what it does (Sober 2000, 86–87). (See also Sterelny & Griffiths 1999, 220–224.)

Evolutionary psychologists focus on psychological adaptations. One consistent theme in the theoretical work of evolutionary psychologists is that “adaptations, the functional components of organisms, are identified […] by […] evidence of their design: the exquisite match between organism structure and environment” (Hagen 2005, 148). The way in which psychological adaptations are identified is by evolutionary functional analysis, which is a type of reverse engineering. [ 8 ] “Reverse engineering is a process of figuring out the design of a mechanism on the basis of an analysis of the tasks it performs. Evolutionary functional analysis is a form of reverse engineering in that it attempts to reconstruct the mind’s design from an analysis of the problems the mind must have evolved to solve” (Buller 2005, 92). Many philosophers object to evolutionary psychologists’ over attribution of adaptations on the basis of apparent design. Here some are following Gould and Lewontin’s (1979) lead when they worry that accounting for apparent design in nature in terms of adaptation amounts to telling just-so stories but they could just as easily cite Williams (1966), who also cautioned against the over attribution of adaptation as an explanation for biological traits. While it is true that evolutionary functional analysis can lend itself to just-so story telling, this is not the most interesting problem that confronts evolutionary psychology, several other interesting problems have been identified. For example, Elisabeth Lloyd (1999) derives a criticism of evolutionary psychology from Gould and Lewontin’s criticism of sociobiology, emphasizing the point that evolutionary psychologists’ adaptationism leads them to ignore alternative evolutionary processes. Buller takes yet another approach to evolutionary psychologists’ adaptationism. What lies behind Buller’s criticisms of evolutionary psychologists’ adaptationism is a different view than theirs about what is important in evolutionary thinking (Buller 2005). Buller thinks that evolutionary psychologists overemphasize design and that they make the contentious assumption that with respect to the traits they are interested in, evolution is finished, rather than ongoing.

Sober’s definition of adaptation is not constrained only to apply to organs or other traits that exhibit apparent design. Rather, clutch size (in birds), schooling (in fish), leaf arrangement, foraging strategies and all manner of traits can be adaptations (Seger & Stubblefield 1996). Buller argues the more general point that phenotypic plasticity of various types can be an adaptation, because it arises in various organisms as a result of natural selection. [ 9 ] The difference here between Buller (and other philosophers and biologists) and evolutionary psychologists is a difference in the explanatory scope that they attribute to natural selection. For evolutionary psychologists, the hallmark of natural selection is a well functioning organ and for their critics, the results of natural selection can be seen in an enormous range of traits ranging from the specific apparent design features of organs to the most general response profiles in behavior. According to Buller, this latter approach opens up the range of possible evolutionary hypotheses that can account for human behavior. Rather than being restricted to accounting for our behavior in terms of the joint output of many specific modular mechanisms, we can account for our behavior by appealing to selection acting upon many different levels of traits. This difference in emphasis on what is important in evolutionary theory also is at the center of debates between evolutionary psychologists and behavioral ecologists, who argue that behaviors, rather than just the mechanisms that underlie them, can be adaptations (Downes 2001). Further, this difference in emphasis is what leads to the wide range of alternate evolutionary hypotheses that Sterelny (Sterelny 2003) presents to explain human behavior. Given that philosophers like Buller and Sterelny are adaptationists, they are not critical of evolutionary psychologists’ adaptationism. Rather, they are critical of the narrow explanatory scope of the type of adaptationism evolutionary psychologists adopt (see also Downes 2015).

Buller’s criticism that evolutionary psychologists assume that evolution is finished for the traits that they are interested in connects worries about the understanding of evolutionary theory with worries about the testing of evolutionary hypotheses. Here is Tooby & Cosmides’ clear statement of the assumption that Buller is worried about: “evolutionary psychologists primarily explore the design of the universal, evolved psychological and neural architecture that we all share by virtue of being human. Evolutionary psychologists are usually less interested in human characteristics that vary due to genetic differences because they recognize that these differences are unlikely to be evolved adaptations central to human nature. Of the three kinds of characteristics that are found in the design of organisms – adaptations, by-products, and noise – traits caused by genetic variants are predominantly evolutionary noise, with little adaptive significance, while complex adaptations are likely to be universal in the species” (Tooby & Cosmides 2005, 39). This line of thinking also captures evolutionary psychologists’ view of human nature: human nature is our collection of universally shared adaptations. (See Downes & Machery 2013 for more discussion of this and other, contrasting biologically based accounts of human nature.) The problem here is that it is false to assume that adaptations cannot be subject to variation. The underlying problem is the constrained notion of adaptation. Adaptations are traits that arise as a result of natural selection and not traits that exhibit design and are universal in a given species (Seger & Stubblefield 1996). As a result, it is quite consistent to argue, as Buller does, that many human traits may still be under selection and yet reasonably be called adaptations. Finally, philosophers of biology have articulated several different types of adaptationism (see, e.g., Godfrey-Smith 2001; Lewens 2009; Sober 2000). While some of these types of adaptationism can be reasonably seen placing constraints on how evolutionary research is carried out, Godfrey-Smith’s “explanatory adaptationism” is different in character (Godfrey-Smith 2001). Explanatory adaptationism is the view that apparent design is one of the big questions we face in explaining our natural world and natural selection is the big (and only supportable) answer to such a big question. Explanatory adaptationism is often adopted by those who want to distinguish evolutionary thinking from creationism or intelligent design and is the way evolutionary psychologists often couch their work to distinguish it from their colleagues in the broader social sciences. While explanatory adaptationism does serve to distinguish evolutionary psychology from such markedly different approaches to accounting for design in nature, it does not place many clear constraints on the way in which evolutionary explanations should be sought (Downes 2015). So far these are disagreements that are located in differing views about the nature and scope of evolutionary explanation but they have ramifications in the discussion about hypothesis testing.

If the traits of interest to evolutionary psychologists are universally distributed, then we should expect to find them in all humans. This partly explains the stock that evolutionary psychologists put in cross cultural psychological tests (see, e.g., Buss 1990). If we find evidence for the trait in a huge cross section of humans, then this supports our view that the trait is an adaptation —on the assumption that adaptations are organ-like traits that are products of natural selection but not subject to variation. But given the wider scope view of evolution defended by philosophers of biology, this method of testing seems wrong-headed as a test of an evolutionary hypothesis. Certainly such testing can result in the very interesting results that certain preference profiles are widely shared cross culturally but the test does not speak to the evolutionary hypothesis that the preferences are adaptations (Lloyd 1999; Buller 2005).

Another worry that critics have about evolutionary psychologists’ approach to hypothesis testing is that they give insufficient weight to serious alternate hypotheses that fit the relevant data. Buller dedicates several chapters of his book on evolutionary psychology to an examination of hypothesis testing and many of his criticisms center around the introduction of alternate hypotheses that do as good a job, or a better job, of accounting for the data. For example, he argues that the hypothesis of assortative mating by status does a better job of accounting for some of evolutionary psychologists’ mate selection data than their preferred high status preference hypothesis. This debate hangs on how the empirical tests come out. The previous debate is more closely connected to theoretical issues in philosophy of biology.

I said in my introduction that there is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise and some philosophers of biology continue to remind us of this sentiment (see, e.g., Dupré 2012). However the relevant consensus is not complete, there are some proponents of evolutionary psychology among philosophers of science. One way of defending evolutionary psychology is to rebut criticism. Edouard Machery and Clark Barrett (2007) do just that in their sharply critical review of Buller’s book. Another way to defend evolutionary psychology is to practice it (at least to the extent that philosophers can, i.e. theoretically). This is what Robert Arp (2006) does in a recent article. I briefly review both responses below.

Machery and Barrett (2007) argue that Buller has no clear critical target as there is nothing to the idea that there is a research tradition of evolutionary psychology that is distinct from the broader enterprise of the evolutionary understanding of human behavior. They argue that theoretical tenets and methods are shared by many in the biology of human behavior. For example, many are adaptationists. But as we saw above, evolutionary psychologists and behavioral ecologists can both call themselves adaptationist but their particular approach to adaptationism dictates the range of hypotheses that they can generate, the range of traits that can be counted as adaptations and impacts upon the way in which hypotheses are tested. Research traditions can share some broad theoretical commitments and yet still be distinct research traditions. Secondly, they argue against Buller’s view that past environments are not stable enough to produce the kind of psychological adaptations that evolutionary psychologists propose. They take this to be a claim that no adaptations can arise from an evolutionary arms race situation, for example, between predators and prey. But again, I think that the disagreement here is over what counts as an adaptation. Buller does not deny that adaptations— traits that arise as a product of natural selection—arise from all kinds of unstable environments. What he denies is that organ-like, special purpose adaptations are the likely result of such evolutionary scenarios.

Arp (2006) defends a hypothesis about a kind of module—scenario visualization—a psychological adaptation that arose in our hominid history in response to the demands of tool making, such as constructing spear throwing devices for hunting. Arp presents his hypothesis in the context of demonstrating the superiority of his approach to evolutionary psychology, which he calls “Narrow Evolutionary Psychology,” over “Broad Evolutionary Psychology,” with respect to accounting for archaeological evidence and facts about our psychology. While Arp’s hypothesis is innovative and interesting, he by no means defends it conclusively. This is partly because his strategy is to compare his hypothesis with archaeologist Steven Mithen’s (1996) non-modular “cognitive fluidity” hypothesis that is proposed to account for the same data. The problem here is that Mithen’s view is only one of the many alternative, evolutionary explanations of human tool making behavior. While Arp’s modular thesis may be superior to Mithen’s, he has not compared it to Sterelny’s (2003; 2012) account of tool making and tool use or to Boyd and Richerson’s (see, e.g., 2005) account and hence not ruled these accounts out as plausible alternatives. As neither of these alternative accounts rely on the postulation of psychological modules, evolutionary psychology is not adequately defended.

Many philosophers who work on moral psychology understand that their topic is empirically constrained. Philosophers take two main approaches to using empirical results in moral psychology. One is to use empirical results (and empirically based theories from psychology) to criticize philosophical accounts of moral psychology (see, e.g., Doris 2002) and one is to generate (and, in the experimental philosophy tradition, to test) hypotheses about our moral psychology (see, e.g., Nichols 2004). For those who think that some (or all) of our moral psychology is based in innate capacities, evolutionary psychology is a good source of empirical results and empirically based theory. One account of the make-up of our moral psychology follows from the massive modularity account of the architecture of the mind. Our moral judgments are a product of domain specific psychological modules that are adaptations and arose in our hominid forebears in response to contingencies in our (mostly) social environments. This position is currently widely discussed by philosophers working in moral psychology. An example of this discussion follows.

Cosmides (see, e.g., 1989) defends a hypothesis in evolutionary psychology that we have a cheater-detection module. [ 10 ] This module is hypothesized to underlie important components of our behavior in moral domains and fits with the massively modular view of our psychology in general. Cosmides (along with Tooby) argues that cheating is a violation of a particular kind of conditional rule that goes along with a social contract. Social exchange is a system of cooperation for mutual benefit and cheaters violate the social contract that governs social exchange (Cosmides & Tooby 2005). The selection pressure for a dedicated cheater-detection module is the presence of cheaters in the social world. The cheater-detection module is an adaptation that arose in response to cheaters. The cheater-detection hypothesis has been the focus of a huge amount of critical discussion. Cosmides and Tooby (2008) defend the idea that cheat detection is modular over hypotheses that more general rules of inference are involved in the kind of reasoning behind cheater detection against critics Ron Mallon (2008) and Fodor (2008). Some criticism of the cheater-detection hypothesis involves rehashing criticisms of massive modularity in general and some treats the hypothesis as a contribution to moral psychology and invokes different considerations. For example, Mallon (2008) worries about the coherence of abandoning a domain general conception of ought in our conception of our moral psychology. This discussion is also ongoing. (See, e.g., Sterelny 2012 for a selection of alternate, non-modular explanations of aspects of our moral psychology.)

Evolutionary psychology is well suited to providing an account of human nature. As noted above (Section 1), evolutionary psychology owes a theoretical debt to human sociobiology. E.O. Wilson took human sociobiology to provide us with an account of human nature (1978). For Wilson human nature is the collection of universal human behavioral repertoires and these behavioral repertoires are best understood as being products of natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists argue that human nature is not a collection of universal human behavioral repertoires but rather the universal psychological mechanisms underlying these behaviors (Tooby & Cosmides 1990). These universal psychological mechanisms are products of natural selection, as we saw in Section 2. above. Tooby and Cosmides put this claim as follows: “the concept of human nature is based on a species-typical collection of complex psychological adaptations” (1990, 17). So, for evolutionary psychologists, “human nature consists of a set of psychological adaptations that are presumed to be universal among, and unique to, human beings” (Buller 2005, 423). Machery’s (2008) nomological account of human nature is based on, and very similar to, the evolutionary psychologists’ account. Machery says that “human nature is the set of properties that humans tend to possess as a result of the evolution of their species” (2008, 323). While Machery’s account appeals to traits that have evolved and are universal (common to all humans), it is not limited to psychological mechanisms. For example, he thinks of bi-pedalism as part of the human nature trait cluster. Machery’s view captures elements of both the sociobiological view and the evolutionary psychology view of human nature. He shares the idea that a trait must be a product of evolution, rather than say social learning or enculturation, with both these accounts.

Some critical challenges to evolutionary psychological accounts of human nature (and the nomological account) derive from similar concerns as those driving criticism of evolutionary psychology in general. In Section 4. we see that discussions of evolutionary psychology are founded on disagreements about how adaptation should be characterized and disagreements about the role of variation in evolution. Some critics charge evolutionary psychologists of assuming that adaptation cannot sustain variation. Buller’s (2005) criticism of evolutionary psychologists’ account of human nature also invokes variation (Here he follows Hull 1986 and Sober 1980). The idea here is that humans, like all organisms, exhibit a great deal of variation, including morphological, physiological, behavioral and cultural variation (see also Amundson 2000). Buller argues that the evolutionary psychology account of human nature either ignores or fails to account for all of this variation (see also Lewens 2015 and Ramsey 2013). Any account that restricts human nature to just those traits we have in common and which also are not subject to change, cannot account for human variation.

Buller’s (2005) criticism of evolutionary psychologists’ notion of human nature (or the nomological account) is based on the idea that we vary across many dimensions and an account of human nature based on fixed, universal traits cannot account for any of this variation. The idea that to account for human nature, we must account for human variation is presented and defended by evolutionary psychologists (see, e.g., Barrett 2015), anthropologists (see e.g. Cashdan 2013) and philosophers (see, e.g., Griffiths 2011 and Ramsey 2013). Barrett agrees with Buller (and others) that evolutionary psychologists have failed to account for human variation in their account of human nature. Rather than seeing this challenge as a knock down of the whole enterprise of accounting for human nature, Barrett sees this as a challenge for an account of human nature. Barrett says “Whatever human nature is, it’s a biological phenomenon with all that implies” (2015, 321). So, human nature is “a big wobbly cloud that is different from the population clouds of squirrels and palm trees. To understand human minds and behaviors, we need to understand the properties of our own cloud, as messy as it might be” (2015, 232). Rather than human nature being a collection of shared fixed universal psychological traits, for Barrett, human nature is the whole human trait cluster, including all of the variation in all of our traits. This approach to human nature is sharply different than the approach defended by either Wilson, Tooby and Cosmides or Machery but is also subject to a number of criticisms. The main thrust of the criticisms is that such a view cannot be explanatory and is instead merely a big list of all the properties that humans have had and can have (see, e.g., Buller 2005; Downes 2016; Futuyma 1998; and Lewens 2015). Discussion over the tension between evolutionary psychologists’ views and the manifest variation in human traits continues in many areas that evolutionary psychologists focus on. Another example of this broader discussion is included in Section 7. below.

Evolutionary psychology is invoked in a wide range of areas of study, for example, in English Literature, Consumer Studies and Law. (See Buss 2005 for discussion of Literature and Law and Saad 2007 for a detailed presentation of evolutionary psychology and consumer studies.) In these contexts, evolutionary psychology is usually introduced as providing resources for practitioners, which will advance the relevant field. Philosophers have responded critically to some of these applications of evolutionary psychology. One concern is that often evolutionary psychology is conflated with evolution or evolutionary theory in general (see, e.g., Leiter & Weisberg 2009 and Downes 2013). The discussion reviewed in Section 4. above, reveals a good deal of disagreement between evolutionary theorists and evolutionary psychologists over the proper account of evolution. Evolutionary psychologists offer to enhance fields such as Law and Consumer Studies by introducing evolutionary ideas but what is in fact offered is a selection of theoretical resources championed only by proponents of a specific approach to evolutionary psychology. For example, Gad Saad (2007) argues that Consumer Studies will profit greatly from the addition of adaptive thinking, i.e. looking for apparent design, and by introducing hypothetical evolved modules to account for consumer behavior. However, this does not appear to be an effort to bring evolutionary theory, broadly construed, to bear on Consumer Studies (Downes 2013). Promoting disputed theoretical ideas is certainly problematic but bigger worries arise when thoroughly discredited work is promoted in the effort to apply evolutionary psychology. Owen Jones (see, e.g., 2000; 2005), who believes that Law will benefit from the application of evolutionary psychology, champions Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s (2000) widely discredited view that rape is an adaptation as exemplary evolutionary work (see de Waal 2000, Coyne & Berry 2000, Coyne 2003, Lloyd 2003, Vickers & Kitcher 2003, and Kimmel 2003). Further, Jones (2000) claims that the critics of Thornhill and Palmer’s work have no credibility as scientists and evolutionary theorists. This claim indicates Jones’ serious disconnect with the wider scientific (and philosophical) literature on evolutionary theory (Leiter & Weisberg 2009).

Aside from monitoring the expansion efforts of evolutionary psychology, there are a number of other areas in which further philosophical work on evolutionary psychology will be fruitful. The examples given above of work in moral psychology barely scratch the surface of this rapidly developing field. There are huge numbers of empirical hypotheses that bear on our conception of our moral psychology that demand philosophical scrutiny. (Hauser 2006 includes a survey of a wide range of such hypotheses.) Also, work on moral psychology and the emotions can be drawn together via work on evolutionary psychology and related fields. Griffiths (1997) directed philosophical attention to evolution and the emotions and this kind of work has been brought into closer contact with moral psychology by Nichols (see, e.g., his 2004). In philosophy of mind there is still much that can be done on the topic of modules. Work on integrating biological and psychological concepts of modules is one avenue that is being pursued and could be fruitfully pursued further (see, e.g., Barrett & Kurzban 2006; Carruthers 2006) and work on connecting biology to psychology via genetics is another promising area (see e.g. Marcus 2004). In philosophy of science, I have no doubt that many more criticisms of evolutionary psychology will be presented but a relatively underdeveloped area of philosophical research is on the relations among all of the various, theoretically different, approaches to the biology of human behavior (but see Downes 2005; Griffiths 2008; and Brown et al. 2011). Evolutionary psychologists present their work alongside the work of behavioral ecologists, developmental psychobiologists and others (see, e.g., Buss 2005; Buss 2007) but do not adequately confront the theoretical difficulties that face an integrated enterprise in the biology of human behavior. Finally, while debate rages between biologically influenced and other social scientists, most philosophers have not paid much attention to potential integration of evolutionary psychology into the broader interdisciplinary study of society and culture (but see Mallon and Stich 2000 on evolutionary psychology and constructivism). In contrast, feminist philosophers have paid attention to this integration issue as well as offered feminist critiques of evolutionary psychology (see Fehr 2012, Meynell 2012 and the entry on feminist philosophy of biology ). Gillian Barker (2015), shares some evolutionarily based criticisms of evolutionary psychology with philosophers of biology discussed in Section 4. but also assesses evolutionary psychology in relation to other social sciences. She also adds a novel critical appraisal of evolutionary psychology. She argues that, as currently practiced, evolutionary psychology is not a fruitful guide to social policy regarding human flourishing.

The publication of Shackleford and Weekes-Shackleford’s (2017) huge collection of articles on issues arising in the evolutionary psychological sciences provides a great resource for philosophers looking for material to fuel critical discussion. Many evolutionary psychologists are aware of the difficulty variation presents for some established approaches in their field. This issue confronts those interested in developing accounts of human nature, as noted above (Section 6.), but also arises when confronting many of the varying human behaviors evolutionary psychologists seek to account for. For example, human aggression varies along many dimensions and confronting and accounting for each of these types of variation is a challenge for many evolutionary psychologists (Downes & Tabery 2017). Given that evolutionary psychology is just one, among many, evolutionarily based approaches to explaining human behavior, the most promising critical discussions of evolutionary psychology should continue to come from work that compares hypotheses drawn from evolutionary psychology with hypotheses drawn from other evolutionary approaches and other approaches in the social sciences more broadly construed. Stephan Linquist (2016) takes this approach to evolutionary psychologists’ work on cultures of honor. Linquist introduces hypotheses from cultural evolution that appear to offer more explanatory bite than those from evolutionary psychology. The broader issue of tension between evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution here will doubtless continue to attract the critical attention of philosophers. (See Lewens 2015 for a nice clear introduction to and discussion of alternative approaches to cultural evolution.)

Interest has re-emerged in the relation(s) between evolutionary psychology and the other social sciences (Buss 2020). Some time ago, John Dupré (1994) diagnosed evolutionary psychology as an exercise in scientific imperialism. Dupré later characterized scientific imperialism as “the tendency for a successful scientific idea to be applied far beyond its original home, and generally with decreasing success the more its application is expanded” (2001, 16). Dupré uses “scientific imperialism” in a pejorative sense and marshals this as a criticism of evolutionary psychology. (See Downes 2017 for further discussion of scientific imperialism and evolutionary psychology.) Buss (2020) does not cite Dupré but might well be responding to him when he proposes that evolutionary psychology constitutes a scientific revolution in Kuhn’s sense. Buss argues that evolutionary psychology is superior to other approaches in psychology, because it has supplanted them (or at least should supplant them) just as Einstein’s physics supplanted Newton’s or just as cognitive psychology supplanted behaviorism. (David Reich [2018] casts ancient DNA research in similarly Kuhnian terms and offers it up as superior to all previous approaches in archaeology.) Buss takes evolutionary psychology to be a meta-theoretical approach best fit for guiding all of psychology. This is one of the many ways in which his appeal to Kuhn is strained, as Buss is not looking back on the supplanting of one theoretical framework by another but rather arguing for the superiority of his approach to others available in psychology. A further, and quite specific way that Buss sees evolutionary psychology as superior to other approaches in psychology (and the social sciences in general, is that evolutionary psychology ignores (or should ignore) proximate explanations. For Buss, evolutionary psychology offers ultimate explanations and these are enough. However, many areas of biology, for example, physiology, trade in proximate explanations and are not likely to be cast aside because of this focus. This implies that there is still a place for proximate explanations in psychology. This brief discussion indicates that the relations between evolutionary psychology and the rest of psychology, and the social sciences, more broadly is a topic well worth pursuing by philosophers of science and Buss’ and Dupré’s accounts present interesting alternate starting points in this endeavor.

Finally, philosophers of science will doubtless continue to check the credentials of evolutionary ideas imported into other areas of philosophy. Philosophers of biology in particular, still voice suspicion if philosophers borrow their evolutionary ideas from evolutionary psychology rather than evolutionary biology. Philip Kitcher (2017) voices this concern with regards to Sharon Street’s (2006) appeals to evolution. Kitcher worries that Street does not rely on “what is known about human evolution” (2017, 187) to provide an account of how her traits of interest may have emerged. As noted above, Machery’s nomological notion of human nature (2008; 2017) is criticized on the grounds that he takes his idea of an evolved trait from evolutionary psychology as opposed to evolutionary biology. Barker (2015) also encourages philosophers, as well as social scientists, to draw from the huge range of theoretical resources evolutionary biologists have to offer, rather than just from those provided by evolutionary psychologists.

• Arp, R., 2006, “The environments of our hominid ancestors, tool-usage and scenario visualization”, Biology and Philosophy , 21: 95–117.
• Barker, G., 2015, Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Barrett, H.C., 2015, The Shape of Thought: How mental adaptations evolve , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2012, “Evolutionary Psychology”, in Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science , W. Frankish and W.M. Ramsey (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257–274.
• Barrett, H.C. and R. Kurzban, 2006, “Modularity in Cognition: Framing the debate”, Psychological Review , 113: 628–647.
• Bateson, P. P. G. and P. Martin, 1999, Design for a Life: How behavior and personality develop , London: Jonathan Cape.
• Bjorklund, D. F. and C. Hernandez Blasi, 2005, “Evolutionary Developmental Psychology”, in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology , D. Buss (ed.), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, pp. 828–850.
• Booth, A., 2004, An Evaluation of the Tracking Argument , MA Thesis, University of Utah.
• Brown, G.R., Dickins, T.E., Sear, R. & Laland, K.N., 2011, Evolutionary accounts of human behavioural diversity, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B , 366: 313–324.
• Buller, D., 2005, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Buss, D., 1990, “International preferences in selecting mates: A study of 37 cultures”, Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology , 21: 5–47.
• –––, 2007, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind , Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
• –––, 2020, “Evolutionary psychology is a scientific revolution”, Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences , 14: 316–323.
• Buss, D. (ed.), 2005, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology , Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, Hoboken, NJ.
• Buss, D. M., M. G. Hasleton, et al., 1998, “Adaptations, Exaptations and Spandrels”, American Psychologist , 53: 533–548.
• Cashdan, E., 2013, “What is a human universal? Human behavioral ecology and human nature”, in S.M. Downes and E. Machery (eds.), Arguing About Human Nature , New York: Routledge, pp. 71–80.
• Carruthers, P., 2006, The Architecture of the Mind , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Cosmides, L., 1989, “The Logic of Social Exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason Selection Task”, Cognition , 31: 187–276.
• Cosmides, L. and J. Tooby, 2005, “Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange”, in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology , D. Buss (ed.), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, pp. 584–627.
• –––, 2008, “Can a General Deontic Logic Capture the Facts of Human Moral Reasoning? How the Mind Interprets Social Exchange Rules and Detects Cheaters”, in W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness , ( Moral Psychology , volume 1), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 53–119.
• Cowie, F., 1999, What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Coyne, J. A., 2003, “Of Vice and Men: A Case Study in Evolutionary Psychology,” in Evolution, Gender, and Rape , C. Brown Travis (ed.), Cambridge MA: MIT Press: 171–190.
• Coyne, J. A. and B. Berry, 2000, “Rape as an Adaptation,” Nature , 404: 121–122.
• Dennett, D. C., 1995, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea , New York: Simon and Schuster.
• de Waal, F., 2000, “Survival of the Rapist,” New York Times , Book Review, April 2, 2000, pp. 24–25.
• Doris, J., 2002, Lack of character: Personality and Moral Behavior , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Downes, S. M., 2001, “Some recent developments in evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior and cognition”, Biology and Philosophy , 16: 575–595.
• –––, 2005, “Integrating the Multiple Biological Causes of Human Behavior”, Biology and Philosophy , 20: 177–190.
• –––, 2009, “The Basic Components of the Human Mind Were Not Solidified During the Pleistocene Epoch”, in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology , F. Ayala and R. Arp (eds.), Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 243–252.
• –––, 2013, “Evolutionary psychology is not the only productive evolutionary approach to understanding consumer behavior”, Journal of Consumer Psychology , 23: 400–403.
• –––, 2015, “Evolutionary Psychology, Adaptation and Design”, in Handbook of Evolutionary thinking in the Sciences , T. Heams, P. Huneman, G. Lecointre, M. Silberstein (eds.), Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 659–673.
• –––, 2016, “Confronting Variation in the Social and Behavioral Sciences”, Philosophy of Science , 83: 909–920.
• Downes, S.M. and Machery, E., 2013, Arguing About Human Nature , New York: Routledge.
• Downes, S.M. and Tabery, J., 2017, “Variability of Aggression”, in T.K. Shackleford and V. Weekes-Shackleford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science , New York: Springer.
• Dupré, J., 1994, “Against Scientific Imperialism”, Philosophy of Science Association Proceedings , 2: 374–381.
• –––, 1998, “Normal People”, Social Research , 65: 221–248.
• –––, 1999, “Review of Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works”, Philosophy of Science , 66: 489–493.
• –––, 2001, Human Nature and the Limits of Science , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2012, “Against Maladaptationism: Or, what’s wrong with evolutionary psychology?”, in J. Dupré, Processes of Life: Essays in Philosophy of Biology , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 245–260.
• Ereshefsky, M., 2007, “Psychological Categories as Homologies: Lessons from Ethology”, Biology and Philosophy , 22: 659–674.
• Faucher, L., 2017, “Biophilosophy of Race”, in D. Livingstone Smith (ed.), How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 247–275.
• Fehr, C., 2012, “Feminist Engagement with Evolutionary Psychology”, Hypatia , 27: 50–72.
• Fodor, J. A., 1983, The Modularity of Mind , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2000, The mind doesn’t work that way: the scope and limits of computational psychology , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• –––, 2008, “Comment on Cosmides and Tooby”, in W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness , ( Moral Psychology , volume 1), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 137–141.
• Futuyma, D.J., 1998, Evolutionary Biology , Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.
• Godfrey-Smith, P., 1996, Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2001, “Three Kinds of Adaptationism”, in S.H. Orzack and E. Sober (eds.) Adaptationism and Optimality , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 335–357.
• Gould, S. J. and R. Lewontin, 1979, “The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme”, Proceedings of the Royal Society London B , 205: 581–598.
• Grantham, T. and S. Nichols, 1999, “Evolutionary Psychology: Ultimate Explanations and Panglossian Predictions”, in V. Hardcastle (ed.), Where Biology Meets Psychology , Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, pp. 47–56.
• Gray, R. D., M. Heaney, et al., 2003, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Challenge of Adaptive Explanation”, in K. Sterelny and J. Fitness (eds.), From Mating to Mentality: Evaluating Evolutionary Psychology , New York: Psychology Press, pp. 247–268.
• Griffiths, P. E., 2011, “Our Plastic Nature”, in S.B. Gissis and E. Jablonka (eds.), Transformations of Lamarckism: From subtle fluids to Molecular Biology , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 319–330.
• –––, 2008, “Ethology, Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology”, in S. Sarkar and A. Plutynski (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Biology , New York: Blackwell, 393–414.
• –––, 2006, “Evolutionary Psychology: History and Current Status”, in S. Sarkar and J. Pfeifer (eds.), Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia , New York: Routledge, Volume 1, pp. 263–268.
• –––, 1996, “The Historical Turn in the Study of Adaptation”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 47: 511–532.
• –––, 1997, What Emotions Really Are , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Hagen, E. H., 2005, “Controversial issues in evolutionary psychology”, in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology , D. Buss (ed.), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, pp. 145–174.
• Hauser, M., 2006, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our universal sense of right and wrong , New York: Harper Collins.
• Hawkes, K., 1990, “Why do men hunt? Benefits for risky choices”, in E. Cashdan (ed.), Risk and Uncertainly in Tribal and Peasant Communities , Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 145–166.
• Heyes, C. M., 2014a, “False belief in infancy: a fresh look”, Developmental Science : 647–659.
• –––, 2014b, “Sub–mentalizing: I’m not really reading your mind”, Perspectives on Psychological Science : 131–143.
• Hirshfield, L. A. and S. A. Gelman, 1994, Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hrdy, S., 1999, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How they Shape the Human Species , New York: Ballantine Books.
• Hull, D.L., 1986, “On Human Nature”, PSA (Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association), 2: 3–13.
• Irons, W., 1998, “Adaptively Relevant Environments Versus the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness”, Evolutionary Anthropology , 6: 194–294.
• Jeffares, B. and Sterelny, K., 2012, “Evolutionary Psychology”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science , E. Margolis, R. Samuels and S.P. Stich (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 480–502.
• Jones, O.D., 1997, “Evolutionary Analysis in law: An introduction and application to child abuse”, North Carolina Law Review , 75: 1117–1242.
• –––, 2000, “An evolutionary analysis of rape: Reflections on transitions”, Hastings Women’s Law Journal , 11: 151–178.
• –––, 2005, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Law”, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology , D.M. Buss (ed.), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, pp. 953–974.
• Kimmel, M., 2003, “An Unnatural History of Rape,” in Evolution, Gender, and Rape , C. Brown Travis (ed.), Cambridge MA, MIT Press: 221–234.
• Kitcher, P., 2017, “Evolution and Ethical Life”, in D. Livingstone Smith (ed.), How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 184–203.
• Laland, K. N. and G. R. Brown, 2002, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Laudan, L., 1977, Progress and Its Problems , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Leiter, B. and Weisberg, M., 2009, “Why Evolutionary Biology is (so far) Irrelevant to Legal Regulation”, Law and Philosophy , 29: 31–74.
• Lewens, T., 2015, Cultural Evolution , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2009, “Seven Types of Adaptationism”, Biology and Philosophy , 24: 161–182.
• Linquist, S., 2016, “Which evolutionary model best explains the culture of honour?”, Biology and Philosophy , 31: 213–235.
• Lewontin, R., 1998, “The evolution of cognition: Questions we will never answer”, in D. Scarborough and S. Sternberg (eds.), Methods, Models, and Conceptual Issues , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 107–132.
• Little, D., 1991, Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Lloyd, E. A., 1999, “Evolutionary Psychology: The Burdens of Proof”, Biology and Philosophy , 14: 211–233.
• –––, 2003, “Violence against Science: Rape and Evolution,” Evolution, Gender, and Rape , C. Brown Travis (ed.), Cambridge MA, MIT Press: 235–262.
• Lloyd, E. A. and M. W. Feldman, 2002, “Evolutionary Psychology: A View from Evolutionary Biology”, Psychological Inquiry , 13: 150–156.
• Machery, E., 2008, “A Plea for Human Nature”, Philosophical Psychology , 21: 321–329.
• –––, 2017, “Human Nature”, in D. Livingstone Smith (ed.) How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism , Cambridge University Press, pp. 204–226.
• Machery, E. and H. C. Barrett, 2007, “Review of David Buller Adapting Minds: Evolutionary psychology and the persistent quest for human nature ”, Philosophy of Science , 73: 232–246.
• Mallon, R., 2008, “Ought we to Abandon a Domain General Treatment of ‘Ought’?” in W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness , ( Moral Psychology , volume 1), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 121–130.
• Mallon, R. and S. P. Stich, 2000, “The Odd Couple: The compatibility of social construction and evolutionary psychology”, Philosophy of Science , 67: 133–154.
• Marcus, G., 2004, The Birth of the Mind: How a tiny number of genes creates the complexities of human thought , New York: Basic Books.
• Marr, D., 1983, Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information , New York: W.H. Freeman.
• Meynell, L., 2012, “Evolutionary Psychology, Ethology, and Essentialism (Because What They Don’t Know Can Hurt Us)”, Hypatia , 27: 3–27.
• Michel, G. F. and C. L. Moore, 1995, Developmental Psychobiology: An interdisciplinary science , Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Mithen, S., 1996, The Prehistory of the Mind: The cognitive origins of art and science , London: Thames and Hudson.
• Nichols, S., 2004, Sentimental Rules: On the natural foundation of moral judgment , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Odenbaugh, J., forthcoming, “Human Nature and the Problem of Variation”.
• Pinker, S., 1997, How the Mind Works , New York: W.W. Norton.
• Ramsey, G., 2013, “Human nature in a post-essentialist world”, Philosophy of Science , 80: 983–993.
• Reich, D., 2018, Who we are and how we got here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past , New York: Pantheon Books.
• Rellihan, M., 2012, “Adaptationism and Adaptive Thinking in Evolutionary Psychology”, Philosophical Psychology , 25: 245–277.
• Richardson, R., 1996, “The Prospects for an Evolutionary Psychology: Human Language and Human Reasoning”, Minds and Machines , 6(4): 541–557.
• –––, 2007, Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Richerson, P. J. and R. Boyd, 2005, Not by Genes Alone: How culture transformed human evolution , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Saad, G., 2007, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption , Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Samuels, R., 1998, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Massive Modularity Hypothesis”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 49: 575–602.
• –––, 2000, “Massively modular minds: evolutionary psychology and cognitive architecture”, in P. Carruthers and A. Chamberlain (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, language and meta-cognition , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 13–46.
• Samuels, R., S. Stich, et al., 1999a, “Reason and Rationality”, in I. Niiniluoto, M. Sintonen and J. Wolenski (eds.), Handbook of Epistemology , Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 131–179.
• Samuels, R., S. Stich, et al., 1999b, “Rethinking Rationality: From Bleak Implications to Darwinian Modules”, in E. Lepore and Z. Pylyshyn (eds.), What is Cognitive Science? Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 74–120.
• Seger, J. and J. W. Stubblefield, 1996, “Optimization and Adaptation”, in M. R. Rose and G. V. Lauder (eds.), Adaptation , San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 93–123.
• Shapiro, L. A. and W. Epstein, 1998, “Evolutionary Theory Meets Cognitive Psychology: A More Selective Perspective”, Mind and Language , 13: 171–194.
• Shackleford, T.K. and Weekes-Shackleford, V. (eds.), 2017, Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science , New York: Springer.
• Simpson, J. A. and L. Campbell, 2005, “Methods of evolutionary sciences”, in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology , D. Buss (ed.), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, pp. 119–144.
• Singh, D., 1993, “Adaptive Significance of female physical attractiveness: Role of waist-to-hip ratio”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 65: 293–307.
• Singh, D. and S. Luis, 1995, “Ethnic and gender consensus for the effect of waist to hip ratio on judgments of women’s attractiveness”, Human Nature , 6: 51–65.
• Sinnott-Armstrong, W., (ed.), 2008, Moral Psychology: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness , ( Moral Psychology , Volume 1), Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
• Smith, S.E., 2020, “Is evolutionary psychology possible?”, Biological Theory , 15: 39–49.
• Sober, E., 1980, “Evolution, Population Thinking and Essentialism”, Philosophy of Science , 47: 350–383.
• –––, 2000, Philosophy of Biology , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Stanovich, K., 2005, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding meaning in the age of Darwin , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Sterelny, K., 1995, “The Adapted Mind”, Biology and Philosophy , 10: 365–380.
• –––, 2003, Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition , Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 2012, The Evolved Apprentice: How evolution made humans unique , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Sterelny, K. and P. E. Griffiths, 1999, Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Street, S., 2006, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, Philosophical Studies , 127: 109–166.
• Thornhill, R. and C.T. Palmer, 2000, A Natural History of Rape: Biological bases of sexual coercion , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Tooby, J. and L. Cosmides, 1990, “On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual”, Journal of Personality , 58: 17–67.
• –––, 1992, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”, in H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind , New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 19–136.
• –––, 2005, “Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology”, in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology , D. Buss (ed.), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, pp. 5–67.
• Vickers, A. L. and P. Kitcher, 2003, “Pop Sociobiology: The Evolutionary Psycholgoy of Sex and Violence,” Evolution, Gender, and Rape , C. Brown Travis (ed.), Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 139–168.
• Williams, G. C., 1966, Adaptation and Natural Selection , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Wilson, E.O., 1978, On Human Nature , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Yu, D. W. and G. H. Shepard, 1998, “Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?”, Nature , 396: 321–322.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Human Behavior and Evolution Society:
• Evolutionary Psychology, University of Texas
• Phil Papers: Evolutionary Psychology
• Phil Papers: Evolution of Cognition

Cited Resources

• Buller, D., 2000, “ Evolutionary Psychology ” (a guided tour), in M. Nani and M. Marraffa (eds.), A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind .

adaptationism | biology: philosophy of | cognitive science | culture: and cognitive science | emotion | feminist philosophy, interventions: philosophy of biology | -->function --> | game theory: evolutionary | innate/acquired distinction | innateness: and language | language of thought hypothesis | mind: modularity of | moral psychology: empirical approaches | prisoner’s dilemma

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Austin Booth, David Buller, Marc Ereshefsky, Matt Haber, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and the Stanford Encyclopedia referees for helpful comments on drafts of this entry.

Copyright © 2024 by Stephen M. Downes < s . downes @ utah . edu >

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2024 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Evol Psychol
• v.10(5); 2012 Dec
• PMC10429996

Evolutionary Psychology in the Modern World: Applications, Perspectives, and Strategies

S. craig roberts.

School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK

Mark van Vugt

Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Robin I. M. Dunbar

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

An evolutionary approach is a powerful framework which can bring new perspectives on any aspect of human behavior, to inform and complement those from other disciplines, from psychology and anthropology to economics and politics. Here we argue that insights from evolutionary psychology may be increasingly applied to address practical issues and help alleviate social problems. We outline the promise of this endeavor, and some of the challenges it faces. In doing so, we draw parallels between an applied evolutionary psychology and recent developments in Darwinian medicine, which similarly has the potential to complement conventional approaches. Finally, we describe some promising new directions which are developed in the associated papers accompanying this article.

The Promise of Applying Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology is the scientific study of the human mind as a product of evolution through natural selection ( Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, 1992 ; Barrett, Dunbar, and Lycett, 2002 ; Buss, 2005 ). Although still a relatively young academic discipline, in less than 20 years it has penetrated virtually every existing branch of psychology, including social, organizational, cognitive, developmental, clinical and environmental psychology ( Fitzgerald and Whitaker, 2010 ). As Dunbar (2008) has argued, this is because evolutionary theory is a ‘single seamless framework’ capable of spanning disciplinary divides. On this basis, Darwin's vision of evolutionary theory providing a new foundation for psychology appears to be finally reaching fruition.

However, while there is no doubting the power of evolutionary theory in helping to explain human behavior, concerted effort to apply this knowledge in practical ways has so far been less evident than one might expect (but see, for example, approaches in Griskevicius, Cantu, and van Vugt, 2012 ; Roberts, 2012 ; Roberts, Miner, and Shackelford, 2010 ; van Vugt, Hogan, and Kaiser, 2008 ). We believe this is about to change. The renowned psychologist Kurt Lewin once noted that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Evolutionary perspectives should therefore have the potential to provide a powerful framework for developing practical applications in many and varied aspects of human behavior and endeavor. A growing community of researchers is interested in pursuing this cause, and with some success as this special issue shows.

This is not to say that evolutionary psychology is going to be the panacea to cure all ailments in the human condition. Researchers in other fields can and do approach the same aspects of behavior and tackle the same issues, without reference to evolution, and meet considerable success in developing interventions that have considerable practical value. In Tinbergen's (1963) terminology, they tend to do this at the proximate level of explanation, understanding immediate cause and effect. However, we would argue that insights into the selective forces that shaped behavior in the past (that is, working at the ultimate level of explanation), and mismatches between ancestral conditions and those we experience today, provide a fundamentally important context and backdrop to complement and inform such efforts. Full understanding of selection pressures shaping specific behaviors requires consideration of both proximate and ultimate factors (e.g., Nettle, 2011 ; Tinbergen, 1963 ).

Parallels with the Development of Darwinian Medicine

We thus take the view that understanding the evolutionary history or likely adaptive value of particular behaviors should be useful in developing novel approaches or in specifying which of a range of possible interventions might have most value in targeting particular outcomes. In this respect, we have argued ( Roberts, 2012 ) that the utility of applied evolutionary psychology in addressing societal issues like tackling prejudice or promoting cooperation (traditionally the reserves of social psychologists or economists) bears close resemblance to the contribution that Darwinian medicine offers conventional medicine. In the twenty or so years following ‘The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine’ ( Williams and Nesse, 1991 ), the field has contributed enormously to our understanding of human illness and in some cases has transformed it (for recent reviews, see Nesse and Stearns, 2008 ; Stearns, 2012 ; Stearns and Koella, 2007 ; Trevathan, Smith, and McKenna, 2007 ).

Take, for example, symptoms of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy, which affects up to 90% of pregnant women in some modern societies ( Pepper and Roberts, 2006 ). As epitomized by its epithets ‘pregnancy sickness’ or ‘morning sickness', this was until recently viewed as an illness for which treatment would be desirable. However, according to one functional (ultimate) explanation, these symptoms reflect a classic evolutionary struggle - parent-offspring conflict, or the non-overlapping interests of mother and embryo (Haig, 1998). Another view is that these symptoms, along with specific aversions to particular kinds of food, arise as an adaptation to avoid ingestion of teratogens and phytochemicals that may harm the health of the mother and foetus ( Flaxman and Sherman, 2000 ). In fact, nausea and vomiting in the first trimester are now viewed as indicative of a healthy embryo, associated with a range of positive pregnancy outcomes (Weigel and Weigel, 1989 ). The evolutionary perspective has helped to change the perception of this condition, and the old epithets are now considered to be misnomers.

However, in spite of this, acceptance of these insights in conventional medicine has yet to live up to its potential. Researchers often face skepticism or indifference from practitioners, and few medical courses devote more than one or two lectures to evolutionary medicine. It remains the case that most researchers - and there is a rapidly growing number of them - come from an evolutionary background, rather than a clinical one. Even in a field with direct and potentially enormous impact on human health, it seems that it will take time to fulfill its promise and to persuade practitioners of the merits of evolutionarily-informed approaches.

There is an analogy between evolutionary medicine and an applied evolutionary psychology. Despite its promise for transforming our understanding of modern world issues and problems, perhaps especially social problems, the evolutionary approach is sometimes met with antipathy or indifference from colleagues in other branches of psychology and those from sociology, anthropology and the like. Indeed, evolutionary psychology probably suffers this to an even greater extent than Darwinian medicine, which at least has near-unanimous support within evolutionary biology and a developing portfolio of convincing empirical studies ( Nesse and Stearns, 2008 ; Stearns, 2012 ; Stearns and Koella, 2007 ; Trevathan et al., 2007 ). Furthermore, evolutionary psychology arguably lags behind evolutionary medicine in the extent to which a core body of researchers exists that actively seeks and develops applications of their research. With some notable exceptions, concerted effort to apply principle to practice remains patchy. Perhaps this is appropriate to a young discipline, but one would expect that, as it matures, its scope will broaden towards tackling contemporary problems in human society. For this reason, we recently organized a wide-ranging seminar series (funded by the UK Economic Social and Research Council), entitled Darwin's Medicine, with a series of workshops each devoted to an applied evolutionary psychology theme such as philanthropy, sustainability, leadership, and intergroup conflict. Other recent developments include the formation of the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society ( www.aepsociety.org ) and the publication of a dedicated volume on this topic ( Roberts, 2012 ).

The Benefits of Application

We do not expect, of course, that researchers should focus on application to the exclusion of further development, refinement and testing of evolutionary theory as it applies to human behaviour. Nor do we think that working on application is necessarily for everyone. However, we think it is inevitable that interest in harnessing evolutionary perspectives to address current social and societal issues is set to become much more common. There are at least three reasons why we think this.

The first reason is that many researchers may feel they have a moral imperative to do so. If, as evolutionary psychologists, we claim to have a particularly powerful theoretical framework with which to understand human behaviour, then, as the expression goes, we should be able to ‘put our money where our mouth is’ and put this to good use. A sense that we want to employ our science for good is relevant to any application, insight or perspective

The second reason is more pragmatic. An applied perspective will help to develop the impact of evolutionary psychology research. We live in a society that is increasingly curious and informed about scientific results, and that wishes (and, increasingly, expects) to see the potential benefits of research that they, as taxpayers, effectively fund. Demonstrating how research, theoretical or applied, might lead to practical benefits for society at large is therefore of growing relevance to funding agencies. For example, the National Science Foundation in the US uses the term ‘broader impacts’ as one of its two criteria of merit in judging research proposals (the other being ‘intellectual merit'). In the UK, research councils also incorporate impact as a criterion used in the assessment of funding applications, defining impact as including ‘the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy”, and includes ways that research may foster global economic performance, increase the effectiveness of public services and policy, and enhance quality of life, health and creativity.

Last but certainly not least, developing applications and practical approaches to specific problems provides an intellectual challenge that is different to, but arguably no less stimulating than theory development. It should not be seen as a ‘soft option’, at least not if it is to be done well. A successful application requires sound knowledge of theory, but because it must also seek to ground theory within the complexity of the ‘real world,’ it also necessitates an ability to test the robustness of effects in a noisy environment and within a broader interdisciplinary perspective (see Buunk and van Vugt, 2007 ; Klatzky, 2009 ). Furthermore, this process may throw up unexpected results and generate new questions and directions for research back in the lab, or even suggest that the theory itself requires amendment. In this way, the pathway from theory to application is not unidirectional, but circular. For many, this may be the most persuasive reason to develop applications of their own research.

Practical Issues in Developing Applied Perspectives

Although we believe that applying evolutionary psychology holds great promise, there are some potential caveats. The first is to ensure that we really understand the problem at hand. By this we mean thinking beyond the evolutionary arguments and theory with which we may be familiar to analyze a particular problem within its broader context, carefully considering and incorporating viewpoints and contributions from other disciplines. This may seem trivial and obvious, but consider as an analogy two cautionary tales. One comes from the introduction of non-native species into new habitats, where an apparently straightforward solution to a practical problem can lead to unforeseen new problems. For example, a new predator might be introduced to control a pernicious pest, but the new predator also eats other desirable and non-pest species. Or take another example from evolutionary medicine. Williams and Nesse (1991) highlight, as one of a number of examples of the importance of evolutionary explanations to augment the ‘treat-the-symptom’ approach of conventional medicine, the way that fever is treated. If fever is an evolutionarily-derived response mechanism to combat bacterial toxins, then treating fever may well be counter-productive; they cite as evidence a study that found longer recovery times from chicken pox in patients treated with acetaminophen compared to those treated with a placebo ( Doran, De Angelis, Baumgardner and Mellits, 1989 ). These examples serve as cautions in thinking about practical applications of evolutionary psychology, and should make us think hard about the context of the issue, although it should not discourage us from engaging with it.

Second, evolutionary psychologists are often accused of arguing that our underlying human nature dictates how things ‘should’ be, that what is natural is good. This argument is known as the naturalistic fallacy. Typically, this accusation comes from critics outside the field and is based on misinterpretation of the presented arguments, although it is not unknown for even well-informed researchers to slip into committing this error. Committing the naturalistic fallacy, or of being perceived to, is probably more likely than ever when seeking evolutionarily-informed solutions or applications to practical issues. While it may sometimes be the case that what is natural is in fact good, this is not always the case. In developing applied perspectives on our work, we should bear this in mind, remaining detached from judgments of value and morality.

New Directions

This special issue, entitled “Evolutionary Psychology in the Modern World: Applications, Perspectives, and Strategies,” brings together contributions which introduce new approaches to thinking about application. The contributions vary widely in scope and constitute a very diverse range of interest areas. Fitzgerald and Danner open the issue with a review of how knowledge of evolutionary psychology might inform the design of the workplace environment to the benefit of employee health and happiness. They argue that this would ultimately benefit the employer through increased productivity from the workforce and associated decrease in other costs. Staying within the workplace, Little and Roberts investigate the effects of appearance on success at work. They review recent studies that show how appearance can influence perception of potential employees at interview, discuss the implications of these results in the light of equality legislation and consider cases where discrimination on the basis of appearance might be legitimate and uncontroversial, including the perception of political candidates and influence on voter's behavior. Petersen and Aarøe also discuss perception of political candidature within an evolutionary framework, within a wider consideration of the ways in which modern mass politics succeeds or fails in eliciting expected levels of engagement given its social nature and our affinity as a social species for social interaction and processes underpinning group dynamics.

Several papers address evolutionary perspectives applied to health and health-related behavior. Buunk, Zurriaga and González examine perceptions of reciprocity and indebtedness in patients suffering from spinal cord injury from the perspective of reciprocal altruism. They show how, surprisingly, lack of reciprocity from close relatives and partners may affect depression more than non-relatives. Gillette and Folinsbee explore evolutionary approaches to reproductive health, focusing on effects of early menarche on subsequent reproductive health and health of offspring and its implications for public health. Whitehead, Ozakinci and Perrett apply insights from evolutionary psychology, specifically perception of an individual's health through carotenoid-linked skin coloration, and its associated effects on interpersonal judgments, to design a novel intervention to improve dietary health. Finally, Tybur, Bryan and Caldwell Hooper describe ways in which evolutionary perspectives might be used to approach challenges faced by health psychologists. They discuss how evolutionary insights reveal why healthy behavior is less common than we might expect, how individuals differ in this regard and why this matters, and how evolutionary approaches can help to both identify particular target groups and fine-tune interventions in order to maximize effectiveness.

Finally, various articles address evolutionary approaches to other societal issues. Barclay explores the promotion of cooperative sentiment within societies, and describes ways in which new insights into the power of reputation in promoting cooperation and reducing conflict might be harnessed across a range of applied settings. The paper by Ingram, Campos, Hondrou, Vasalou, Martinho and Joinson considers a related theme: how to reduce conflict in children? They describe an evolutionarily-informed game designed to help children learn conflict resolution skills. In a change of tack, Oesch and Miklousic then consider the growth of the modern dating industry and analyze its marketing strategies against the background of recent research on the evolutionary psychology of courtship. Finally, Brooks describes the issue of population-level sex ratio bias in certain countries in the light of parental investment theory. He argues that evolutionary psychology can provide, along with an eye on cultural history and rapidly changing economic circumstances, more detailed understanding of why and how these biases occur, and perhaps a framework for reducing their most severe consequences.

We have drawn parallels between applied evolutionary psychology and Darwinian medicine, both in their enormous potential for contributing to application and in the uphill challenge both fields face to persuade practitioners of their intellectual and practical value. We also described applied evolutionary psychology as lagging behind Darwinian medicine in terms of persuading even evolutionary-minded researchers in biology (let alone other psychologists, anthropologists and the like) and in being represented by a group of researchers interested in the practical application of their research. However, we anticipate that this may be beginning to change, and we hope that the articles in this special issue provide further stimulus to the nascent field of applied evolutionary psychology.

Contributor Information

S. Craig Roberts, School of Natural Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK.

Mark van Vugt, Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Robin I. M. Dunbar, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.

• Barclay P. (2012). Harnessing the power of reputation: Strengths and limits for promoting cooperative behaviors . Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 868–883. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Barkow J. H., Cosmides L., and Tooby J. (Eds.) (1992). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Barrett L., Dunbar R. I. M., and Lycett J. E. (2002). Human evolutionary psychology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brooks R. (2012). “Asia's missing women” as a problem in applied evolutionary psychology? Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 910–925. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Buss D. M. (2005). The handbook of evolutionary psychology. Hoboken: Wiley. [ Google Scholar ]
• Buunk A. P., and van Vugt M. (2007). Applying social psychology: From problems to solutions. London: Sage. [ Google Scholar ]
• Buunk A. P., Zurriaga R., and González P. (2012). Does theorizing on reciprocal altruism apply to the relationships of individuals with a spinal cord injury? Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 818–829. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Doran T. F., De Angelis C., Baumgardner R. A., and Mellits E. D. (1989). Acetominophen: More harm than good for chicken pox? Journal of Pediatrics , 114 , 1045–1048. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dunbar R. (2008). Taking evolutionary psychology seriously . The Psychologist , 21 , 304–306. [ Google Scholar ]
• Fitzgerald C. J., and Danner K. M. (2012). Evolution in the office: How evolutionary psychology can increase employee health, happiness, and productivity . Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 770–781. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fitzgerald C. J., and Whitaker M. B. (2010). Examining the acceptance of and resistance to evolutionary psychology . Evolutionary Psychology , 8 , 284–296. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Flaxman S. M., and Sherman P. W. (2000). Morning sickness: A mechanism for protecting mother and embryo . Quarterly Review of Biology , 75 , 113–148. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gillette M. T., and Folinsbee K. E. (2012). Early menarche as an alternative reproductive tactic in human females: An evolutionary approach to reproductive health issues . Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 830–841. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Griskevicius V., Cantu S., and van Vugt M. (2012). Evolutionary basis for sustainable behaviours . Journal of Public Policy and Marketing , 31 , 115–128. [ Google Scholar ]
• Haig D. (1993). Genetic conflicts in human pregnancy . Quarterly Review of Biology , 68 , 495–532. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ingram G. P. D., Campos J., Hondrou C., Vasalou A., Martinho C., and Joinson A. (2012). Applying evolutionary psychology to a serious game about children's interpersonal conflict . Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 884–898. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Klatzky R. L. (2009). Giving psychological science away . Perspectives on Psychological Science , 4 , 522–530. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Little A. C., and Roberts S. C. (2012). Evolution, appearance, and occupational success . Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 782–801. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Nesse R. M., and Stearns S. C. (2008). The great opportunity: Evolutionary applications to medicine and public health . Evolutionary Applications , 1 , 28–48. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Nettle D. (2011). Flexibility in reproductive timing in human females: Integrating ultimate and proximate explanations . Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B , 366 , 357–365. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Oesch N., and Miklousic I. (2012). The dating mind: Evolutionary psychology and the emerging science of human courtship . Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 899–909. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pepper G. V., and Roberts S. C. (2006). Rates of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy and dietary characteristics across populations . Proceedings of the Royal Society B , 273 , 2675–2679. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Petersen M. B., and Aarøe L. (2012). Is the political animal politically ignorant? Applying evolutionary psychology to the study of political attitudes . Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 802–817. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Roberts S. C. (2012). Applied evolutionary psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Roberts S. C., Miner E. M., and Shackelford T. K. (2010). The future of an applied evolutionary psychology for human partnerships . Review of General Psychology , 14 , 318–329. [ Google Scholar ]
• Stearns S. C. (2012) Evolutionary medicine: Its scope, interest and potential . Proceedings of the Royal Society B , 279 , 4305–4321. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Stearns S. C., and Koella J. C. (2007). Evolution in health and disease (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tinbergen N. (1963). On aims and methods in ethology . Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie , 20 , 410–433. [ Google Scholar ]
• Trevathan W. R., Smith E. O., and McKenna J. J. (2007). Evolutionary medicine and health: New perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tybur J. M., Bryan A. D., and Caldwell Hooper A. E. (2012). An evolutionary perspective on health psychology: New approaches and applications . Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 855–867. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• van Vugt M., Hogan R., and Kaiser R. (2008). Leadership, followership, and evolution: Some lessons from the past . American Psychologist , 63 , 182–196. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Weigel R. M., and Weigel M. M. (1989). Nausea and vomiting of early pregnancy and pregnancy outcome: A metaanalytical review . British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology , 96 , 1312–1318. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Whitehead R. D., Ozakinci G., and Perrett D. I. (2012). Attractive skin coloration: Harnessing sexual selection to improve diet and health . Evolutionary Psychology , 10 , 842–854. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Williams G. C., and Nesse R. M. (1991). The dawn of Darwinian medicine . Quarterly Review of Biology , 66 , 1–22. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]

Evolutionary Psychology

Sociobiology

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

The human body evolved over eons, slowly calibrating to the African savanna on which 98 percent of humankind lived and died. So, too, did the human brain. Evolutionary psychology is the study of the ways in which the mind was shaped by pressures to survive and reproduce. Findings in this field often shed light on "ultimate" as opposed to "proximal" causes of behavior. Romantic jealousy and mate guarding are proximally intended to keep one's relationship intact. Ultimately, though, the behavior can be explained by the fact that for most of human history, losing a romantic partner jeopardized one's ability to reproduce and raise children.

• The Science of Evolutionary Psychology
• Concepts In Evolutionary Psychology
• Human Nature, Explained
• Why Evolutionary Psychology Is Controversial

Natural selection has a lot to do with human behavior. In fact, our behavior is naturally selected just as our physical traits are naturally selected. We are much taller and live longer than our ancestors. Through centuries of generations, evolution has helped us pass along adaptive behaviors that promote our reproduction.

Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers proposed a number of theories on evolutionary psychology , including why we engage in reciprocal altruism , the nature of sex differences, and parent-offspring investment. Altruism among strangers, for example, can naturally develop because people cooperate with the expectation of receiving similar treatment from others.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors passed down behavioral traits that are, for the most part, advantageous to us. For example, we are mindful of danger in dark alleyways. This caution is innate and within our behavioral make-up. And our predetermined response to gravitate to that 800-calorie Cinnabon can wreak havoc, but our ancestors made us do it .

Juggling our ancestral tendencies with the demands of modern-day living can be a struggle. This phenomenon is known as evolutionary mismatch—when we find ourselves in an environment inconsistent with our ancestral conditioning.

A good example of such mismatch is the contemporary diet : Ten thousand years ago, people battled starvation. They had to pile on the necessary calories just to survive certain lean times; high-fat meats and high-sugar foods were a luxury. Today, however, fatty foods and processed sugars are readily available at low cost.

Many of the behaviors people exhibit have been tools for self-preservation: Homo sapiens jealously guard their romantic partners because competition for mates has always been harsh. Everyone cherishes their closest kin because it's in one's best interest to preserve one's genes . Humans also crave social interaction to encourage cooperation , further increasing the chances for survival. Many of these behaviors are innate: How people react and interact with one another is spelled out in DNA.

Fight or flight refers to the human body’s built-in response to a perceived threat: It prepares the body to either face danger or quickly run from it. During flight or flight , the brain releases stress hormones , pushing the body into high alert. The heart rate rises, muscles tense, and thoughts race. While the modern-day human does not face the same threats as our ancestors did, the fight-or-flight response system remains intact.

Any fearful situation can trigger it, whether it is physical danger or a stressful event, like running late for a meeting. In people with anxiety , the fight-or-flight response is more readily triggered, the brain sees certain situations as threatening, even when there's no actual present danger. In fact, there is a tendency for this response to move into overdrive in anxious individuals.

Kin selection is the theory that our calculations about genetic relatedness to others (conscious or unconscious ) are powerful drivers of behavior. Most people favor, and will make sacrifices for, immediate kin as opposed to distant relatives, and blood relatives over strangers. This ensures the survival of genes through the survival of the people who are closely related to us.  

In evolutionary parlance, reproductive success is called reproductive fitness, a measure of how well an organism or a person is adapted to their environment. Men committing foolish or heroic acts that increase status or attractiveness are acting in ways that increase the odds of reproduction, and attempting to maximize reproductive fitness.  Reproductive fitness  also measures how well an organism is adapted to its environment.

The differences in parental investment —the energy and resources invested in an offspring—lead the sex that invests more (females, in most species) to focus on mate quality and the sex that invests less (males) to seek quantity. In humans, we expect choosiness in females and aggression between males as they vie for females.

Our emotional complexity differentiates us from other members of the animal kingdom. Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain how our emotions and other aspects of being human served as advantages to our ancestors. Like other social primates, we experience emotions beyond primal fear and anger.

Through evolving as a group, we have developed empathy and altruism, which allow us to commiserate with each other’s circumstances and act in ways that are not self-serving. What is better for the group as a whole, is better for a person as an individual.

We have also developed emotions to help keep us in line —for example, shame motivates us to atone for past transgressions, while pride pushes us to remain in the high regard of our peers. And as our social structures developed, so did our value systems and what we define as “right” and “wrong.”

Trivers also suggested that complex strategies of cheating , detecting cheating, and the false accusation of cheating (itself a form of cheating) pushed the development of intelligence and helped increase the size of the human brain.

People reject evolutionary psychology for ideological reasons. With sexual behavior, for example, there is the notion that the field justifies people’s behaviors and actions. Our present-day traits and characteristics had survival value for our ancestors, and these traits survived because the genes they are linked to were selected and now remain part of our genetic makeup. Shouting evolution made me do it seems so convenient.

This refers to common but faulty logic wherein people assume that because something is "natural" it is therefore "good" or just. Violence and aggression are found in all human societies, but that does not make this acceptable behavior. No endorsement is implied in a discovery of what is natural. The general public commits the naturalistic fallacy in thinking that evolutionary psychologists endorse certain findings (such as violence or rape), when in fact evolutionary psychologists are simply outlining reasons that these behaviors may occur.

The moralistic fallacy is the false belief that the world operates as we wish it would, that what ought to be is in fact the truth, or that because we wish something were not true, it cannot be true. People sometimes reject evolutionary theorists' findings about human nature because they do not want to believe that said findings are true.

Both sides of the political aisle accuse evolutionary psychology of numerous ills. Among many arguments, for example, conservatives on the right fear that this field of study absolves people of responsibility , while liberals on the left fear that accepting inherited differences hinders the goal of social equality.

Feminists are not keen on the idea that women are inherently different from men. Such differences, they think, would force women back in time, losing ground in equal opportunity and equal pay, for example. They also feel that people can use evolutionary psychology to explain away misogyny, poverty, sexual misbehavior, among many areas.

More and more studies show that homosexuality is genetic. However, being gay doesn’t fit so neatly into the theory of natural selection. Why would nature select for homosexuality if reproductive success is a moot point? But there are valid reasons according to evolutionary biologists. For example, gay aunts and uncles can invest more time and resources in rearing the offspring of close relatives with whom they share part of their genetic makeup. Maybe homosexuality emerged because it benefits entire groups.

Although forgiveness may seem like "the right thing to do," forgiving others can often fall between difficult and impossible. An evolutionary perspective helps us understand why.

Scientists disagree on whether the cerebral cortex—the more evolved part of the brain—is necessary for conscious emotional experience, and indeed for consciousness itself.

We are intimately familiar with them but defining them is harder than it seems. Understanding how emotions give rise to subjective feelings is key to understanding consciousness.

Economic unfairness undermines health. Obesity is a case in point.

Stress and burnout will not go away on their own — you must take steps to address them!

The brain has three processing stages associated with consciousness. Here, we focus on Stage 2, "the conscious field."

When residents of a wealthy U.S. zip code live more than a decade longer than a poorer one, we need to ask why.

How we respond to humorous remarks often depends on our relationship with the joker. When is joking allowed, when is it indefensible, and who’s entitled to offer up a response?

We hold two misconceptions about our shared history that may limit our belief about our future. When we learn the truth about our past, we can find our way to a better tomorrow.

There are three stages of processing in the brain, starting with unconscious processes preceding, and giving rise to, the construction of the “conscious field."

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Sticking up for yourself is no easy task. But there are concrete skills you can use to hone your assertiveness and advocate for yourself.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Evolutionary Psychology Essays

A comparison between intrasexual and intersexual selection, popular essay topics.

• American Dream
• Artificial Intelligence
• Black Lives Matter
• Bullying Essay
• Career Goals Essay
• Causes of the Civil War
• Child Abusing
• Civil Rights Movement
• Community Service
• Cultural Identity
• Cyber Bullying
• Death Penalty
• Depression Essay
• Domestic Violence
• Freedom of Speech
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• I Believe Essay
• Immigration
• Importance of Education
• Israel and Palestine Conflict
• Leadership Essay
• Legalizing Marijuanas
• Mental Health
• National Honor Society
• Police Brutality
• Pollution Essay
• Racism Essay
• Romeo and Juliet
• Same Sex Marriages
• Social Media
• The Great Gatsby
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• Time Management
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Violent Video Games
• What Makes You Unique
• Why I Want to Be a Nurse
• Send us an e-mail

Evolutionary Psychology and Natural Selection Theory Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

How Darwin formulated the theory of natural selection

How darwin’s notion of natural selection has changed since the modern synthesis, reference list.

It is now over 150 years since when Charles Darwin proposed one of the influential theories, the theory of evolution, through natural selection in human history. At its youngest years, the theory faced immense controversies. People inclined to evangelical conservatism came out to counter it via mega campaigns. At the same time, progressive intellectuals coupled with liberal-minded people were also not left out of controversy.

Nevertheless, these controversies have not ceded. Even in the modern world, the theory of evolution through natural selection also attracts valid contest from a scientific society. In his scholarly work, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection , Darwin prophesies, “in the distant future, I see open fields for far more important researches where psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation” (Darwin, 1859, p. 449). Today, this dream of Darwin is arguably realized. Evolutionary psychology has resulted in altering the manner in which psychologists conduct their studies on the human mind. Indeed, it is permitting psychologists to introspect human behaviors in more fascinating dimensions.

Nonetheless, the progression of any discipline attracts mixed reactions and ways of contextualizing the whole process of progression. Psychology, being one of the disciplines that call for the immense deployment of the power of reasoning, does not give clean pathways for the progression of the evolutional theory by natural selection in a way that Darwin could have anticipated. However, the concern here is not to explore why the theory of natural selection faces criticism. Rather, the aim is to discuss the manner in which Darwin formulated the theory of natural selection coupled with how his notion has changed since the modern synthesis.

The popularisation of the term natural selection is owed to the scholarly works of Charles Darwin. In particular, his aim was to make his theory comparable with “the theory of selective breeding, what was priory termed as artificial selection” (Keightley & Otto, 2006, p.89). Natural selection entails a slow and gradual process through which certain biological traits of the population become more or even less common due to the deferential reproduction of the trait bearers.

Darwin noted that variation always takes place across all organisms in populations. In the modem day evolutionary psychology body of knowledge, among the contributors to these variations are random mutations, which lead to alterations of genomes of organisms. Such mutations are hereditary. During the lives of organisms, “…genomes interact with the environment-cells, other individuals, other cells, species and even abiotic surroundings” (Keightley & Otto, 2006, p.90).

However, in the context of Darwin’s theory, under natural circumstances, certain organisms that possess some variant traits may end up surviving and reproducing more than those that possess other variant traits. This way, the evolution of populations occurs. In his ideas of sexual selection, Darwin recognized, “the factors that influenced reproduction success were also critical in the evolution process” (Keightley & Otto, 2006, p.89). However, in times of Darwin, the theory of hereditary was not eminently developed. Consequently, his natural selection theory was developed in relation to phenotypic traits of organisms.

This means that natural selection theory operates on observable characteristics of organisms. With the knowledge of genetics, the natural selection theory process proposed by Charles Darwin acts as one of the processes through which the evolution of organisms may take place. In this context, Keightley and Otto (2006) note, “opposed to artificial selection, in which humans favor specific traits, in natural selection the environment acts as sieve through which only certain variations can pass” (p. 90). Since its proposal in 1859, the theory of natural selection has been a central cornerstone in the development of modern biology and evolutionary psychology.

Darwin formulated his theory of natural selection in a style similar to artificial selection in which people (breeders) choose certain traits in animals and plants for reproduction purposes. In this context, Darwin formulated his theory as a means of explaining speciation and adaptation. Precisely, the scholar wrote that natural selection is the “principle by which each slight variation (of a trait), if useful, is preserved (Darwin, 1859, p.331).

In this perspective, the concept of natural selection is simple but insightful as to what Darwin thought encompassed the evolution of species. At the heart of the theory, Darwin infers that only those individuals that are well suited to the new environments in which they live stand better chances of surviving so that they can reproduce. This means, “As long as there is some variation between them, there will be an inevitable selection of individuals with the most advantageous variations” (Keightley & Otto, 2006, p.91).

Therefore, according to Darwin, in the case of inheritance of variations, chances are that the success of differential reproduction truncates into making certain species of certain populations of organism evolve and become magnificently different from the original species. Prior to the postulation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, reverend Thomas Malthus had noted in 1938 that, in case a population went on growing freely without checks, it grew in an exponential function while food supplies only grew arithmetically. Consequently, it is reasonable that, to maintain a balance between the two, a natural mechanism of the balance must exist.

In technical language, this implies that “inevitable limitations of resources would have demographic implications leading to straggle for existence” (Kauffman, 1993, p.81). In his formulation of the theory of natural selection, Darwin was smart enough to factor in the concept of the struggle for existence so that a population does not out power the resources provisions to support the growing population numbers. In this dimension, Darwin held that in a situation where the population may result powering resource provisions, naturally “favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed” (Kauffman, 1993, p.81).

The repercussion would be the emergence of new species. In chapter four of the origin of species, Darwin summarised his formulations for his theory of natural selection. He argues that, in the due course of ages of populations and under certain provisions or life conditions, organic beings differ in several elements of their organization. If this is true, he thinks that it is a fact, which cannot be disputed especially bearing in mind that there occurs “high geometrical powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, and a severe struggle for life” (Darwin, 1859, p.234) takes place.

Again, he views this as a fact that cannot be disputed. “Considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare” (Darwin, 1859, p.231).

He further asserts that, in case variations that are useful to particular organic beings take place, those individuals who have the characteristics that are favorable to match the variations would stand better chances of being preserved in the quest to struggle for survival. Consequently, due to the principle of inheritance, such individuals would sire off springs possessing similar traits.

Stemming from the above discussion, it is evident that Darwin and his like-minded thinkers thought of natural selection as largely being analogous to evolution by means of selective selection. Many scholars appreciated that tantamount to Darwin’s postulations, evolution had actually taken place in some magnitudes. However, they differed in the manner in which Darwin formulated his theory claiming that it did not explain the immense range of observable traits that exist among various organisms.

Eisley (1988) amplifies this position by further adding, “natural selection remained controversial as a mechanism, partly because it was perceived to be too weak to explain the range of observed characteristics of living organisms, and partly because even supporters of evolution balked at its unguided and non-progressive nature” (p.44). Arguably, this is the most crucial argument that has been pinpointed as the most important in the case against acceptance of the ideas of Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection. However, this does not imply that the theory has not been received positively. The coining of the terms survival for the fittest by Hebert spacer is ideally the short description of the natural selection theory formulated by Darwin. Some scholars embraced the theory in an enthusiastic fashion.

However, inputting Darwin’s theory into perspectives of modern knowledge of genetics and hereditary, clear demarcations can be drawn on the circumstances leading to the evolution and emergence of new species of organization, which are more superior to their former parents. According to natural selection, species evolve to produce others that are better adapted to new environments. This also happens in the evolution of species due to genetic drifts and or mutations. However, the latter is random while the former is not. Rather, natural selection “preferentially selects for different mutations based on differential fitness” (Eisley, 1988, p.73).

Amid the many objections and or acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and how it translates into the evolvement of the new species of organism, its concepts are central in the evolution process of evolutional psychology.

In a similar way in which natural selection provides mechanisms of reproduction of those organisms that are well suited to the environmental changes, within the psychology discipline, integration is crucial. This follows because “the fields of psychology remain a divided” (Fitzgerald, 2010, p.285). Amid this non-unification, arguably, many scholars within the sub-disciplines of psychology such as cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, and social psychology among others have been inculcating the concepts of evolutionary psychology in the foundations of their arguments.

This means that possibilities may exist that all sub-disciplines of the broader discipline of psychology would evolve to deploy evolutionary psychology as its unifying media just as common needs for survival amid environmental changes in Darwin’s theory of natural selection form the media prompting the emergence of new species whose characteristics measure up to the new environmental demands. In this dimension, it is crucial to argue that the emergence of the discipline of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience evidences a merger or integration of cognitive and biological approaches to psychology. This integration has been instigated by a common methodology in both disciplines inspired by concepts of evolutionally meta-theory.

With this desired direction of evolution, the resulting new species is the synthesis of the two approaches to psychology discipline as a whole. This has truncated into the creation of evolutionary psychology as a discipline integrating both cognitive science and biological psychology. This proves the applicability of Darwin’s concepts of evolution by natural selection.

The modern evolutionary synthesis arose between 1936 and 1947. It reflects a consensus in the manner in which evolution proceeds through bridging of various specialties of biology providing accounts for the manner in which the process of evolution proceeds. Charles Darwin’s notion of evolution by natural selection has been altered by the “modern synthesis in that, modern evolutionary synthesis has brought in additional perspectives such as Gregor Mendel’s’ genetics coupled with the germ theory proposed by August Weismann on how evolution occurs” (Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett, 2001, p.84). In addition to these paradigms, modern evolutionary synthesis is also an amalgamation of other population genetics advances such as paleontology among others.

The notion of Darwin in the theory of natural selection was based on the argument that only organisms that are fit for survival would reproduce and hence maintain the presence of their species. This implied that organisms that were fitter than others were the only ones, which would stand higher chances of transmitting their genes down their generations. Therefore, after a couple of generations, organisms that had genes that were more successful than others would be favored.

It is also important that the process of natural section be subjected to some limiting factors for it to take place. These factors are “variation in a population, a difference in fitness between the different variations, and heredity (the ability to pass on these variations to offspring)” (Gould, 2002, p.41). During the times of Darwin, genetic blending was the most acceptable mechanisms through which heredity took place. Hence, it was akin to the conceptualization of Darwin’s hypothesis of natural selection. This mechanism was evidenced by the interbreeding of mongrels.

However, the notion of natural selection failed to account for reasons why certain favorable “variations are not rapidly lost within a few generations of breeding with normal populace” (Gould, 2002, p.47). In an attempt to provide solutions for this drawback of natural selections, some paradigms of the modern evolutionary synthesis have altered the original notion of Darwin. For instance, Gregor Mendel found out, “alleles (different forms of the same gene) are not changed when inherited; they are not ‘blended’ together, but instead remain distinct and separate in the offspring” (Gould, 2002, p.109). This means that, opposed to the notion of Darwin, variations are maintained within generations hence providing raw materials that create a breeding culture for natural selection to occur.

Modern evolutionary synthesis has also resulted in the updating of the theory of natural selection advanced by Darwin. While Darwin found out that natural selection was a crucial force for evolution, the modern synthesis finds a mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow as crucial forces resulting in the evolution of organisms (Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett, 2001, p.87). These three forces driving the perspective of modern evolutionary synthesis are reserves of the proceeds of populace genetics. Additionally, as Nash (2009) notes, “ On the Origin of Species , Darwin struggled to explain how variation could be formed and maintained” (Para.5).

On the other hand, this notion is altered by modern evolutionary synthesis since the modern synthesis articulates mutation as the key driver of the maintenance of genetic variations across individuals within populations. Opposed to Darwin’s notion, the concepts of gene flow are introduced in the modern evolutionary synthesis as a paradigm of explaining how variations take place. Essentially, RNA and DNA flow embraces the transfer of inherent messages across populations. A typical example is where an individual migrates from one place to another creating a mechanism of enhancing accessibility of alleles to populations, which are geographically isolated.

This is significant in the determination of the population’s genetic pool, which in turn helps in fostering natural selection. In the case of genetic drift, it entails “the random fluctuation in frequency of different alleles of comparable fitness” (Gould, 2002, p.113). Under the perspective of genetic drift, a single allele possesses no ability to outcompete in totality with another allele. However, “random sampling errors can have a significant impact especially upon smaller populations; the smaller the population the more likely that one allele is completely lost due to an environmental catastrophe despite, there being no significant disadvantage in bearing one allele over another” (Nash, 2009, Para. 7).

Modern synthesis combines these three paradigms with Darwin’s natural selection theory to arrive at a mathematical model for explaining the way variations occur in populations and hence the evolution of species.

Another critical concern of modern evolutionary synthesis entailed the integration of paleontologists’ findings into the models of evolution. In particular, scholars who studied fossils immensely differed with the postulation of natural selection as the chief driver of the evolution process. Nevertheless, in 1944, the notion of natural selection as an explanation of evolution faced an immense boost following the publication of George Simpson’s (an American biologist) finding that “the achievement of paleontology studies was precisely compatible with the concepts of natural selection coupled with population genetics” (Keightley & Otto, 2006, p.91).

With this argument in mind, it is subtle to conclude that modern evolutionary synthesis brings together naturalists, paleontologists, and geneticists’ perspectives on evolution. This implies that the genetic principles developed by scholars such as Mendel are largely compatible with concepts of evolution as stipulated by natural selection. In this perspective, natural selection acts as the central force that operates on various variations existing in individuals.

However, for these variations to take place, small genetic alterations need to be accumulated in a process that is essentially gradual despite the fact that the changes may also vary at a rate similar to the rate of evolution. The amalgamation of geneticists, naturalists, and paleontologists’ notions of evolution indicate, “Evolution occurs within populations where gene flow and genetic drift can have effects additional to those of selection” (Nash, 2009, Para. 10) in the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Another concept of modern evolutionary synthesis that has caused alteration of the notion of natural selection is the concept of epigenetic. It entails the inheritance of certain genetic systems’ expressions due to changes that are non-genetic. A good example of this entails “the modification of proteins on which DNA is wrapped by environmental changes making the accessibility of the DNA either difficult or easier” (Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett, 2001, p.169).

Consequently, levels of various gene expressions may raise or fall. Hence, the accessibility of the genes is either restricted or enhanced. Though instigated by environmental changes, when these changes occur, they can are acquired by the germ cells of organism. This means that they can be transmitted across generations despite the fact that the DNA has not undergone alterations. Arguably, the concept of epigenetic is an alteration of the notion of natural selection postulated by Darwin.

This holds because selection functions in levels of individuals’ traits. Hence, “epigenetic inheritance is a central subject tied within the concepts of natural selection, gene flow, mutations, and genetic drift” (Barrett, Dunbar & Lycett, 2001, p.87). These concepts tie the discipline of epigenetic to form an integral building block of modern evolutionary synthesis.

In conclusion, based on the expositions made above, it is apparent that the pioneers of evolution steered by Charles Darwin had what it takes to garner the credit they have acquired for their efforts to broaden and sensitize the subject of evolution. When Charles Darwin proposed the theory of natural selection, controversies came up from various conservatism schools of thought, as well as from the scholarly community. However, amid the controversies, Darwin set a stage for research in the body of knowledge seeking to explain the causes of variations among individual organisms.

Darwin postulated in his natural selection theory that the chief cause of variations among species is the need to adapt to new changes in the environment. This means that a change in the environment required organisms to respond likewise. The organisms that respond to these changes become fitter to survive as opposed to those that do not change. Consequently, this leads to the evolution of species of organisms.

However, this notion has been changed by the modern evolutionary synthesis from being the sole explanation of why variations occur and why evolution takes place. Precisely, genetic drift, mutations, epigenetic, and gene flow concepts have been amalgamated with the original concept of natural selection to provide a mathematical model for explaining sources of variations in organisms and hence evolution.

Barrett, L., Dunbar, R., & Lycett, J. (2001). Human Evolutionary Psychology . London: Palgrave.

Fitzgerald, C. (2010). Examining the Acceptance of and Resistance to Evolutionary Psychology Journal of evolutionary psychology, 8 (2), 284-296.

Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life . London: Penguin Books.

Eisley, L. (1958). Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. New York, USA: Doubleday & Co.

Gould, S. (2002). The Structure of Evolutionary Theory . Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Huesmann, R. (2007). The impact of electronic violence: scientific theory and research. Journal of adolescent health , 41 (6), 6-13.

Kauffman, A. (1993). The Origin of order. Self-organization and selection in evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.

Keightley, D & Otto, P. (2006). Interference among deleterious mutations favors sex and recombination in finite populations. Nature, 443 (7107), 89–92.

Nash, S. (2009). The Modern Synthesis . Web.

• Abnormal Psychology as a Scientific Discipline
• Solution-Focused (Brief) Therapy and Its Techniques
• Evolutionary Biology and Darwin
• The Role of Epigenetics in Cancer: Contributors to the Formation of Cancer Tumors
• Historical Development of Embryology and Epigenetics
• Behavioral Analysis Theory by B. F. Skinner
• Psychology History, Subdisciplines, and Careers
• Acceptance and Commitment vs. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Behavior Therapy
• Psychoanalytic, Existential, and Family Therapies
• Depression Explanation in Psychological Theories
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, March 31). Evolutionary Psychology and Natural Selection Theory. https://ivypanda.com/essays/evolutionary-psychology-and-natural-selection-theory/

"Evolutionary Psychology and Natural Selection Theory." IvyPanda , 31 Mar. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/evolutionary-psychology-and-natural-selection-theory/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Evolutionary Psychology and Natural Selection Theory'. 31 March.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Evolutionary Psychology and Natural Selection Theory." March 31, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/evolutionary-psychology-and-natural-selection-theory/.

1. IvyPanda . "Evolutionary Psychology and Natural Selection Theory." March 31, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/evolutionary-psychology-and-natural-selection-theory/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Evolutionary Psychology and Natural Selection Theory." March 31, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/evolutionary-psychology-and-natural-selection-theory/.

Evolutionary Psychology

• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 24 April 2018
• Cite this living reference work entry

• Elena Racevska 3  

68 Accesses

Evolutionary psychology is a discipline of psychology that examines psychological mechanisms from an evolutionary perspective. Some authors do not consider it to be a distinct branch of psychology, but rather a “theoretical lens that is currently informing all branches of psychology” (Buss 1998 ). The central aim of evolutionary psychologists is to identify which psychological traits can be considered adaptations – functional products of natural or sexual selection in human evolution.

History of Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology, albeit relatively new as a scientific discipline, dates back to Charles Darwin. In his book The Origin of Species published in 1859, Darwin predicted that “psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of a necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation” (Darwin 1859 ). As an academic discipline, evolutionary psychology developed on the basis of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology, but its beginnings were also...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture . New York: Oxford University Press.

Google Scholar  

Barret, D. (2007). Waistland: A (R)evolutionary view of our weight and fitness crisis . London: W.W. Norton & Company.

Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal stimuli: How primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose . London: W. W. Norton & Company.

Buss, D. M. (1998). The handbook of evolutionary psychology . Hoboken: Wiley.

Buss, D. (1999). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind . Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100 , 204–232.

Article   Google Scholar  

Buss, D. M., Larsen, R. J., Westen, D., & Semmelroth, J. (1992). Sex differences in jealousy: Evolution, physiology, and psychology. Psychological Science, 3 (4), 251–255.

Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2000). Evolutionary psychology and the emotions. Handbook of Emotions, 2 , 91–115.

Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2005). Social exchange: The evolutionary design of a neurocognitive system. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The new cognitive neurosciences, III (pp. 1295–1308). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of the species by natural selection . London: Murray.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22 (6), 469–493.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1996). Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language . London: Faber and Faber.

Fisher, R. A. (1930). The genetical theory of natural selection: A complete variorum edition . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Book   Google Scholar  

Fitch, W. T. (2004). Kin selection and ‘mother tongues’: A neglected component in language evolution. In U. Griebel & D. O. Kimbrough (Eds.), Evolution of communication systems: A comparative approach . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gangestad, S. W. (1989). The evolutionary history of genetic variation: An emerging issue in the behavioral genetic study of personality. In D. M. Buss & N. Cantor (Eds.), Personality: Recent trends and emerging directions (pp. 320–332). Berlin: Springer.

Hampton, S. J. (2004). The instinct debate and the standard social science model. Sexualities, Evolution & Gender, 6 (1), 15–44.

Kanazawa, S. (2004). General intelligence as a domain-specific adaptation. Psychological Review, 111 (2), 512–523.

Kanazawa, S., & Perina, K. (2012). Why more intelligent individuals like classical music. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 25 (3), 264–275.

Lloyd, E., Wilson, D.S., & Sober, E. (2011). Evolutionary mismatch and what to do about it: A basic tutorial. Evolutionary Applications , 2–4.

Plotkin, H. (2008). Evolutionary thought in psychology: A brief history. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Shostak, M. (2014). Nisa: The life and words of a! Kung woman . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Symons, D. (1979). The evolution of human sexuality . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, P. D., & Jonker, L. B. (1978). Evolutionary stable strategies and game dynamics. Mathematical Biosciences, 40 (1–2), 145–156.

Thornhill, R., & Thornhill, N. W. (1983). Human rape: An evolutionary analysis. Ethology and Sociobiology, 4 , 63–99.

Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Ethology, 20 (4), 410–433.

Trivers, R. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection . Cambridge, MA: Biological Laboratories, Harvard University.

Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

Elena Racevska

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elena Racevska .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Oakland University , Rochester, Michigan, USA

Jennifer Vonk

Department of Psychology, Oakland University Department of Psychology, Rochester, Michigan, USA

Todd Shackelford

Section Editor information

Penn State Worthington Scranton, Scranton, USA

Douglas Sellers

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Racevska, E. (2018). Evolutionary Psychology. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_561-1

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_561-1

Received : 27 August 2017

Accepted : 13 April 2018

Published : 24 April 2018

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-47829-6

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-47829-6

eBook Packages : Springer Reference Behavioral Science and Psychology Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essay Examples >
• Essays Topics >
• Essay on Human

Essay On Evolutionary Psychology

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Human , Psychology , Study , Genetics , Biology , Theory , Science , Behavior

Words: 1800

Published: 02/19/2020

ORDER PAPER LIKE THIS

Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology (or EP) examines psychological traits like memory, language, and perception, from an evolutionary perspective, which is modern. This theory seeks to identify the human psychological traits that are evolved adaptations. These are the traits, which are the functional products of sexual selection or natural selection. According to the adaptationists, physiological mechanisms are related to psychological processes. They consider the physiological mechanisms of the heart, immune system, and lungs. Some of the evolutionary psychologists apply this thinking to psychology, and argue that the human mind has a similar modular structure to the human body, where different modular adaptations serve different functions. According to evolutionary psychologists, a lot of the behavior exhibited by humans is the product of psychological adaptations, which evolved to solve their recurrent problems in the environments of their ancestors. This field of evolutionary psychology is steadily becoming influential in the field of psychology. According to evolutionary psychologists, EP is not just a sub-discipline of the larger field of psychology. They argue that evolutionary theory is sufficient in providing a metatheoretical framework at the foundational level that integrates the whole psychology field, in a manner similar to that used for biology. According to evolutionary psychologists, traits or behaviors that take place universally in every culture are very good candidates for the mentioned evolutionary adaptations. These include the abilities to deduce facts from others' emotions, to discern non-kin from kin, prefer and identify healthier mates, or to cooperate with other people. This makes it possible to predict issues such as intelligence, marriage patterns, bride price, infanticide, perception of beauty, promiscuity, and parental investment.

The theory of evolutionary psychology is based on several central premises. The first premise is that the brain is a device that processes information, and produces behavior to respond appropriately to internal and external inputs. The brain has adaptive mechanisms, which were shaped by sexual, and natural selection. This theory also argues that there were different neural mechanisms, which were specialized for problem solving in the evolutionary past of humanity. With time, the brain evolved some specialized neural mechanisms, which were designed for problem solving, especially for the problems that recurred as evolution continued and time went by, giving modern human beings stone-age minds. A vast majority of the processes and contents of the mind are unconscious. Most of the mental problems that appear easy to solve, happen to be extremely difficult, and these are solved unconsciously through complicated neural mechanisms. The theory also argues that human psychology is made up of a large number of specialized mechanisms, with each of them being sensitive to unlike classes of inputs or information. These mechanisms combine and produce manifest behavior. The findings and theories of Evolutionary Psychology have applications in a large number of fields, including economics, management, psychiatry, politics literature, environment, health, and law.

Controversies Concerning Evolutionary Psychology

Some of the critics of this perspective have raised questions on the testability of the theories. Others are on the assumptions made in evolutionary and cognitive assumptions (such as the modular functioning in which the brain operates, and large uncertainty on the ancestral environment). Some critics are also concerned with the importance of non-adaptive and non-genetic explanations, and the ethical and political issues that could arise due to interpretation of the research results.

Behavioral genetics

Behavioral genetics examines the role played by genetics in animal and human behavior. It is usually associated with the debate on "nature versus nurture". Behavioral genetics is interdisciplinary, and it involves contributions from biology, epigenetics, ethology, psychology, genetics, and statistics. Most behavioral geneticists study how behavioral traits are inherited. In humans, the information is usually gathered by using the twin studies or adoption studies. In animal studies, transgenesis, gene knockout and various breeding techniques are common. This field is very closely related to Psychiatric genetics. The relationship between genetics, or heredity and behavior, dates back to the work of Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist who lived between1822–1911. He coined the saying “nature and nurture.” He studied the families and relatives of outstanding men, who lived in his days and finally concluded, like Charles Darwin his cousin that mental powers normally run in families. He became the first person to use twins for genetic research and started many statistical analysis methods used today. In 1918, the British geneticist Ronald Aylmer Fisher wrote a paper to show how the laws of Gregor Mendel’s on inheritance, could be applied to complex the traits influenced by environmental factors and multiple genes. The very first research on human behavioral genetic influence on mental illness and intelligence began in 1920, when environmentalism (that is, the theory that human behavior resulted from non-genetic factors like various childhood experiences) was popular. This was before Nazi Germany abused genetics and made the notion that hereditary could influence behavior abhorrent. Even though genetic research continued to be carried out on human behavior throughout the decades that followed, it was not until the 70s that a more balanced view prevailed in psychiatry and recognized the significance of both nature and nurture. However, in the field of psychology, this reconciliation never took hold until the 80s. a lot of the behavioral genetic research carried out today focuses on the identification of specific genes that could affect behavioral dimensions like intelligence and personality, and disorders, such as hyperactivity, depression, schizophrenia and autism.

The main goal of the field of behavioral genetics is usually to establish the causal relationships between behavior and genes. One of the more common approaches in this field is the reductionism. Here, scientists first examine a behavioral or psychological function (for example, schizophrenia). They then use the known functions of neurotransmitter systems and brain systems, to correlate behavior to the specific brain areas (for example, excess release of glutamate may stimulate excess production of dopamine within the limbic system, and this would lead to schizophrenic symptoms). After the scientists are able to connect behavior to various biological systems, they are then able to turn to genetics in order to understand how these biological systems developed (for example, abnormal glutamate genes could be the cause of schizophrenia). The first attempts to associate a particular genes (or chromosomal position) to behavior usually involve searching for QTL, or (Quantitative trait loci). With human populations, other methods used involve adoption studies and twin studies. These two methods try to separate environmental and genetic contributions to behavior. The Human Genome Project made it possible for scientists to comprehend the coding sequence found in human DNA nucleotides. After candidate genes for various behaviors are discovered, i8t becomes possible for scientists to genetically screen different individuals in order to determine their chances of developing some form of pathology. With animals (non-humans), selection experiments are often employed. For instance, breeding laboratory house mice for the observation of open-field behavior, voluntary hamster wheel-running behavior, and thermoregulatory nesting.

Behavioral Neuroscience

Behavioral neuroscience is a perspective that applies the principles of neurobiology, to studying physiological, developmental, and genetic mechanisms of behavior. Scientists do this by using both non-human and human animals. It investigates different things at the level of neurotransmitters, nerves, brain circuitry and other basic biological processes underlying abnormal and normal behavior. In most cases, experiments carried out in behavioral neuroscience usually involve animal models which are non-human (such as rats, mice, and primates which are non-human) which have implications that could lead to a better comprehension of human pathology, thereby contributing to practice which is based on evidence. The distinguishing characteristic found in behavioral neuroscience experiments is that either one of the variables, the dependent variable used in the experiment is biological, or the independent variable is biological. What this means is that, the nervous system belonging to the organism being studied is temporarily or permanently altered, or some other aspect of this nervous system may be measured (it is usually related to a given behavioral variable). Generally, behavioral neuroscientists study themes and issues, which are similar to academic psychologists, although they are limited by their need to use animals, which are nonhuman. As a result, most of the literature found in behavioral neuroscience covers behaviors and mental processes that are shared by different animal models. For instance, sensation and perception control of movement, motivated behavior (such as hunger, thirst, and sex), learning and memory, emotion, and sleep and biological rhythms. However, with increases in technical sophistication and the development of more accurate noninvasive methods, which can also be applied to the human subjects as well, behavioral neuroscientists are now beginning to contribute knowledge to other areas of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy, such as language, consciousness, and reasoning and decision making. This science has also made contributions a better comprehension of medical disorders, as well as the ones that fall under the purview of biological psychopathology and clinical psychology (that is, the ones in abnormal psychology). Although there are no animal models for all the mental illnesses, this field has contributed a lot of important therapeutic data covering a wide variety of conditions, which include: Parkinson’s disease, Huntington's disease, Alzheimer's disease, clinical depression, schizophrenia, autism, anxiety, drug abuse, and alcoholism.

Limitations and Advantages

Behavioral neuroscience involves different manipulations, and they have limitations and advantages. For instance, neural tissue, which is destroyed by electric shock, neurotoxicin or surgery, is a permanent type of manipulation and consequently limits any follow-up investigation. This is true for most techniques of genetic manipulation. One of the advantages of behavioral neuroscience is that temporary lesions are achievable with advances in genetic manipulation, for instance, certain genes can be switched on or off with proper diet. Pharmacological manipulations allow scientists to block certain neurotransmitters temporarily to enable the function to return to its original state after the metabolism of the drug.

Of the three perspectives, the most valid is behavioral neuroscience. This is because it uses scientific methods that can be measured, and the data collected is easy to analyze. It is reliable, and its methods can be replicated for other studies. It has also contributed more to the sciences than the other perspectives, making it more useful.

Freberg, L. (2010). Discovering Biological Psychology. New York: Cengage Learning. Kalat, J. W. (2009). Biological Psychology. New York: Cengage Learning. Kassin, S. (2004). Psychology. New York: Prentice Hall.

Cite this page

Share with friends using:

Removal Request

Finished papers: 1717

This paper is created by writer with

If you want your paper to be:

Well-researched, fact-checked, and accurate

Original, fresh, based on current data

Eloquently written and immaculately formatted

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Get your papers done by pros!

Other Pages

Europe argumentative essays, weakness term papers, uniqueness term papers, production and management accounting essay, considering ethics essay example, free research paper on an aging population places a heavy burden on public programs, course work on paternalism, research paper on health care system, horizontal hostility in nursing case study examples, should the us be on a gold standard term paper sample, example of statistics in research essay, congressional decision making essay examples, essay on cancer, macroeconomics essay examples, essay on arizona statehood and constitution 2, troubleshooting operating systems term paper example, example of research paper on study of a school race and age, essay on tiny smiling daddy, colorado peace ride case data analysis course work example, personality identity and growth paper essay, example of article review on intro 1st assing for a, identify and discuss learning opportunities within reinforcing and balancing feedback case study example, economic globalization production markets work and corporate restructuring critical thinking examples, budget course work examples, essay on stock market, example of critical thinking on the us constitution, thug essays, acknowledgment essays, streetcar essays, j edgar hoover essays, repository essays, spider essays, picket essays, panther essays, comb essays, vine essays, kebab essays, mycoplasma essays, tahitian essays, jackfruit essays, beanstalk essays, ullage essays.

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline