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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.

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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

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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.

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10 Evolutionary Psychology Examples

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

Learn about our Editorial Process

Evolutionary psychology aims to understand how thoughts, actions, and behavior are shaped by evolutionary forces (Mealey, 2023; Workman, 2004).

Evolutionary psychology proposes that the human brain and mind have developed in ways that were evolutionarily advantageous to our ancestors.

Therefore, according to this approach, we need to understand the evolutionary origins of mental processes to fully understand human behavior.

The mental processes and mechanisms that have evolved to solve problems of survival and reproduction are called psychological adaptations.  

An example of evolutionary psychology is the investigation of the underlying psychological reasons we might prefer to mate with partners with certain physical or behavioral traits.

Evolutionary psychology is set apart from other psychological disciplines because it typically explains human behavior through the lens of survival and reproduction.

1. Explaining Perception in Infants

Some essential aspects of human behavior seem to be innate even early on. Cognitive functions, like perceiving a steep drop off or an object coming towards you, are present in infants. For example, infants are weary of steep drop-offs (i.e. cliffs), even if they haven’t experienced a fall (Mealey, 2023).    

2. Explaining Mate Selection through Evolution

Much of evolutionary psychology is concerned with relationships since they are important to understanding reproduction. Some evolutionary psychology tries to explain why people prefer specific characteristics in other people – like facial symmetry.   

3. Explaining Human Emotion

Many emotions appear early in life and do not have to be learned. Evolutionary psychology suggests that emotions have evolved in response to selective pressures. For example, fear may have evolved to avoid potential threats to survival.

4. The Origins of Mental Health Problems

Behavioral traits like anxiety could have been adaptive in certain situations. For example, being worried and vigilant could have been very adaptive to survival and reproductive success if you lived in a time that involved many predators and dangers. However, too much anxiety could be maladaptive and harmful.

5. Understanding Parental Attachment

Attachment theory is well-established in developmental psychology. Human infants are very dependent on their parents, much more so than many other species. Evolutionary psychology, therefore, proposes that attachment between a parent and child has arisen due to its importance for survival and reproduction.  

6. Evolutionary Basis for Human Personality

Evolutionary psychology proposes that some personality traits, like aggression, have persisted because they were once valuable in competition for resources and mates.  As a result, even traits we now consider to be negative continue to part of human behavior, and even be admired as an attractive trait for mates.

7. Explanation for Cooperation in Humans

Some people are more aggressive, while others are more agreeable and cooperative. Evolutionary psychology suggests that humans have evolved to be cooperative with others to increase their chances of survival. For example, cooperative behavior could have increased access to resources, reduced potentially harmful fighting, and increased help with childcare. 

8. Evolutionary Basis of Social Bonds

Humans are very social creatures. Evolutionary psychology proposes that humans have evolved to form strong social bonds because these bonds were important for gathering resources, taking care of each other, and surviving. By being social creatures, we have managed to thrive – together.

For more, read our piece on social bond theory.

9. Evolutionary Basis of Language

Human children start learning language and communication very early on. Evolutionary psychology proposes that language development occurs because the ability to communicate would have been useful for many activities that would have increased survival. For example, these activities could have involved warning others about danger, coordinating group activities, and passing along other useful information.

10. Explaining Behavioral Preferences through Evolution

Humans have many behavioral preferences. For example, many people enjoy what are now deemed “unhealthy” calorie-dense sweet and fatty foods. Evolutionary psychology would suggest that we have evolved preferences for these foods because these high-calorie foods were once particularly valuable sources of energy in our ancestral environment where food was often scarce.

Top Theories in Evolutionary Psychology

Two popular theories in evolutionary psychology include the sexual strategies theory and error management theory.

1. Sexual Strategies Theory

Sexual strategies theory proposes that humans have evolved different long and short-term mating strategies that may depend on many factors like culture and social context.

This theory focuses on similarities and differences in men’s and women’s mating preferences and strategies.

The theory proposes that women have inherited the trait of desiring mates who possess resources. In contrast, men have inherited the trait of desiring health.

Many factors, beyond resources or health, like culture, context, and personality, will influence who people choose to be their partners (Buss, 2023).

2. Error Management Theory

Error management theory (EMT) explains how we think, make decisions, and evaluate uncertain or novel situations.

We must make decisions constantly; some errors are more costly than others. EMT explains that we have evolved to make decisions that will result in less costly errors (Buss, 2023).

Criticisms of Evolutionary Biology

Human behavior is very complex and influenced by many biological, environmental, and cultural factors . Therefore, evolutionary psychology has faced some criticism and, like any psychological field, has important limitations to consider.

For example, many human behaviors persist that are not beneficial to survival and reproduction.

Additionally, we lack knowledge on the details of all the selection pressures humans could have faced over millions of years of evolution (Confer et al., 2010). This lack of knowledge and heavy reliance on theorizing leads to a lack of testability – we weren’t there to observe selective pressures millions of years ago.

As a result, we can’t directly test how those pressures may have shaped behavior.

Evolutionary psychology has also faced criticism for overemphasizing the role of biology in behavior.

However, we know that genetic and environmental influences are important to understand why humans differ from each other (Polderman et al., 2015).

The nature vs. nurture question that is so popular is somewhat misleading, as at this point, we know that nature and nurture are both essential and often interact with each other.

Evolutionary psychologists operate under the assumption that human brain structures, functions, and mental capabilities evolved under natural selection in the same way that human bodies did (Mealey, 2023).

This would mean that the mental processes that underlie thought and behavior in humans exist now because they once helped human ancestors survive and reproduce.

Evolutionary psychological theories are applied to all human behavior, including emotions, personality, perception, and learning.

Other Types of Psychology

• Biological Psychology – Biological psychology involves studying biological influences on behavior, thoughts, and emotions (Kalat, 2015).
• Clinical Psychology – Clinical Psychology is a specialty in psychology that involves the practical application of psychological theories for treating psychological problems and disorders (Pomerantz, 2016).
• Comparative Psychology – Comparative psychology studies the similarities and differences in behavior across different species to understand evolutionary relationships.
• Cognitive Psychology – Cognitive psychology focuses on understanding mental processes such as perception, memory, reasoning, and problem-solving.
• Social Psychology – Social psychology examines how individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the presence and actions of others.
• Experimental Psychology – Experimental psychology involves using scientific methods to study and understand behavior and mental processes through controlled experiments.

Buss, D. M. (2023). Evolutionary theories in psychology. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds),  Noba textbook series: Psychology.  Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from  http://noba.to/ymcbwrx4

Confer, J. C., Easton, J. A., Fleischman, D. S., Goetz, C. D., Lewis, D. M. G., Perilloux, C., & Buss, D. M. (2010). Evolutionary psychology: Controversies, questions, prospects, and limitations. American Psychologist , 65 (2), 110–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018413

Mealey, L. (2023). Evolutionary psychology. In Salem Press Encyclopedia of Health .

Polderman, T. J. C., Benyamin, B., de Leeuw, C. A., Sullivan, P. F., van Bochoven, A., Visscher, P. M., & Posthuma, D. (2015). Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies. Nature Genetics , 47 (7), 702–709. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3285

Workman, L. (2004). Evolutionary psychology: An introduction . Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press. http://archive.org/details/evolutionarypsyc0000work

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Green Flags in a Relationship
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Signs you're Burnt Out, Not Lazy
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Toxic Things Parents Say to their Children
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd-2/ 15 Red Flags Early in a Relationship

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Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology

* E-mail: [email protected] (JJB); [email protected] (KNL)

Affiliation Behavioural Biology Group and Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Affiliation School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom

Affiliation Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States of America

Affiliation School of Biology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom

• Johan J. Bolhuis, 
• Gillian R. Brown, 
• Robert C. Richardson, 
• Kevin N. Laland

Published: July 19, 2011

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109
• Reader Comments

Evolutionary Psychology (EP) views the human mind as organized into many modules, each underpinned by psychological adaptations designed to solve problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. We argue that the key tenets of the established EP paradigm require modification in the light of recent findings from a number of disciplines, including human genetics, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and paleoecology. For instance, many human genes have been subject to recent selective sweeps; humans play an active, constructive role in co-directing their own development and evolution; and experimental evidence often favours a general process, rather than a modular account, of cognition. A redefined EP could use the theoretical insights of modern evolutionary biology as a rich source of hypotheses concerning the human mind, and could exploit novel methods from a variety of adjacent research fields.

Citation: Bolhuis JJ, Brown GR, Richardson RC, Laland KN (2011) Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. PLoS Biol 9(7): e1001109. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001109

Copyright: © 2011 Bolhuis et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: JJB is funded by Utrecht University and by Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) grants (ALW Open Competition and GW Horizon Programme) ( http://www.nwo.nl/ ). GRB is funded by a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship, UK ( http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/ ). RCR is funded by the University of Cincinnati. KNL is funded by the BBSRC, UK ( http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/ ) and an ERC Advanced Grant http://erc.europa.eu/ ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Abbreviations: AI, artificial intelligence; EEA, environment of evolutionary adaptedness; EP, Evolutionary Psychology

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin's publication of the Origin of Species , evolutionary theory has become the bedrock of modern biology; yet, its application to the human mind remains steeped in controversy [1] – [13] . Darwin himself wrote of cognitive evolution, most notably in The Descent of Man , where he suggested that like any other trait, human “mental faculties” are the outcome of evolution by natural and sexual selection and insisted that they should be understood in light of what he called “common descent”. This evolutionary interpretation of human cognition was taken up in the 1980s by contemporary evolutionary psychology, which rapidly became dominated by a school of thought stemming from the University of California at Santa Barbara (see Box 1 ). The essence of this brand of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) is neatly summarized in the famous quote that “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind” [2] .

Box 1. The Major Tenets of Evolutionary Psychology

According to the Santa Barbara school of Evolutionary Psychology (EP), human minds are organized into a large number of evolved psychological mechanisms—psychological adaptations designed to solve recurrent problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors [30] . These evolutionary psychologists attempt to provide criteria for “carving the mind at its natural joints” [104] , generally by reverse-engineering from an observable phenomenon to its proposed function.

In the 1980s, four major tenets of EP crystallized, and these ideas became widespread. While not all evolutionary psychologists endorse the Santa Barbara perspective, these ideas have nonetheless shaped the broader field, and remain extremely prevalent.

1. The environment of evolutionary adaptedness ( EEA ). This concept refers to the notion that our psychological mechanisms have evolved in response to stable features of ancestral environments [87] . While the EEA has frequently been equated with an African Pleistocene savanna, this version of the concept has been strongly critiqued [66] , and the more recent formulation of the EEA concept presents a broader, less specific theoretical landscape of our past lives, based on an abstract statistical composite of all relevant past selective environments [105] .

2. Gradualism. Evolutionary psychologists argue that minds are built from co-adapted gene complexes that are unable to respond quickly to selection [105] , [106] . When combined with the concept of the EEA, gradualism suggests that human beings experience an adaptive lag [88] , such that evolved psychological mechanisms may not produce adaptive responses in modern human environments that have undergone dramatic recent changes [105] .

3. Massive modularity. Given that different sets of adaptive problems will have required different computational solutions, the mind is argued to consist predominantly of domain-specific, modular programmes [105] . Whether the mind also contains evolved general-purpose processes remains debated within EP [104] .

4. Universal human nature. The evolved computational programmes in the human mind are assumed to be responsible for producing a universal (that is, species-typical) human nature [105] . At the same time, different outcomes of these programmes are suggested to be triggered by different environmental or social conditions, leading to the prediction of both universal behavioural outcomes and locally specified adaptive solutions [105] .

However, many evolutionarily minded psychologists, evolutionary biologists, and philosophers of science disagree with the theoretical proposals put forward by the Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologists, and the discipline has been the subject of intense debates [1] , [3] – [13] . Here, we assess the impact of recent developments in genetics, evolutionary and developmental biology, paleoecology, and cognitive science on EP and then go on to suggest that these developments provide new avenues for research.

Reassessing the Major Tenets of Evolutionary Psychology

EP is encapsulated by four major tenets (see Box 1 ) that have generated considerable discussion. Here, we argue that all of these basic assumptions need to be reassessed in the light of contemporary evidence.

The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness and Gradualism

EP argues that that human cognitive processes evolved in response to selection pressures acting in ancestral conditions—in an environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA)—and are not necessarily adaptive in a contemporary world that has changed radically in recent millennia. From this vantage point, genetic evolution simply could not keep pace fully with the extraordinary rate at which human technology transformed environments. Tied up with this notion of adaptive lag (or mismatch between our biology and our environment) is an emphasis on evolutionary gradualism: evolutionary change, particularly with respect to complex adaptations in the human mind, is deemed to have occurred slowly; too slowly to have led to significant genetic change in the few hundred generations that have elapsed since the end of the Pleistocene, or even since the spread of modern humans around the world over the last 50,000 years.

Recent developments in human genetics have challenged the concepts of adaptive lag and gradualism. EP originated in the early 1980s, when our knowledge of the human genome was limited and gradualism dominated evolutionary thinking (although biologists' attempts to estimate rates of selection in nature were in full flow in the 1970s [14] , leaving the Santa Barbara school's gradualism assumption contentious from the outset). Since then, geneticists have not only mapped the genome, but have devised means for detecting which genes have been subject to recent selection [15] – [19] . There have been substantial human genetic changes in the last 50,000 years, with possibly as much as 10% of human genes affected [19] . Events in the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), particularly the adoption of agriculture, domestication of animals, and the increases in human densities that these practices afforded, were a major source of selection on our species [17] – [22] , and possibly accelerated human evolution [20] , [22] . Evidence from the human genome strongly suggests that recent human evolution has been affected by responses to features of the environment that were constructed by humans, from culturally facilitated changes in diet, to aspects of modern living that inadvertently promoted the spread of diseases [22] , [23] . Genes expressed in the human brain are well-represented in this recent selection [11] , [12] .

Evolutionary biologists have also measured the rate of response to selection in a wide variety of animals [14] , [24] , finding that evolutionary change typically occurs much faster than hitherto thought. A recent meta-analysis of 63 studies that measured the strength of natural selection in 62 species, including more than 2,500 estimates of selection, concluded that the median selection gradient (a measure of the rate of change of fitness with trait value) was 0.16, which would cause a quantitative trait to change by one standard deviation in just 25 generations [24] . If humans exhibit equivalent rates, then significant genetic evolution would occur over the course of a few hundred years. While fast evolution is far from inevitable, there is nonetheless strong evidence that it has frequently occurred in humans. EP has yet to come to terms with the possibility of recent, rapid genetic changes with their potential for associated neural rewiring.

Even if we consider the selection pressures that acted on ancestral human populations during the Pleistocene epoch (approximately 1.7 million to 10,000 years ago), the abstract concept of stable selection pressures in the EEA is challenged by recent evidence from paleoecology and paleoanthropology. The Pleistocene was apparently far from stable, not only being variable, but progressively changing in the pattern of variation [25] , [26] . The world experienced by members of the genus Homo in the early Pleistocene was very different from that experienced in the late Pleistocene, and even early anatomical modern Homo sapiens that lived around 150,000 years ago led very different lives from Upper Paleolithic people (40,000 years ago) [27] – [29] .

Universalism

EP has also placed emphasis on the concept of human nature, comprising a species-specific repertoire of universal, evolved psychological mechanisms, from a childhood fear of strangers, to a cheater-detection mechanism, to a preference for specific mate characteristics. This putative universal cognition can be rendered compatible with the observed diversity in human behaviour by recourse to context-dependent strategies. From this perspective, the mind shifts between pre-specified behavioural outputs in response to differential environmental influences [30] , [31] .

This explanation of human behavioral variation is also contentious [3] , [32] – [34] . The notion of universalism has led to the view that undergraduates at Western universities constitute a representative sample of human nature, a view that has been subject to criticism from anthropologists and psychologists [33] – [35] . Moreover, by EP's formulation, all epigenetic and developmental effects simply evoke alternative genetically pre-specified strategies. Recent trends in developmental psychology and neuroscience have instead stressed the malleability of the human brain, emphasizing how experience tunes and regulates synaptic connectivity, neural circuitry and gene expression in the brain, leading to remarkable plasticity in the brain's structural and functional organization [36] . Neuroscientists have been aware since the 1980s that the human brain has too much architectural complexity for it to be plausible that genes specify its wiring in detail [37] ; therefore, developmental processes carry much of the burden of establishing neural connections.

In parallel, emerging trends in evolutionary theory, particularly the growth of developmental systems theory, epigenetic inheritance, and niche-construction theory, have placed emphasis on organisms as active constructors of their environments [38] – [40] . The development of an organism, including the characteristics of its brain, involves a complex interaction between genetically inherited information, epigenetic influences, and learning in response to constructed features of the physical and social environment [5] , [40] – [45] . From this viewpoint, the human mind does not consist of pre-specified programmes, but is built via a constant interplay between the individual and its environment [45] , [46] , a point made by developmental psychologist Daniel Lehrman [47] many years ago. By constructing their worlds (for example, by building homes, planting crops, and setting up social institutions), humans co-direct their own development and evolution [22] , [39] , [48] , [49] .

The view that a universal genetic programme underpins human cognition is also not fully consistent with current genetic evidence. Humans are less genetically diverse than many species, including other apes [50] , largely because human effective population sizes were small until around 70,000 years ago [51] , [52] . Nonetheless, there is enough genetic variation to have supported considerable adaptive change in the intervening time, and recent thinking amongst geneticists is that our species' unique reliance on learned behaviour and culture may have relaxed allowable thresholds for large-scale genomic diversity [21] , [53] . Human behavioral genetics has also identified genetic variation underlying an extensive list of cognitive and behavioural characteristics [54] .

While variation within populations accounts for the bulk of human genetic variation, around 5%–7% of genetic differences can be attributed to variation between populations [55] . Some of the significant genetic differences between human populations have arisen from recent selective events [56] , [57] . Gene-culture coevolution may well turn out to be the characteristic pattern of evolutionary change in humans over recent time spans [22] , [58] (see Box 2 ). From this perspective, cultural practices are likely to have influenced selection pressures on the human brain, raising the possibility that genetic variation could lead to biases in the human cognitive processing between, as well as within, populations. In summary, there is no uniform human genetic program.

Box 2. Gene-Culture Coevolution

Gene-culture coevolutionary theory explores how genetic and cultural processes interact over evolutionary time [22] , [58] . Changes in diet afforded by cultural practices, such as agriculture and the domestication of plants and animals, provide compelling examples of gene-culture coevolution, demonstrating how cultural practices have transformed the selection pressures acting on humans and given rise to some of the genetic differences between human populations. For instance, there is now little doubt that dairy farming created the selective environment that favoured the spread of alleles for adult lactose tolerance [85] , [107] , [108] . Another example concerns the evolution of the human amylase gene: Perry et al. [109] found that copy number of the salivary amylase gene ( AMY1 ) is positively correlated with salivary amylase protein level and that individuals from human populations with high-starch diets have, on average, more AMY1 copies than those with traditionally low-starch diets. Indeed, the transition to novel food sources with the advent of agriculture and the colonization of new habitats would appear to have been a major source of selection on humans [17] , [110] , and several genes related to the metabolism of carbohydrates, lipids, and phosphates show signals of recent selection [17] – [19] .

More generally, human dispersal and subsequent exposure to novel climates, aggregation and exposure to new pathogens, and farming and exposure to new diets are now widely thought to be the source of selection for the spread of many human alleles [22] . Amongst the overrepresented categories in genome-wide scans of recent selection are numerous alleles expressed in the human nervous system and brain [17] – [19] . This raises the possibility that complex cognition on which culture is reliant (social intelligence, language, and challenges associated with constructing and adapting to new environmental conditions) have driven human brain evolution. Mathematical models exploring how genetic and cultural processes interact provide strong support for the role of gene-culture coevolution in human evolution [92] , [111] – [115] . Analyses of these models has often revealed patterns and rates of change that are uncharacteristic of more traditional population genetic theory [92,114–116]. Gene-culture dynamics are typically faster and stronger and operate over a broader range of conditions than conventional evolutionary dynamics [22] , [83] , [117] , [118] .

EP's emphasis on a universal human nature has hindered its exploitation of new opportunities to examine human diversity utilizing evolutionary biology. Contemporary evolution theory makes predictions about behavioural variation within and between populations in traits commonly studied by evolutionary psychologists. For example, sex differences in mate preferences constitute a large proportion of EP research and are generally assumed to exhibit universal patterns (e.g., [59] , [60] ); however, sexual selection theory suggests that a number of factors, such as sex-biased mortality, population density, and variation in mate quality, will affect sex roles (see Box 3 ). A modern EP would make greater use of the theoretical insights of modern evolutionary biology as a source of testable hypotheses [3] , [6] .

Box 3. Reconsidering the Evolution of Sex Roles

Based on the classic work of Bateman [119] and Trivers [120] , EP has predicted sex differences in the relative competiveness and choosiness of men and women when seeking mating partners. Men are generally assumed to have been selected to favour more sexual partners than women and to base their choices on the age, health, and physical attractiveness of prospective partners; in contrast, women are assumed to be more choosy than men and to base their judgements on the willingness of males to invest resources in their offspring [59] . However, contemporary sexual selection theory [121] , [122] suggests that a number of factors, such as sex-biased mortality, population density, and variation in mate quality, will affect how competitive and choosy males and females are, with sex roles expected to vary considerably within and between societies. For example, this theory predicts that, in human beings, both sexes will be choosy when encounter rates with potential mates are high, particularly where the parental investment levels of both sexes are large and not too different, and/or where variation in mate quality of both sexes is high, and males are likely to be choosy in populations with a female-biased adult sex ratio and considerable paternal investment.

The prediction that sex roles will vary between populations is borne out in data on variance in mating and reproductive success in current and historic human populations, which does not support the notion of a single universal pattern [123] . In addition, evolutionary psychologists have themselves begun to record cross-cultural variation in mate preferences and to examine whether variables such as adult sex ratios and local pathogen loads can explain within- and between-population variation in mating behaviour (e.g., [31] ). However, the EP perspective generally assumes that context-specific strategies are pre-programmed within our evolved psychological mechanisms, such that individuals possess multiple strategies that are differentially elicited by certain external factors or that individuals develop a particular strategy as a result of environmental inputs acting on evolved developmental systems during early life (e.g., [30] , [60] . Arguably, the more flexible and variable the exhibited behaviour, the less explanatory power can be attributed to evolved structure in the mind.

An alternative perspective, supported by developmental systems and niche construction theorists (e.g., [38] , [39] ), posits that the human mind does not consist solely of pre-specified programmes and that brain development is strongly influenced by transmitted culture. One of the key contrasts between this perspective and traditional EP is therefore the role that socially transmitted culture has to play in the development of the brain and behaviour [32] . For illustration, consider how the relatively recent developments of agriculture (niche construction), high-density populations, and the evolution of social stratification (transmitted culture), have dramatically changed the ecological context of human mating decisions from what would have occurred in hunter-gatherer societies. According to the aforementioned theory, the increasing encounter rates that such practices likely afforded should have led to much greater choosiness in both modern men and women compared to their Pleistocene ancestors. Modern evolutionary theory has much to offer evolutionary psychologists who are willing to eschew a focus on universality.

Massive Modularity

EP has proposed that the mind consists of evolved cognitive modules, a perspective referred to as the massive modularity hypothesis [61] , [62] . Massive modularity is a somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of Fodor's [63] original concept of modularity. Essentially, Fodor suggested that what he called input systems (such as those involved in auditory and visual perception, but also in language) were modular, i.e., operating in relative isolation from each other. Information from these modular systems would be passed on to central systems (involved in problem solving or thought) that themselves were thought not to be modular. EP has extended modularity to involve the whole mind/brain.

The thesis of massive modularity is not supported by the neuroscientific evidence [64] – [67] . Firstly, comparative psychology presents an unassailable case for the existence of domain-general mechanisms. The processes of associative learning are widespread in animals and have general properties that allow animals to learn about the causal relationships among a wide variety of events [68] , [69] . For instance, a simple learning theory rule, known as the Rescorla–Wagner rule [70] , has proved extraordinarily useful in explaining the results of hundreds of experiments in diverse animals, including foraging in honeybees, avoidance conditioning in goldfish, and inferential reasoning in humans.

Secondly, there is broad involvement of diverse neural structures in many psychological processes, and there is feedback even to the most basic perceptual processing. For instance, the hominid brain has not only witnessed a proportional expansion of the neocortex, but the neocortex has become intricately interconnected and has evolved projections into the medulla and spinal cord [71] . This has allowed humans to learn intricate routines of movement and complex manual tasks, because the Fodorian executive part of the brain can directly monitor the fingers and the feet [71] . The same projections allow exhibit fine control of the tongue, vocal chords, and breathing, without which humans probably could not have learned to speak [71] . After evaluating the evidence and consistent with Fodor's original proposals, Bolhuis and Macphail [64] suggested that there is no evidence for modularity in central systems such as those involved in learning and memory. With regard to cognitive mechanisms, more often than not, data from animal experiments is consistent with a general-process account rather than an interpretation involving adaptively specialized cognitive modules [64] , [65] , [67] , [72] .

A large part of EP's emphasis on massive modularity drew from artificial intelligence (AI) research. While the great lesson from AI research of the 1970s was that domain specificity was critical to intelligent behaviour, the lesson of the new millennium is that intelligent agents (such as driverless robotic cars) require integration and decision-making across domains, regularly utilize general-process tools such as Bayesian analysis, stochastic modelling, and optimization, and are responsive to a variety of environmental cues [73] . However, while AI research has shifted away from an emphasis on domain specificity, some evolutionary psychologists continue to argue that selection would have favoured predominantly domain-specific mechanisms (e.g., [74] ). In contrast, others have started to present the case for domain-general evolved psychological mechanisms (e.g., [75] , [76] ), and evidence from developmental psychology suggests that domain-general learning mechanisms frequently build on knowledge acquired through domain-specific perceptual processes and core cognition [44] . Both domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms are compatible with evolutionary theory, and their relative importance in human information processing will only be revealed through careful experimentation, leading to a greater understanding of how the brain works [44] .

Towards a New Science of the Evolution of the Mind

We have reviewed how developments in a number of scientific fields have called into question the key tenets of EP. Fortunately, these developments do not just create problems for EP, but also suggest potential solutions. We argue that the key factor will be the methodological and conceptual integration of EP with adjacent fields.

Traditionally, EP has tested hypotheses using the conventional tools of psychology (questionnaires, computer-based experiments, etc.). Generally these hypotheses have a functional perspective—that is, EP proposes that a particular mechanism functioned to enhance reproductive success in our ancestors. However, Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen [77] famously proposed that understanding behavior requires comprehension not only of its function and evolution, but also of its causation and development [78] , and he argued that a complete understanding of behavior involves addressing all four of these questions. These distinctions are relevant because accounts of the evolution of brain and cognition cannot in themselves explain the brain's underlying working mechanisms [1] , since these are logically distinct questions. While evolutionary analyses may generate clues as to the mechanisms of human cognition, these are best regarded as hypotheses, not established explanations, that need to be tested empirically [1] , [64] , [79] , and there are instances where such evolutionary hypotheses about mechanisms have had to be rejected [1] . Here, we ask which of Tinbergen's questions is currently addressed in the field of EP and describe how EP could expand its focus to provide a broader and richer understanding of human behaviour.

Evolutionary psychologists commonly seek to study how the human mind works by using knowledge of evolution to formulate, and sometimes test, hypotheses concerning the function of cognitive architecture. While functional or evolutionary considerations cannot be used to test hypotheses about mechanisms, considerations in one domain can generate hypotheses concerning problems in the other domain. For instance, a theory of the evolution of a certain cognitive trait may generate hypotheses as to the mechanisms of that trait. Evolutionary psychologists have conducted hundreds of empirical studies to test the predictions generated by consideration of evolutionary arguments [80] . However, we should be clear that such studies do not test the evolutionary hypotheses themselves, but rather test whether the predictions about the psychological mechanisms have been upheld [6] , [81] . For example, the numerous studies supporting the hypothesis that human beings are predisposed to detect cheaters in social situations [74] , [82] are consistent with several evolutionary explanations. While the original researchers reasoned that cheater detection has resulted from a selective history of reciprocal altruism [82] , alternative evolutionary explanations, for instance that a history of cultural group selection has selected for this trait [83] , and non-evolutionary explanations, are also plausible.

The recent trend within the behavioural sciences has been away from confirmation or rejection of a single hypothesis towards the far more powerful simultaneous evaluation of multiple competing statistical models through model selection procedures [84] . A modern EP would, as standard practice, conduct empirical studies designed specifically to test between multiple competing adaptive and non-adaptive explanations [13] , and would test the evolutionary historical, as well as the proximate, aspects of its hypotheses. In the following sections, we examine how EP could expand to cover all four of Tinbergen's questions.

i) A modern EP would evaluate the evolution of a character by constructing and testing population genetic models, estimating and measuring responses to selection, exploring the covariation of phenotypic traits or genetic variation with putative selective agents, making comparisons across species and seeking correlates to selected traits in the selective environment, and so forth, as do contemporary evolutionary biologists. In addition to these established tools, researchers can also exploit modern comparative statistical methods applied to cultural and behavioural variation [85] and gene-culture coevolutionary theory [22] , [58] , [83] , [86] to reconstruct human evolutionary histories. The function of reliable aspects of human cognition, and of consistent behavioural patterns, can be explored utilizing the same methods. An important point here is that researchers are not restricted to considerations of the current function of evolved traits, and well-established methods are available to reconstruct the evolutionary history of human cognition.

ii) With regard to functional questions, while EP has stressed the idea that human beings are adapted to past worlds [87] , a niche-construction perspective argues that human beings are predicted to build environments to suit their adaptations, and to construct solutions to self-imposed challenges, aided and abetted by the extraordinary level of adaptive plasticity afforded by our capacities for learning and culture [88] . While adaptiveness is far from guaranteed, from this theoretical perspective humans are expected to experience far less adaptive lag than anticipated by EP [88] . If correct, examining the relationship between evolved psychological mechanisms and reproductive success in modern environments will not necessarily be an unproductive task.

Consistent with this hypothesis is the observation that humans have experienced extraordinary levels of population growth, indicative of increments in absolute fitness, in the Holocene whilst exposed to modern, culturally constructed environmental conditions [60] . However, rather than simply pronouncing that human behaviour is, or is not, likely to be adaptive, a modern EP would carry out quantitative analyses across a multitude of behavioural and cognitive traits to measure to what extent, or on what occasions, human behaviour is currently adaptive (e.g., [89] ). We anticipate that the formal methods of human behavioural ecology are likely to be productive even in modern societies, in many instances (e.g., [90] , [91] ). Where the use of optimality models proves unproductive, cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolutionary models could be developed to investigate whether the data conform to equilibria that are not globally optimal (e.g., [92] ). Researchers could go on to explore which factors explain this variation, for instance by measuring, among diverse traits and across a broad range of populations, what percentage of the variance in behaviour is explained by local ecology and what percentage is better predicted by cultural history (e.g., [93] ).

iii) In order to study the causal mechanisms underlying the character, researchers can employ methodologies that are available to modern cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, such as fMRI and related technology, and take advantage of advances in genetics. While much EP research describes human behaviour in terms of information processing, decision rules and cognition, the psychological adaptations can also be described at the level of the nervous system. Cognitive and behavioural neuroscientists have amassed a huge amount of research on the functioning of the nervous system, including the influence of genes on brain development. However, evolutionary psychologists rarely examine whether their hypotheses regarding evolved psychological mechanisms are supported by what is known about how the brain works. Here the role of evolutionary knowledge is less direct, and again relegated to the generation of novel hypotheses that can be tested using established protocols.

Variation in experimental procedures, patterns of connectivity, differences between individuals, and comparisons across species potentially allows researchers to explore to what extent the circuitry associated with the focal mechanism is human specific, and to identify both the major genes involved and the environmental conditions that regulate their expression. There is evidence that modern neuroscience technologies are starting to be used to test hypotheses generated from evolutionary theory [94] – [97] , and some evolutionary psychologists are beginning to present evolutionary accounts of genetic variation underlying traits such as personality [98] – [100] . The aforementioned developments in cognitive neuroscience and genetics open up further opportunities for a broader EP.

iv) As discussed earlier, development is an extremely important factor in human cognition, and the human mind is built via a constant interplay between the individual and its environment. Recent work by developmental psychologists demonstrates how it is possible to detect the unlearned roots of cognition, such as deep, explicit conceptual understanding, through careful experimentation on young children [44] . Such experiments also reveal the manner in which culturally and individually variable concepts emerge, through domain-general learning akin to bootstrapping, in response to a culturally constructed, symbolically encoded environments [44] . In principle, all posited evolved psychological mechanisms, from fear of snakes to cheater-detection mechanisms, could be subject to the same kind of detailed developmental investigation.

Recent trends in developmental biology and cognitive neuroscience recognize that the human brain and behaviour are shaped to an important extent by individual and social learning [36] . Hitherto, EP's theoretical stance led it to assume domain specificity in cognition, resulting in the neglect of opportunities to investigate to what extent human social and asocial learning are reliant upon processes that apply across domains, or the manner in which cross-domain general learning processes build on domain-specific inputs. For instance, while behavioural innovation is critical to the survival of animals living in changing and unpredictable environments, whether such innovation is channeled in a context specific manner is unclear. Innovation could instead be reliant on domain-general mechanisms expressed in complex cognition, intelligence and learning; for instance, innovation could involve learned behaviour patterns being adapted to a new domain. Available evidence suggests the latter scenario [76] , [101] .

Similarly, EP has engaged in a longstanding debate with advocates of cultural evolution over whether human social learning is governed by evolved content biases (e.g., choose the sugar-rich food) or by domain-general context biases (e.g., conform to the local norm). There is sufficient empirical evidence for the deployment of context biases, such as conformity or prestige bias, to render the casual dismissal of transmitted culture counterproductive [102] , [103] . A broader EP could actively pursue these questions, by testing experimentally whether human social learning is dominated by content or context biases, and by investigating the factors that affect reliance on each. The finding that innovation, social learning, and other aspects of development are capable of introducing novelty into phenotype design space, thereby establishing new selective scenarios [39] , [41] , [48] , opens up new opportunities for investigating evolutionary novelty to which social scientists can actively participate.

Conclusions

None of the aforementioned scientific developments render evolutionary psychology unfeasible; they merely require that EP should change its daily practice. The key concepts of EP have led to a series of widely held assumptions (e.g., that human behaviour is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments, that cognition is domain-specific, that there is a universal human nature), which with the benefit of hindsight we now know to be questionable. A modern EP would embrace a broader, more open, and multi-disciplinary theoretical framework, drawing on, rather than being isolated from, the full repertoire of knowledge and tools available in adjacent disciplines. Such a field would embrace the challenge of exploring empirically, for instance, to what extent human cognition is domain-general or domain specific, under what circumstances human behaviour is adaptive, how best to explain variation in human behaviour and cognition. The evidence from adjacent disciplines suggests that, if EP can reconsider its basic tenets, it will flourish as a scientific discipline.

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1.2 The Evolution of Psychology: History, Approaches, and Questions

Learning objectives.

• Explain how psychology changed from a philosophical to a scientific discipline.
• List some of the most important questions that concern psychologists.
• Outline the basic schools of psychology and how each school has contributed to psychology.

In this section we will review the history of psychology with a focus on the important questions that psychologists ask and the major approaches (or schools) of psychological inquiry. The schools of psychology that we will review are summarized in Table 1.2 “The Most Important Approaches (Schools) of Psychology” , and Figure 1.5 “Timeline Showing Some of the Most Important Psychologists” presents a timeline of some of the most important psychologists, beginning with the early Greek philosophers and extending to the present day. Table 1.2 “The Most Important Approaches (Schools) of Psychology” and Figure 1.5 “Timeline Showing Some of the Most Important Psychologists” both represent a selection of the most important schools and people; to mention all the approaches and all the psychologists who have contributed to the field is not possible in one chapter.

The approaches that psychologists have used to assess the issues that interest them have changed dramatically over the history of psychology. Perhaps most importantly, the field has moved steadily from speculation about behavior toward a more objective and scientific approach as the technology available to study human behavior has improved (Benjamin & Baker, 2004). There has also been an increasing influx of women into the field. Although most early psychologists were men, now most psychologists, including the presidents of the most important psychological organizations, are women.

Figure 1.4 Female Psychologists

Although most of the earliest psychologists were men, women are increasingly contributing to psychology. The first female president of the American Psychological Association was Mary Whiton Calkins (1861–1930). Calkins made significant contributions to the study of memory and the self-concept. Mahzarin Banaji (left), Marilynn Brewer (not pictured), and Linda Bartoshuk (right) are all recent presidents of the American Psychological Society.

Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung – Keynote: Mahzarin R. Banaji – CC BY-SA 2.0; NIDCD Inside Newsletter – no copyright.

Although it cannot capture every important psychologist, this timeline shows some of the most important contributors to the history of psychology.

Although psychology has changed dramatically over its history, the most important questions that psychologists address have remained constant. Some of these questions follow, and we will discuss them both in this chapter and in the chapters to come:

• Nature versus nurture. Are genes or environment most influential in determining the behavior of individuals and in accounting for differences among people? Most scientists now agree that both genes and environment play crucial roles in most human behaviors, and yet we still have much to learn about how nature (our biological makeup) and nurture (the experiences that we have during our lives) work together (Harris, 1998; Pinker, 2002). The proportion of the observed differences on characteristics among people (e.g., in terms of their height, intelligence, or optimism) that is due to genetics is known as the heritability of the characteristic, and we will make much use of this term in the chapters to come. We will see, for example, that the heritability of intelligence is very high (about .85 out of 1.0) and that the heritability of extraversion is about .50. But we will also see that nature and nurture interact in complex ways, making the question of “Is it nature or is it nurture?” very difficult to answer.
• Free will versus determinism. This question concerns the extent to which people have control over their own actions. Are we the products of our environment, guided by forces out of our control, or are we able to choose the behaviors we engage in? Most of us like to believe in free will, that we are able to do what we want—for instance, that we could get up right now and go fishing. And our legal system is premised on the concept of free will; we punish criminals because we believe that they have choice over their behaviors and freely choose to disobey the law. But as we will discuss later in the research focus in this section, recent research has suggested that we may have less control over our own behavior than we think we do (Wegner, 2002).
• Accuracy versus inaccuracy. To what extent are humans good information processors? Although it appears that people are “good enough” to make sense of the world around them and to make decent decisions (Fiske, 2003), they are far from perfect. Human judgment is sometimes compromised by inaccuracies in our thinking styles and by our motivations and emotions. For instance, our judgment may be affected by our desires to gain material wealth and to see ourselves positively and by emotional responses to the events that happen to us.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden (left photo) meet with BP executives to discuss the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (right photo). Psychologists study the causes of poor judgments such as those made by these executives.

The White House – United States Government Work; International Bird Rescue Research Center – CC BY 2.0

• Conscious versus unconscious processing. To what extent are we conscious of our own actions and the causes of them, and to what extent are our behaviors caused by influences that we are not aware of? Many of the major theories of psychology, ranging from the Freudian psychodynamic theories to contemporary work in cognitive psychology, argue that much of our behavior is determined by variables that we are not aware of.
• Differences versus similarities. To what extent are we all similar, and to what extent are we different? For instance, are there basic psychological and personality differences between men and women, or are men and women by and large similar? And what about people from different ethnicities and cultures? Are people around the world generally the same, or are they influenced by their backgrounds and environments in different ways? Personality, social, and cross-cultural psychologists attempt to answer these classic questions.

Early Psychologists

The earliest psychologists that we know about are the Greek philosophers Plato (428–347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC). These philosophers asked many of the same questions that today’s psychologists ask; for instance, they questioned the distinction between nature and nurture and the existence of free will. In terms of the former, Plato argued on the nature side, believing that certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn, whereas Aristotle was more on the nurture side, believing that each child is born as an “empty slate” (in Latin a tabula rasa ) and that knowledge is primarily acquired through learning and experience.

The earliest psychologists were the Greek philosophers Plato (left) and Aristotle. Plato believed that much knowledge was innate, whereas Aristotle thought that each child was born as an “empty slate” and that knowledge was primarily acquired through learning and experience.

Image Editor – Plato and Aristotle – CC BY 2.0

European philosophers continued to ask these fundamental questions during the Renaissance. For instance, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) also considered the issue of free will, arguing in its favor and believing that the mind controls the body through the pineal gland in the brain (an idea that made some sense at the time but was later proved incorrect). Descartes also believed in the existence of innate natural abilities. A scientist as well as a philosopher, Descartes dissected animals and was among the first to understand that the nerves controlled the muscles. He also addressed the relationship between mind (the mental aspects of life) and body (the physical aspects of life). Descartes believed in the principle of dualism : that the mind is fundamentally different from the mechanical body. Other European philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), also weighed in on these issues.

The fundamental problem that these philosophers faced was that they had few methods for settling their claims. Most philosophers didn’t conduct any research on these questions, in part because they didn’t yet know how to do it, and in part because they weren’t sure it was even possible to objectively study human experience. But dramatic changes came during the 1800s with the help of the first two research psychologists: the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), who developed a psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, and the American psychologist William James (1842–1910), who founded a psychology laboratory at Harvard University.

Structuralism: Introspection and the Awareness of Subjective Experience

Wundt’s research in his laboratory in Liepzig focused on the nature of consciousness itself. Wundt and his students believed that it was possible to analyze the basic elements of the mind and to classify our conscious experiences scientifically. Wundt began the field known as structuralism , a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or “structures” of psychological experience . Its goal was to create a “periodic table” of the “elements of sensations,” similar to the periodic table of elements that had recently been created in chemistry.

Structuralists used the method of introspection to attempt to create a map of the elements of consciousness. Introspection involves asking research participants to describe exactly what they experience as they work on mental tasks , such as viewing colors, reading a page in a book, or performing a math problem. A participant who is reading a book might report, for instance, that he saw some black and colored straight and curved marks on a white background. In other studies the structuralists used newly invented reaction time instruments to systematically assess not only what the participants were thinking but how long it took them to do so. Wundt discovered that it took people longer to report what sound they had just heard than to simply respond that they had heard the sound. These studies marked the first time researchers realized that there is a difference between the sensation of a stimulus and the perception of that stimulus, and the idea of using reaction times to study mental events has now become a mainstay of cognitive psychology.

Wilhelm Wundt (seated at left) and Edward Titchener (right) helped create the structuralist school of psychology. Their goal was to classify the elements of sensation through introspection.

Wikimedia Commons – Wundt research group – no copyright; David Webb – Edward Bradford Titchener – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Perhaps the best known of the structuralists was Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927). Titchener was a student of Wundt who came to the United States in the late 1800s and founded a laboratory at Cornell University. In his research using introspection, Titchener and his students claimed to have identified more than 40,000 sensations, including those relating to vision, hearing, and taste.

An important aspect of the structuralist approach was that it was rigorous and scientific. The research marked the beginning of psychology as a science, because it demonstrated that mental events could be quantified. But the structuralists also discovered the limitations of introspection. Even highly trained research participants were often unable to report on their subjective experiences. When the participants were asked to do simple math problems, they could easily do them, but they could not easily answer how they did them. Thus the structuralists were the first to realize the importance of unconscious processes—that many important aspects of human psychology occur outside our conscious awareness, and that psychologists cannot expect research participants to be able to accurately report on all of their experiences.

Functionalism and Evolutionary Psychology

In contrast to Wundt, who attempted to understand the nature of consciousness, the goal of William James and the other members of the school of functionalism was to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess (Hunt, 1993). For James, one’s thinking was relevant only to one’s behavior. As he put it in his psychology textbook, “My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing” (James, 1890).

James and the other members of the functionalist school were influenced by Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) theory of natural selection , which proposed that the physical characteristics of animals and humans evolved because they were useful, or functional. The functionalists believed that Darwin’s theory applied to psychological characteristics too. Just as some animals have developed strong muscles to allow them to run fast, the human brain, so functionalists thought, must have adapted to serve a particular function in human experience.

The functionalist school of psychology, founded by the American psychologist William James (left), was influenced by the work of Charles Darwin.

Wikimedia Commons – public domain. Darwin portrait courtesy of George Richmond, Wikimedia Commons – public domain.

Although functionalism no longer exists as a school of psychology, its basic principles have been absorbed into psychology and continue to influence it in many ways. The work of the functionalists has developed into the field of evolutionary psychology , a branch of psychology that applies the Darwinian theory of natural selection to human and animal behavior (Dennett, 1995; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology accepts the functionalists’ basic assumption, namely that many human psychological systems, including memory, emotion, and personality, serve key adaptive functions. As we will see in the chapters to come, evolutionary psychologists use evolutionary theory to understand many different behaviors including romantic attraction, stereotypes and prejudice, and even the causes of many psychological disorders.

A key component of the ideas of evolutionary psychology is fitness . Fitness refers to the extent to which having a given characteristic helps the individual organism survive and reproduce at a higher rate than do other members of the species who do not have the characteristic . Fitter organisms pass on their genes more successfully to later generations, making the characteristics that produce fitness more likely to become part of the organism’s nature than characteristics that do not produce fitness. For example, it has been argued that the emotion of jealousy has survived over time in men because men who experience jealousy are more fit than men who do not. According to this idea, the experience of jealously leads men to be more likely to protect their mates and guard against rivals, which increases their reproductive success (Buss, 2000).

Despite its importance in psychological theorizing, evolutionary psychology also has some limitations. One problem is that many of its predictions are extremely difficult to test. Unlike the fossils that are used to learn about the physical evolution of species, we cannot know which psychological characteristics our ancestors possessed or did not possess; we can only make guesses about this. Because it is difficult to directly test evolutionary theories, it is always possible that the explanations we apply are made up after the fact to account for observed data (Gould & Lewontin, 1979). Nevertheless, the evolutionary approach is important to psychology because it provides logical explanations for why we have many psychological characteristics.

Psychodynamic Psychology

Perhaps the school of psychology that is most familiar to the general public is the psychodynamic approach to understanding behavior, which was championed by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his followers. Psychodynamic psychology is an approach to understanding human behavior that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories . Freud developed his theories about behavior through extensive analysis of the patients that he treated in his private clinical practice. Freud believed that many of the problems that his patients experienced, including anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction, were the result of the effects of painful childhood experiences that the person could no longer remember.

Figure 1.10

Sigmund Freud and the other psychodynamic psychologists believed that many of our thoughts and emotions are unconscious. Psychotherapy was designed to help patients recover and confront their “lost” memories.

Max Halberstadt – Wikimedia Commons -public domain.

Freud’s ideas were extended by other psychologists whom he influenced, including Carl Jung (1875–1961), Alfred Adler (1870–1937), Karen Horney (1855–1952), and Erik Erikson (1902–1994). These and others who follow the psychodynamic approach believe that it is possible to help the patient if the unconscious drives can be remembered, particularly through a deep and thorough exploration of the person’s early sexual experiences and current sexual desires. These explorations are revealed through talk therapy and dream analysis, in a process called psychoanalysis .

The founders of the school of psychodynamics were primarily practitioners who worked with individuals to help them understand and confront their psychological symptoms. Although they did not conduct much research on their ideas, and although later, more sophisticated tests of their theories have not always supported their proposals, psychodynamics has nevertheless had substantial impact on the field of psychology, and indeed on thinking about human behavior more generally (Moore & Fine, 1995). The importance of the unconscious in human behavior, the idea that early childhood experiences are critical, and the concept of therapy as a way of improving human lives are all ideas that are derived from the psychodynamic approach and that remain central to psychology.

Behaviorism and the Question of Free Will

Although they differed in approach, both structuralism and functionalism were essentially studies of the mind. The psychologists associated with the school of behaviorism , on the other hand, were reacting in part to the difficulties psychologists encountered when they tried to use introspection to understand behavior. Behaviorism is a school of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behavior itself . Behaviorists believe that the human mind is a “black box” into which stimuli are sent and from which responses are received. They argue that there is no point in trying to determine what happens in the box because we can successfully predict behavior without knowing what happens inside the mind. Furthermore, behaviorists believe that it is possible to develop laws of learning that can explain all behaviors.

The first behaviorist was the American psychologist John B. Watson (1878–1958). Watson was influenced in large part by the work of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), who had discovered that dogs would salivate at the sound of a tone that had previously been associated with the presentation of food. Watson and the other behaviorists began to use these ideas to explain how events that people and other organisms experienced in their environment ( stimuli ) could produce specific behaviors ( responses ). For instance, in Pavlov’s research the stimulus (either the food or, after learning, the tone) would produce the response of salivation in the dogs.

In his research Watson found that systematically exposing a child to fearful stimuli in the presence of objects that did not themselves elicit fear could lead the child to respond with a fearful behavior to the presence of the stimulus (Watson & Rayner, 1920; Beck, Levinson, & Irons, 2009). In the best known of his studies, an 8-month-old boy named Little Albert was used as the subject. Here is a summary of the findings:

In line with the behaviorist approach, the boy had learned to associate the white rat with the loud noise, resulting in crying.

Figure 1.11

B. F. Skinner was a member of the behaviorist school of psychology. He argued that free will is an illusion and that all behavior is determined by environmental factors.

Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 3.0.

The most famous behaviorist was Burrhus Frederick (B. F.) Skinner (1904–1990), who expanded the principles of behaviorism and also brought them to the attention of the public at large. Skinner used the ideas of stimulus and response, along with the application of rewards or reinforcements , to train pigeons and other animals. And he used the general principles of behaviorism to develop theories about how best to teach children and how to create societies that were peaceful and productive. Skinner even developed a method for studying thoughts and feelings using the behaviorist approach (Skinner, 1957, 1968, 1972).

Research Focus: Do We Have Free Will?

The behaviorist research program had important implications for the fundamental questions about nature and nurture and about free will. In terms of the nature-nurture debate, the behaviorists agreed with the nurture approach, believing that we are shaped exclusively by our environments. They also argued that there is no free will, but rather that our behaviors are determined by the events that we have experienced in our past. In short, this approach argues that organisms, including humans, are a lot like puppets in a show who don’t realize that other people are controlling them. Furthermore, although we do not cause our own actions, we nevertheless believe that we do because we don’t realize all the influences acting on our behavior.

Recent research in psychology has suggested that Skinner and the behaviorists might well have been right, at least in the sense that we overestimate our own free will in responding to the events around us (Libet, 1985; Matsuhashi & Hallett, 2008; Wegner, 2002). In one demonstration of the misperception of our own free will, neuroscientists Soon, Brass, Heinze, and Haynes (2008) placed their research participants in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner while they presented them with a series of letters on a computer screen. The letter on the screen changed every one-half second. The participants were asked, whenever they decided to, to press either of two buttons. Then they were asked to indicate which letter was showing on the screen when they decided to press the button. The researchers analyzed the brain images to see if they could predict which of the two buttons the participant was going to press, even before the letter at which he or she had indicated the decision to press a button. Suggesting that the intention to act occurred in the brain before the research participants became aware of it, the researchers found that the prefrontal cortex region of the brain showed activation that could be used to predict the button press as long as 10 seconds before the participants said that they decided which button to press.

Research has found that we are more likely to think that we control our behavior when the desire to act occurs immediately prior to the outcome, when the thought is consistent with the outcome, and when there are no other apparent causes for the behavior. Aarts, Custers, and Wegner (2005) asked their research participants to control a rapidly moving square along with a computer that was also controlling the square independently. The participants pressed a button to stop the movement. When participants were exposed to words related to the location of the square just before they stopped its movement, they became more likely to think that they controlled the motion, even when it was actually the computer that stopped it. And Dijksterhuis, Preston, Wegner, and Aarts (2008) found that participants who had just been exposed to first-person singular pronouns, such as “I” and “me,” were more likely to believe that they controlled their actions than were people who had seen the words “computer” or “God.”

The idea that we are more likely to take ownership for our actions in some cases than in others is also seen in our attributions for success and failure. Because we normally expect that our behaviors will be met with success, when we are successful we easily believe that the success is the result of our own free will. When an action is met with failure, on the other hand, we are less likely to perceive this outcome as the result of our free will, and we are more likely to blame the outcome on luck or our teacher (Wegner, 2003).

The behaviorists made substantial contributions to psychology by identifying the principles of learning . Although the behaviorists were incorrect in their beliefs that it was not possible to measure thoughts and feelings, their ideas provided new ideas that helped further our understanding regarding the nature-nurture debate as well as the question of free will. The ideas of behaviorism are fundamental to psychology and have been developed to help us better understand the role of prior experiences in a variety of areas of psychology.

The Cognitive Approach and Cognitive Neuroscience

Science is always influenced by the technology that surrounds it, and psychology is no exception. Thus it is no surprise that beginning in the 1960s, growing numbers of psychologists began to think about the brain and about human behavior in terms of the computer, which was being developed and becoming publicly available at that time. The analogy between the brain and the computer, although by no means perfect, provided part of the impetus for a new school of psychology called cognitive psychology . Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including perception, thinking, memory, and judgment . These actions correspond well to the processes that computers perform.

Although cognitive psychology began in earnest in the 1960s, earlier psychologists had also taken a cognitive orientation. Some of the important contributors to cognitive psychology include the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), who studied the ability of people to remember lists of words under different conditions, and the English psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969), who studied the cognitive and social processes of remembering. Bartlett created short stories that were in some ways logical but also contained some very unusual and unexpected events. Bartlett discovered that people found it very difficult to recall the stories exactly, even after being allowed to study them repeatedly, and he hypothesized that the stories were difficult to remember because they did not fit the participants’ expectations about how stories should go. The idea that our memory is influenced by what we already know was also a major idea behind the cognitive-developmental stage model of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Other important cognitive psychologists include Donald E. Broadbent (1926–1993), Daniel Kahneman (1934–), George Miller (1920–), Eleanor Rosch (1938–), and Amos Tversky (1937–1996).

The War of the Ghosts

The War of the Ghosts was a story used by Sir Frederic Bartlett to test the influence of prior expectations on memory. Bartlett found that even when his British research participants were allowed to read the story many times they still could not remember it well, and he believed this was because it did not fit with their prior knowledge.

In its argument that our thinking has a powerful influence on behavior, the cognitive approach provided a distinct alternative to behaviorism. According to cognitive psychologists, ignoring the mind itself will never be sufficient because people interpret the stimuli that they experience. For instance, when a boy turns to a girl on a date and says, “You are so beautiful,” a behaviorist would probably see that as a reinforcing (positive) stimulus. And yet the girl might not be so easily fooled. She might try to understand why the boy is making this particular statement at this particular time and wonder if he might be attempting to influence her through the comment. Cognitive psychologists maintain that when we take into consideration how stimuli are evaluated and interpreted, we understand behavior more deeply.

Cognitive psychology remains enormously influential today, and it has guided research in such varied fields as language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, education, human development, social psychology, and psychotherapy. The cognitive revolution has been given even more life over the past decade as the result of recent advances in our ability to see the brain in action using neuroimaging techniques. Neuroimaging is the use of various techniques to provide pictures of the structure and function of the living brain (Ilardi & Feldman, 2001). These images are used to diagnose brain disease and injury, but they also allow researchers to view information processing as it occurs in the brain, because the processing causes the involved area of the brain to increase metabolism and show up on the scan. We have already discussed the use of one neuroimaging technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in the research focus earlier in this section, and we will discuss the use of neuroimaging techniques in many areas of psychology in the chapters to follow.

Social-Cultural Psychology

A final school, which takes a higher level of analysis and which has had substantial impact on psychology, can be broadly referred to as the social-cultural approach . The field of social-cultural psychology is the study of how the social situations and the cultures in which people find themselves influence thinking and behavior . Social-cultural psychologists are particularly concerned with how people perceive themselves and others, and how people influence each other’s behavior. For instance, social psychologists have found that we are attracted to others who are similar to us in terms of attitudes and interests (Byrne, 1969), that we develop our own beliefs and attitudes by comparing our opinions to those of others (Festinger, 1954), and that we frequently change our beliefs and behaviors to be similar to those of the people we care about—a process known as conformity .

An important aspect of social-cultural psychology are social norms — the ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving that are shared by group members and perceived by them as appropriate (Asch, 1952; Cialdini, 1993). Norms include customs, traditions, standards, and rules, as well as the general values of the group. Many of the most important social norms are determined by the culture in which we live, and these cultures are studied by cross-cultural psychologists . A culture represents the common set of social norms, including religious and family values and other moral beliefs, shared by the people who live in a geographical region (Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Markus, Kitayama, & Heiman, 1996; Matsumoto, 2001). Cultures influence every aspect of our lives, and it is not inappropriate to say that our culture defines our lives just as much as does our evolutionary experience (Mesoudi, 2009).

Psychologists have found that there is a fundamental difference in social norms between Western cultures (including those in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) and East Asian cultures (including those in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia). Norms in Western cultures are primarily oriented toward individualism , which is about valuing the self and one’s independence from others. Children in Western cultures are taught to develop and to value a sense of their personal self, and to see themselves in large part as separate from the other people around them. Children in Western cultures feel special about themselves; they enjoy getting gold stars on their projects and the best grade in the class. Adults in Western cultures are oriented toward promoting their own individual success, frequently in comparison to (or even at the expense of) others.

Norms in the East Asian culture, on the other hand, are oriented toward interdependence or collectivism . In these cultures children are taught to focus on developing harmonious social relationships with others. The predominant norms relate to group togetherness and connectedness, and duty and responsibility to one’s family and other groups. When asked to describe themselves, the members of East Asian cultures are more likely than those from Western cultures to indicate that they are particularly concerned about the interests of others, including their close friends and their colleagues.

In Western cultures social norms promote a focus on the self ( individualism ), whereas in Eastern cultures the focus is more on families and social groups ( collectivism ).

Another important cultural difference is the extent to which people in different cultures are bound by social norms and customs, rather than being free to express their own individuality without considering social norms (Chan, Gelfand, Triandis, & Tzeng, 1996). Cultures also differ in terms of personal space, such as how closely individuals stand to each other when talking, as well as the communication styles they employ.

It is important to be aware of cultures and cultural differences because people with different cultural backgrounds increasingly come into contact with each other as a result of increased travel and immigration and the development of the Internet and other forms of communication. In the United States, for instance, there are many different ethnic groups, and the proportion of the population that comes from minority (non-White) groups is increasing from year to year. The social-cultural approach to understanding behavior reminds us again of the difficulty of making broad generalizations about human nature. Different people experience things differently, and they experience them differently in different cultures.

The Many Disciplines of Psychology

Psychology is not one discipline but rather a collection of many subdisciplines that all share at least some common approaches and that work together and exchange knowledge to form a coherent discipline (Yang & Chiu, 2009). Because the field of psychology is so broad, students may wonder which areas are most suitable for their interests and which types of careers might be available to them. Table 1.3 “Some Career Paths in Psychology” will help you consider the answers to these questions. You can learn more about these different fields of psychology and the careers associated with them at http://www.apa.org/careers/psyccareers/ .

Table 1.3 Some Career Paths in Psychology

Psychology in Everyday Life: How to Effectively Learn and Remember

One way that the findings of psychological research may be particularly helpful to you is in terms of improving your learning and study skills. Psychological research has provided a substantial amount of knowledge about the principles of learning and memory. This information can help you do better in this and other courses, and can also help you better learn new concepts and techniques in other areas of your life.

The most important thing you can learn in college is how to better study, learn, and remember. These skills will help you throughout your life, as you learn new jobs and take on other responsibilities. There are substantial individual differences in learning and memory, such that some people learn faster than others. But even if it takes you longer to learn than you think it should, the extra time you put into studying is well worth the effort. And you can learn to learn—learning to effectively study and to remember information is just like learning any other skill, such as playing a sport or a video game.

To learn well, you need to be ready to learn. You cannot learn well when you are tired, when you are under stress, or if you are abusing alcohol or drugs. Try to keep a consistent routine of sleeping and eating. Eat moderately and nutritiously, and avoid drugs that can impair memory, particularly alcohol. There is no evidence that stimulants such as caffeine, amphetamines, or any of the many “memory enhancing drugs” on the market will help you learn (Gold, Cahill, & Wenk, 2002; McDaniel, Maier, & Einstein, 2002). Memory supplements are usually no more effective than drinking a can of sugared soda, which also releases glucose and thus improves memory slightly.

Psychologists have studied the ways that best allow people to acquire new information, to retain it over time, and to retrieve information that has been stored in our memories. One important finding is that learning is an active process. To acquire information most effectively, we must actively manipulate it. One active approach is rehearsal—repeating the information that is to be learned over and over again. Although simple repetition does help us learn, psychological research has found that we acquire information most effectively when we actively think about or elaborate on its meaning and relate the material to something else.

When you study, try to elaborate by connecting the information to other things that you already know. If you want to remember the different schools of psychology, for instance, try to think about how each of the approaches is different from the others. As you make the comparisons among the approaches, determine what is most important about each one and then relate it to the features of the other approaches. In an important study showing the effectiveness of elaborative encoding, Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977) found that students learned information best when they related it to aspects of themselves (a phenomenon known as the self-reference effect ). This research suggests that imagining how the material relates to your own interests and goals will help you learn it.

An approach known as the method of loci involves linking each of the pieces of information that you need to remember to places that you are familiar with. You might think about the house that you grew up in and the rooms in it. Then you could put the behaviorists in the bedroom, the structuralists in the living room, and the functionalists in the kitchen. Then when you need to remember the information, you retrieve the mental image of your house and should be able to “see” each of the people in each of the areas.

One of the most fundamental principles of learning is known as the spacing effect . Both humans and animals more easily remember or learn material when they study the material in several shorter study periods over a longer period of time, rather than studying it just once for a long period of time. Cramming for an exam is a particularly ineffective way to learn.

Psychologists have also found that performance is improved when people set difficult yet realistic goals for themselves (Locke & Latham, 2006). You can use this knowledge to help you learn. Set realistic goals for the time you are going to spend studying and what you are going to learn, and try to stick to those goals. Do a small amount every day, and by the end of the week you will have accomplished a lot.

Our ability to adequately assess our own knowledge is known as metacognition . Research suggests that our metacognition may make us overconfident, leading us to believe that we have learned material even when we have not. To counteract this problem, don’t just go over your notes again and again. Instead, make a list of questions and then see if you can answer them. Study the information again and then test yourself again after a few minutes. If you made any mistakes, study again. Then wait for a half hour and test yourself again. Then test again after 1 day and after 2 days. Testing yourself by attempting to retrieve information in an active manner is better than simply studying the material because it will help you determine if you really know it.

In summary, everyone can learn to learn better. Learning is an important skill, and following the previously mentioned guidelines will likely help you learn better.

Key Takeaways

• The first psychologists were philosophers, but the field became more empirical and objective as more sophisticated scientific approaches were developed and employed.
• Some basic questions asked by psychologists include those about nature versus nurture, free will versus determinism, accuracy versus inaccuracy, and conscious versus unconscious processing.
• The structuralists attempted to analyze the nature of consciousness using introspection.
• The functionalists based their ideas on the work of Darwin, and their approaches led to the field of evolutionary psychology.
• The behaviorists explained behavior in terms of stimulus, response, and reinforcement, while denying the presence of free will.
• Cognitive psychologists study how people perceive, process, and remember information.
• Psychodynamic psychology focuses on unconscious drives and the potential to improve lives through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
• The social-cultural approach focuses on the social situation, including how cultures and social norms influence our behavior.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• What type of questions can psychologists answer that philosophers might not be able to answer as completely or as accurately? Explain why you think psychologists can answer these questions better than philosophers can.
• Choose one of the major questions of psychology and provide some evidence from your own experience that supports one side or the other.
• Choose two of the fields of psychology discussed in this section and explain how they differ in their approaches to understanding behavior and the level of explanation at which they are focused.

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Chan, D. K. S., Gelfand, M. J., Triandis, H. C., & Tzeng, O. (1996). Tightness-looseness revisited: Some preliminary analyses in Japan and the United States. International Journal of Psychology, 31 , 1–12.

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Dijksterhuis, A., Preston, J., Wegner, D. M., & Aarts, H. (2008). Effects of subliminal priming of self and God on self-attribution of authorship for events. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44 (1), 2–9.

Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7 , 117–140.

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Research topics at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology

Reprints are provided for scholarly purposes only.  Permission to reprint any article must be sought from the holder of the copyright. 

Scientists at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology specialize in finding new ways that an evolutionary perspective can inform research on the design of the human mind.  In so doing, we have been researching many new topics, as well as trying out new approaches to old topics.  Below we provide a partial list with links to some relevant research papers. 

Principles of evolutionary psychology

A roadmap to principles of evolutionary psychology

Reasoning and rationality

Social exchange reasoning (reciprocation, reciprocal altruism, cooperation)

Judgment under uncertainty  (intuitive statistics; optimal foraging; ecological rationality; heuristics & biases)

Adaptationism, normative theories, and rationality

Emotions—What are they?

Emotion  (emotions as super-ordinate programs solving the problem of mechanism coordination in a multimodular mind)

Emotions—Specific ones

Anger . See also:

Formidability, Strength, and Entitlement . Adaptations for detecting physical strength

Vision and Visual Attention

Visual attention –a system specialized for monitoring animals

Vision : Faces—the case for domain-specific object recognition

Evolutionary Biology

Evolutionary Biology : Intragenomic Conflict , Pathogens & the Evolution of Sexual Recombination; Banker’s Paradox (etc)

Literature and the Arts

Art, Fiction, and Aesthetics

Close social relationships

Kin detection  (as regulator of incest avoidance; altruism)

Friendship and Deep Engagement Relationships

Courtship, Mate Choice, and Human Sexuality

Varieties of Cooperation

Two-person cooperation / reciprocation / reciprocal altruism

Evolution of generosity

Cooperating in Groups:

Coalitional psychology and alliance detection

Adaptations for collective action

Memory  (memory systems; specializations; personality trait database; self-knowledge, episodic memories; amnesia; memory loss )

Spatial cognition

Spatial adaptations for foraging (female advantage in location memory for plants; content effects; optimal foraging)

Tools: Cognitive foundations

Adaptations for tool use  (the artifact concept and inferences about function; design stance; problem solving, dissociation between inferences about function and naming)

Personality

Personality (personality differences and universal human nature; adaptationist framework for personality science; cognitive systems specialized for encoding, storing, and retrieving knowledge of personality traits)

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Intelligence (improvisational intelligence; dedicated intelligence; decoupled reasoning (counterfactual reasoning, suppositional reasoning, metarepresentation)

Theoretical foundations of psychology and the behavioral sciences

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A brief introduction to the field in  [ English ], [ Español ] and [ Português ].

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What Is Evolutionary Psychology? (+ Real Life Examples)

If this is true of the hardware, shouldn’t the same biological processes apply to the software ?

Evolutionary psychologists claim that we have evolved countless mental programs, “each specialized for solving a different adaptive problem our ancestors faced” (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013).

Evolutionary psychology is more than one subject. It is a meta-theory, encompassing and building on success in cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, genetics, and evolutionary biology to understand human psychology (Balish, Eys, & Schulte-Hostedde, 2013).

This article introduces evolutionary psychology along with its claims, research findings, and surrounding controversy.

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This Article Contains:

What is evolutionary psychology, brief history of the field, scientifically validated theories: 4 examples, 5 fascinating experiments and research findings, common criticisms of the field, 4 books on the topic, 3 interesting podcasts, a take-home message.

Evolution is change over time. Natural selection  is the engine that drives such change through the adaptation of species to their environment.

Though the idea sounds simple, it has the power to cast light on the rich diversity of life and explain how favorable traits are passed down through the generations.

Human evolution

We, as Homo sapiens, like any other species, are the sum of our genetic inheritance.

Earlier humans, poorly adapted to their environment, were less likely to survive, reproduce, and pass on their genes. Those better equipped for survival handed successful adaptations down the generations, leading to permanent transformation.

Evolutionary theory provides a new way of looking at existing ideas. Evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973) famously said:

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Could this also be true of psychology? Possibly .

Has our psychology evolved?

We tend to think of evolutionary adaptations in a physical sense. For example, our human capacity for extreme endurance is made possible by our long achilles tendons, narrow, elongated body form, and large gluteus maximus. Such specializations provide us with balance and heat dissipation while maximizing our energy return as we run (Bramble & Lieberman, 2004).

Our brain and its cognitive processes are also subject to the same evolutionary processes.

Evolutionary psychology recognizes that the process of evolution has designed both the structure and content of our physiology and psychology. Our psychological traits are necessary adaptations that have evolved to solve our ancestors’ difficulties (Balish et al., 2013).

Are we born a blank slate?

Evolutionary psychologists do not believe that we are born with an empty mind – a blank slate  waiting to be written on by experience. Nor do they think of the brain as a general-purpose computer ready to be tailored to the environment into which the child arrives.

Instead, our mind is a set of highly specific, evolved adaptive programs. Mechanisms within the brain have been shaped and molded through natural and sexual selection to solve the problems found in the environment in which they evolved – known as the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013; Sutton, 2019).

Such environments were very different from the ones in which most of us now find ourselves.

Our long human lineage can be traced back over 6 million years to our last common ape ancestor with chimpanzees. For much of the previous 200,000 years, we lived as hunter–gatherers, only settling to a less nomadic, sedentary farming way of life within the last 10,000 years.

Therefore, our highly specific cognitive architecture solved problems that, in some cases, are quite different or even harmful to our modern way of living (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013).

For example, our universal craving for high-calorie food, stored as fat, may have ensured human survival in much earlier times but leads to obesity and related health problems in modern society. Science labels these evolved brain processes that no longer fit the modern world as psychological mismatches (Li, van Vugt, & Colarelli, 2017).

Crucially, our ancestors evolved information-processing capabilities to ensure the survival of the species, including nonverbal and verbal communication, mate selection, avoiding poisonous food and infectious disease, cooperating with kin, and dealing with enemies.

But it was in 1859 that Charles Darwin combined multiple ideas to form the theory of natural selection and gave voice to life’s struggle for existence , each species edging forward down a path of natural selection via the mechanisms of variation, inheritance, and differential reproductive success.

While Darwin himself suggested that psychology could ultimately fall under the theory, it was only recently that we acquired the tools needed to apply it to the study of our mind (Buss, 2016).

One of the most significant early attempts to apply evolutionary theory to psychology was a branch of biology known as sociobiology . Led by E. Wilson, it was the beginning of the “systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior” (Wilson, 1975).

The theory received considerable criticism and controversy, with claims of sexism, racism, and even unsupported suggestions that it encouraged eugenics (the improving of the population’s genetic quality).

But the term “evolutionary psychology” was born when a group of researchers including John Tooby and Leda Cosmides got together at the University of California and collaborated on the book The Adapted Mind  (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992).

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Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (2013) describe evolutionary psychology as an “organizing framework that can be applied to any topic in the psychological sciences.” As such, it predicts behavior that can subsequently be validated through observation (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013; Buss, 2016):

Visual attention

It would not be possible to analyze and interpret everything in our field of vision; the processing required would be prohibitive. Instead, in line with evolutionary theory, our brains select specific parts of the scene for further processing.

For example, from birth onward, we pay extra attention to faces. And it makes evolutionary sense. As hunter–gatherers, we lived in small groups of between 25 and 200 people. We needed to be able to recognize those from within the group versus those from outside.

Research by cognitive scientists confirms that we more quickly identify people from our group than strangers, unless they pose a threat.

Spatial awareness

Evolutionary psychology provides a framework for predicting behavior and even differences between the sexes.

Men often outperform women in standard spatial cognition lab tests. However, based on evolutionary psychology, it was predicted and confirmed that in certain conditions women perform better than men.

Based on our long-term history as hunter–gatherers, while men typically hunted and tracked game, women foraged for plants and needed to remember locations to revisit later. When tests consider the need for specific spatial awareness skills, men and women are equally adept at knowing where they are and getting to where they need to be.

Social behavior

Game theory – a mathematical model widely used in economics for studying human interaction and reward – has been adopted by evolutionary biologists to research cooperation between organisms.

Evolutionary psychology has successfully borrowed such models to validate theories on how parties cooperate, work toward a common goal, and handle free-riders (those who want the benefit of group work without the effort).

Kin detection

Kin detection is crucial for avoiding inbreeding and ensuring kin-directed altruism. Evolutionary psychology suggests that we have “ancestrally reliable cues” to identify closeness in terms of family relations.

Research using computer modeling has proven evolutionary-based hypotheses and that such bias is often independent of our conscious beliefs (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013; Lieberman Tooby, & Cosmides, 2007).

Such knowledge is crucial to our understanding of who we are and opens a window into our evolutionary past.

Mental toughness

Like other personality traits , mental toughness is approximately 50% inherited (Horsburgh, Schermer, Veselka, & Vernon, 2009). Therefore, while the environment we find ourselves in matters greatly – including upbringing, experiences, and skills we develop – so do our parents, their parents, and so on.

After all, it is not difficult to imagine that mental toughness must have provided a survival advantage, helping earlier humans cope with harsh conditions including conflict, drought, and climatic change.

It is fascinating to note that religion is found in all cultures (described as a cultural universal ) and often leads to behavior that appears non-Darwinian (Workman & Reader, 2015).

For example, arranged marriages and vows of celibacy appear at odds with mates chosen based on apparent physical signs of fertility or the need to disperse our genetic material widely.

It has been suggested that religion is a psychological mechanism that can help ensure the group’s survival, ultimately favoring the individual (Wilson, 2002).

In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins (2006) argues that children’s blind acceptance of religious beliefs forms part of an adaptive “cultural acquisition device.” As such, religion is a highly successfully propagated meme – though not factual.

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Attraction and mating

Evolutionary psychology theory predicts that our ancestors’ mate selection strongly influences our modern-day choice of partner.

Natural and “sexual selection should, therefore, promote ‘good’ mating strategies” (Workman & Reader, 2015). According to the theory, one sex evolves to suit another’s preferences – and if maintained, it is more likely to result in a lasting pair bond (Buss, 2016).

In foraging societies, the most successful male hunters are seen as more attractive and therefore more likely to pass on their genes and form longer term relationships. The benefits of such prolonged partnerships, including provision for the offspring, etc., must be balanced (in evolutionary terms) against the potential for reproductive success with other partners (Smith, 2004).

It is not difficult to see why evolutionary psychology conclusions are often controversial and can lead to passionate refutation from many different angles.

Few among us have been spared the feeling of jealousy. Perhaps, a small amount may even be useful, if kept in check.

After all, once you have found your mate, it is crucial to keep them, at least from an evolutionary perspective.

Literature suggests that the risk of low mate retention comes from more than one source: rivals who attempt to lure away the mate and short- or long-term mate infidelity (Buss, 2016). Jealousy may offer several strategies that promote vigilance to reduce situations that lead a partner to be unfaithful, including fulfilling others’ needs and warding off rivals who appear to show sexual interest.

According to research, personality and intelligence are approximately 50% inherited, just like mental toughness. However, it is less clear cut for emotions (Penke & Jokela, 2016; Horsburgh et al., 2009).

Instead, the psychological adaptations we inherit influence our sensitivity to emotional information (Todd et al., 2015). While several people may experience the same event, we differ in our response due to both inherited and learned responses.

Evolutionary psychology: an introduction – Dr. Diana Fleischman – The Weekend University

Undoubtedly, evolutionary psychology is fascinating, not least because of its willingness to combine ideas and research from multiple cutting-edge fields including cognitive science, anthropology, information theory, and genetics.

However, it has the power to upset communities and meets resistance from academics for several reasons, including (Jonason & Schmitt, 2016; Jonason, 2017):

• Conceptual concerns Regarding the underlying theory of evolutionary psychology
• Political implications The impact that the ideas and research have from a political and a social point of view
• Validity Can we rely on the work, the results, and what they appear to tell us?
• Sampling concerns Concerns regarding the sampling and the participants used (or absent from) studies
• Religious matters The incongruity with religious teachings

While concerns arise for political, social, methodological, and epistemological reasons, there is also resistance to evolutionary psychology’s potential as an organizing paradigm for all of existing psychology (Jonason & Schmitt, 2016).

Some of the challenges, especially those from a religious perspective, arise from resistance to seeing us as indistinct from animals (Jonason, 2017).

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Read these recommended books to learn even more about the topic:

1. Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction – Lance Workman and Will Reader

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the beauty and complexity of evolutionary psychology for students and practitioners interested in understanding this extraordinary field.

The text is full of the latest research and critical evaluation of the central aspects of the theory.

Find the book on Amazon .

2. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind – David Buss

This book offers a good grounding in all aspects of evolutionary psychology by one of the experts in the field, David Buss.

The text is well laid out and very accessible. It provides a fascinating insight into the latest thinking in this new and developing field.

3. The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease – Daniel Lieberman

Harvard chair of evolutionary biology Daniel Lieberman takes us on an incredible journey through the evolution of our body over millions of years.

He also describes the increasing disparity between how we live today and the environment for which we have evolved.

While not directly focusing on psychology, this insight into evolutionary theory in action is inspiring and enlightening.

4. The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary Edition – Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins may be known to many for his disagreements with people of faith, but he is also an accomplished professor in evolutionary biology and an author of some fascinating books on genetics.

His book The Selfish Gene is a classic in evolutionary thinking. First published in 1976 to great critical acclaim, this 40th edition brings the gene’s eye view of evolution up to date.

1. Evolutionary Psychology

Melvyn Bragg takes us on a fascinating journey through Dawkins’s work and his ongoing contribution to the new discipline of evolutionary psychology.

2. A Neuroscientist Explains: the evolutionary origins of social behaviour

Robin Dunbar , University of Oxford’s professor of evolutionary psychology, describes what our evolutionary past can tell us about our behavior today.

3. The Ape that Understood the Universe

This podcast episode is an insightful interview with evolutionary psychologist and author Steve Stewart-Williams , covering topics such as altruism and group selection.

Whether we agree with evolutionary psychology or not, as an approach, it provides a valuable lens through which we can view and challenge our current understanding of human psychology and behavior.

It also provides an insightful way to reframe and question an established field such as psychology while drawing together knowledge from the latest research in multiple, distinct areas.

Put simply, if we assume that psychological systems are ultimately biological, then the mechanism of evolution must apply (Jonason, 2017).

And yet, while fascinating, evolutionary psychology results in multiple challenges from both within the academic and the broader community. Many criticisms arise from the sensitive nature of the areas it explores – race, gender, belief systems, and mating – and a seemingly animalistic view of human behavior.

Yet, we must remember that although evolutionary psychology explains much of our thinking, it does not, in any way, condone behavior that ignores the needs or wishes of others. We have evolved a highly complex brain that not only provides automatic and instinctual reactions but also the capacity for complex reasoning and moral thinking.

Therefore, we must take care when considering the conclusions drawn from research and how they are shared.

Evolutionary theory is a rich and powerful means to explore our whole being – both psychologically and physiologically – and can guard us against the behavioral mismatches we face between the environment we evolved for and the one in which we live.

From the perspective of our own psychology and our work with clients, evolutionary psychology can benefit how we approach unwanted behavior. Viewing our minds in light of our ancient past may explain why we behave as we do and how we can change.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download three Positive Psychology Exercises for free.

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• Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture . Oxford University Press.
• Bramble, D. M., & Lieberman, D. E. (2004). Endurance running and the evolution of Homo. Nature , 432 (7015), 345–352.
• Buss, D. M. (2016). Evolutionary psychology: The new science of the mind . Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
• Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2013). Evolutionary psychology: New perspectives on cognition and motivation. Annual Review of Psychology , 64 (1), 201–229.
• Darwin, C. (1859). The origin of species . Oxford University Press.
• Dawkins, R. (2006). The God delusion . Bantam Press.
• Dawkins, R. (2016).  The selfish gene  (40th Anniversary ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Dobzhansky, T. (1973). Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. The American Biology Teacher , 35 (3), 125–129.
• Horsburgh, V. A., Schermer, J. A., Veselka, L., & Vernon, P. A. (2009). A behavioural genetic study of mental toughness and personality. Personality and Individual Differences , 46 , 100–105.
• Jonason, P. K., & Schmitt, D. P. (2016). Quantifying common criticisms of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary Psychological Science , 2 (3), 177–188.
• Jonason, P. K. (2017). The grand challenges for evolutionary psychology: Survival challenges for a discipline. Frontiers in Psychology , 8 .
• Lieberman, D. (2013).  The story of the human body: Evolution, health, and disease . Pantheon Books.
• Lieberman, D., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2007). The architecture of human kin detection. Nature , 445 , 727–731.
• Li, N. P., van Vugt, M., & Colarelli, S. M. (2017). The evolutionary mismatch hypothesis: Implications for psychological science. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 27 (1), 38–44.
• Penke, L., & Jokela, M. (2016). The evolutionary genetics of personality revisited. Current Opinion in Psychology , 7 , 104–109.
• Smith, E. A. (2004). Why do good hunters have higher reproductive success? Human Nature , 15 (4), 343–364.
• Sutton, J. (2019). Psychological and physiological factors that affect success in ultra-marathoners (Doctoral thesis, Ulster University). Retrieved from https://pure.ulster.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/psychological-and-physiological-factors-that-affect-success-in-ul
• Todd, R. M., Ehlers, M. R., Muller, D. J., Robertson, A., Palombo, D. J., Freeman, N., … & Anderson, A. K. (2015). Neurogenetic variations in norepinephrine availability enhance perceptual vividness. Journal of Neuroscience , 35 (16), 6506–6516.
• Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis . Harvard University Press.
• Wilson, D. S. (2002). Darwin’s cathedral: Evolution, religion, and the nature of society . University of Chicago Press.
• Workman, L., & Reader, W. (2015). Evolutionary psychology: An introduction . Cambridge University Press.

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Theoretical Insights of Evolutionary Psychology: New Opportunities for Studies in Evolutionary Ethnobiology

• Published: 29 January 2020
• Volume 47 , pages 6–17, ( 2020 )

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• Joelson Moreno Brito Moura 1 , 4 ,
• Risoneide Henriques da Silva 1 , 4 ,
• Washington Soares Ferreira Júnior 2 ,
• Taline Cristina da Silva 3 &
• Ulysses Paulino Albuquerque   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8131-8429 4  

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In this article, we present the central ideas of evolutionary psychology, and discuss how their assumptions can help ethnobiologists to understand the dynamic relationship between people and their environments. In this sense, investigating this relationship from an evolutionary perspective can bring new empirical evidence about human evolution, also contributing to both evolutionary psychology and evolutionary ethnobiology.

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Acknowledgements

This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001. Contribution of the INCT Ethnobiology, Bioprospecting and Nature Conservation, certified by CNPq, with financial support from FACEPE (Foundation for Support to Science and Technology of the State of Pernambuco - Grant Number: APQ-0562-2.01/17). Thanks to CNPq for the productivity grant awarded to UPA. We also acknowledge the CAPES for the grant awarded to JM, and the Fundação de Amparo à Ciência e Tecnologia de Pernambuco (FACEPE) for the grant awarded to RHS. To the anonymous reviewers who improved our paper with their comments.

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Moura, J.M.B., da Silva, R.H., Ferreira Júnior, W.S. et al. Theoretical Insights of Evolutionary Psychology: New Opportunities for Studies in Evolutionary Ethnobiology. Evol Biol 47 , 6–17 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11692-020-09491-0

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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.

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

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Evolutionary Psychology and Normal Science: in Search of a Unifying Research Program

Jonathan egeland.

University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway

Why are there so many controversies in evolutionary psychology? Using a couple of concepts from philosophy of science, this paper argues that evolutionary psychology has not reached the stage of mature, normal science, since it does not currently have a unifying research program that guides individual scientists working in the discipline. The argument goes against claims made by certain proponents and opponents of evolutionary psychology, and it is supported by discussion of several examples. The paper notes that just because evolutionary psychology has not reached the stage of normal science, the discipline is nevertheless a source of many progressive theoretical developments and interesting empirical discoveries.

Introduction

The purpose of evolutionary psychology is to understand human traits and behaviors as products of evolved psychological mechanisms that improved our ancestors’ chances of reproducing and/or surviving. Evolutionary psychology takes Darwin’s theory of natural selection as its point of departure, claiming that ancestral populations characterized by phenotypic variation, heredity and differential fitness evolved a great number of psychological adaptations that were conductive to individual reproduction and/or survival. 1 In other words, using evolutionary theory, it provides putative explanations of psychological mechanisms; sometimes these explanations only focus on ultimate causes —which is to say that they are distal explanations of why our psychological mechanisms exist—and other times they also focus on proximate causes , which concern how psychological mechanisms work. 2

However, the discipline remains controversial, with some considering it “an indispensable, not optional, ingredient for a mature psychological science” (Confer, Easton et al. 2010 , 111), and others claiming that it is “a deeply flawed enterprise” (Dowens, 2021 ) and “wrong in almost every detail” (Buller 2005 ). 3 This paper will use a couple concepts from philosophy of science in order to explain why there is so much disagreement about whether, or to what extent, evolutionary psychology is a scientifically legitimate enterprise. Indeed, it will argue that the main cause of controversy is the fact that evolutionary psychology has not reached the stage of mature, normal science , but that it rather is a battleground of competing research programs with different theoretical foundations. 4 Moreover, the paper notes that although evolutionary psychology is not at the moment a mature, normal science, it has nevertheless led to numerous progressive theoretical developments and interesting empirical discoveries (cf. Lukaszewski, Lewis et al. 2020 , 4); indeed, it provides the only viable naturalist framework for understanding human nature and behavior as the biological phenomena that they are.

The paper has the following structure. The second section introduces and explains the concepts of “normal science” and “research program”. The third section claims that many of the disagreements that exist with respect to evolutionary psychology and its scientific legitimacy are symptomatic of the fact that there currently is no single, unifying research program that most researchers adhere to. The fourth section supports this claim by discussing six fundamental issues about which researchers working on conceptual or empirical issues in evolutionary psychology generally disagree: modularity, adaptationism, human nature, ongoing evolution in modern humans, group selection, and novelty adaptations. The last section discusses the paper’s argument, and it offers some reflections on the future of evolutionary psychological science.

What is Normal Science?

In his work on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( 2012 ), Kuhn argues that the process of scientific change occurs in a cyclical and stepwise fashion. It starts off in a state of relative disorganization, in which there is little or no consensus on any theory. Once a theory provides the basis for important discoveries, then normal science can begin as researchers stop debating fundamentals and start “puzzle-solving”—i.e., they try to solve new conceptual or empirical puzzles by using the theoretical foundation (about which there is a consensus opinion that it is correct, or at the very least that it is to be pursued) to make sense of them. However, if anomalies that should be solvable accrue, then the scientific community enters a crisis that either is resolved by continuing the work of normal science, or it results in a scientific revolution that eventually leads to the adoption of a new theoretical foundation that allows scientists to return to normal science.

Kuhn calls the theoretical foundation that characterizes normal science a paradigm . However, there are good reasons to prefer Lakatos’s notion of a research program instead. According to Lakatos, scientific theories are not evaluated in isolation, but rather as parts of a larger research program to which they belong. Indeed, a research program is constituted by a sequence of theories that all share the same hard core of theses that are, due to the research program’s negative heuristic , made “‘irrefutable’ by [a] methodological decision of its proponents” (Lakatos 1978 , 48). The hard core is made irrefutable in the sense that it does not in and of itself provide any deducible empirical predictions and, moreover, rejecting it is invariably considered a rejection of the research program that it belongs to. Furthermore, the individual theories comprising a research program all rely on certain auxiliary hypotheses that allow for the derivation of predictions and that differentiate them from each other. Whenever a prediction fails to be corroborated by the empirical data, it is (some of) the auxiliary hypotheses of the theory from which the prediction was derived, rather than the hard core, that are falsified (which is why Lakatos names them the protective belt ). Moreover, when this happens, the research program also has a positive heuristic consisting of a “partially articulated set of suggestions” about how the auxiliary hypotheses are to be modified, in order to ensure that the latest and most sophisticated theoretical development within the research program has not been refuted by the empirical evidence (Lakatos 1978 , 50).

There are primarily two reasons why this paper focuses on Lakatos’s notion of a research program, rather than Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm. The first is that Lakatos’s notion is part of a much more sophisticated conceptual framework that provides a philosophical account of changes within individual research programs, as well as a way of evaluating competing research programs. 5 The second is that Lakatos’s conceptual framework is increasingly being used in the psychological research literature in order to understand and evaluate different hypotheses or theories therein. For example, it has been used in the debate about individual and group differences in general intelligence (Urbach 1974 , Rushton and Jensen 2005 ), 6 in the context of secular trend analysis (Egeland, 2022 ), and in the discussion about falsifiability in evolutionary psychology (Ketelaar and Ellis 2000 ). 7 Continuing, the next section will use the concepts of normal science and research program to diagnose why exactly there is so much controversy and disagreement when it comes to the merits and demerits of evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary Psychology (Currently) has no Unifying Research Program

The core thesis of this paper is that evolutionary psychology has not (yet) reached the stage of mature, normal science, since there is no unifying research program that guides individual scientists working in the discipline. Rather, what we find is that evolutionary psychology is characterized by numerous competing research programs, and that there is not (at the moment) any such program that appears likely to achieve the status of consensus opinion. 8 However, this is a thesis that both proponents and opponents of evolutionary psychology have explicitly argued against.

In their defense of evolutionary psychology as a progressive Lakatosian research program, Ketelaar and Ellis ( 2000 ) argue that the discipline has a unifying research program that guides scientists working to understand the ultimate causes of human behavior. They claim that the hard core consists of a metatheory, which is “a set of consensually held basic assumptions that shape how scientists generate, develop, and test middle-level theories and hypotheses”, and that “in the case of evolutionary psychology, the metatheoretical level consists of the general principles of genetical evolution drawn from modern evolutionary theory” (Ketelaar and Ellis 2000 , 4). So, in other words, the hard core of the research program that is evolutionary psychology consists of the core tenets of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

But what about the protective belt—i.e., the auxiliary hypotheses of the research program? The protective belt, Ketelaar and Ellis ( 2000 , 6) tell us, is broken down into three levels of analysis: middle-level theories, hypotheses, and predictions. Middle-level theories (such as Trivers’s ( 1972 ) parental investment and sexual selection theory) are consistent with the hard core, and they provide inferential links to specific hypotheses from which testable predictions can be derived. (cf. Buss 2019 , ch. 2, who appears to assume a similar view in his comprehensive introduction to evolutionary psychology.)

The problem with Ketelaar and Ellis’s understanding of evolutionary psychology is that their conception of its hard core is too broad. By arguing that the hard core consists of the general principles of evolution by natural selection, it follows that evolutionary psychology is just a very small part of a vast research program that includes most branches of both psychology and biology. Indeed, any theory in any field that includes the theory of evolution by natural selection in its theoretical foundation will by definition belong to the same research program as evolutionary psychology, since any two theories that share the same hard core invariably belong to the same research program. However, it is not just implausible that evolutionary psychology belongs to the same research program as, say, contemporary molecular entomology, but the consequences of this position become downright absurd as one would have to include theoretical approaches that are in direct conflict with standard evolutionary psychology, such as Gould & Lewontin’s ( 1979 ) approach focusing on the relative importance of spandrels and exaptations 9 rather than adaptations, in the same research program.

Moreover, another problem with Ketelaar and Ellis’s position is that it makes it very hard to understand why exactly there is so much controversy surrounding evolutionary psychology. If any theory in any scientific field that includes the theory of evolution by natural selection in its theoretical foundation necessarily belongs to the same research program as evolutionary psychology, then why does evolutionary psychology stand out as a discipline about which there is a rather remarkable amount of both internal (from within) and external (from without) disagreement? There does not appear to be a forthcoming answer, as long as one assumes that Ketelaar and Ellis’s position is correct. After all, a basic Lakatosian idea is that researchers working within the same research program are in agreement about the fundamentals of their discipline. Furthermore, when there is a dominant research program that guides the work of the majority of researchers in a certain discipline, then they have reached the Kuhnian stage of normal science. However, when it comes to how evolutionary psychology actually is practiced, and to the various theoretical commitments that its practitioners actually take on, it is quite clear that there is no unifying research program in evolutionary psychology, and that the discipline has not reached the stage of mature, normal science. This is a point that will be illustrated using various examples in the next section.

Proponents of evolutionary psychology are, however, not alone in thinking that the discipline has a unifying research program. Indeed, this is a claim voiced by its opponents also. Buller ( 2005 ), and others following him (e.g., Dowens 2021 ), draw a distinction between “evolutionary psychology” (henceforth referred to as “ep”) that encompasses evolutionary approaches to human behavior and mind in general, and (the capitalized phrase) “Evolutionary Psychology” (henceforth referred to as “EP”) that is committed to certain very specific theoretical theses associated with the Santa Barbara School (or so-called “High Church”, Heyes 2012 ). The theoretical foundation of EP has been articulated in different ways, and the following characterization by the Santa Barbara psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides is one way of doing so: 10

• The brain’s evolved function is to extract information from the environment and use that information to generate behavior and regulate physiology[… The brain] is a computer—that is, a physical system that was designed to process information. Its programs were designed not by an engineer, but by natural selection, a causal process that retains and discards design features based on how well they solved adaptive problems in past environments[…] 11
• Individual behavior is generated by this evolved computer, in response to information that it extracts from the internal and external environment[…] To understand an individual’s behavior, therefore, you need to know both the information that the person registered and the structure of the programs that generated his or her behavior. 12
• The programs that comprise the human brain were sculpted over evolutionary time by the ancestral environments and selection-pressures experienced by the hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended[…].
• Although the behavior our evolved programs generate would, on average, have been adaptive (reproduction promoting) in ancestral environments, there is no guarantee that it will be so now[…] Each evolved program exists because it produced behavior that promoted the survival and reproduction of our ancestors better than alternative programs that arose during human evolutionary history. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize hunter-gatherer life because the evolutionary process is slow—it takes thousands of generations to build a program of any complexity. The industrial revolution—even the agricultural revolution—is too brief a period to have selected for complex new cognitive programs. 13 , 14
• Natural selection will ensure that the brain is composed of many different special purpose programs, many (or all) of which will be specialized for solving their own corresponding adaptive problems. That is, the evolutionary process will not produce a predominant general-purpose, equipotential, domain-general architecture[…] 15
• Descriptions of the computational architecture of our evolved mechanisms allow a systematic understanding of cultural and social phenomena[…] 16 (Tooby & Cosmides, 2005 , 16–18)

On this view, the aforementioned theses constitute the hard core of the EP research program. 17 (The auxiliary hypotheses are found in more specific theories/hypotheses that develop and build upon this hard core, and that (often) offer testable predictions.) However, there are a couple of reasons as to why the claim that there is a unifying EP research program is problematic.

First, (just like with Ketelaar and Ellis’s position) its conception of the hard core is too broad ( cf . Zagaria, Ando’ et al. 2020 ), since some of its central theses are shared by proponents of ep too. For example, Buller ( 2005 , 200) takes issue with the adaptationist thesis (nr. 3) above, claiming that the mind’s psychological mechanisms “weren’t shaped by selection over our species’ evolutionary history”. However, this claim is certainly false—for a discussion with examples, see Machery and Barrett ( 2006 , 233–234)—since virtually every scientist studying human behavior from an evolutionary perspective will concede that many of the psychological mechanisms of the human mind are evolutionary adaptations. Moreover, as the hard core of EP is broad enough to include theses that also are endorsed by proponents of ep, this may raise legitimate concerns as to whether the dichotomous ep-EP distinction really is adequate ( cf . Machery and Barrett 2006 , 233–234).

Second, the hard core of the EP research program may paradoxically in some sense also be too narrow. The purpose of the ep-EP distinction is to show that there indeed is a unifying research program in evolutionary psychology (namely, the EP research program) that is distinct from other evolutionary approaches (referred to as ep) to the human mind and human behavior. However, since many evolutionary psychologists do not subscribe to the hard core articulated by proponents of the Santa Barbara School (or to similar permutations thereof), it follows that the hard core does not provide the basis for a unifying research program. (As previously mentioned, this is something that will be discussed in greater detail in the next section.) Indeed, claiming that all of evolutionary psychology operates within the EP research program, and that the faults of EP necessarily undermine evolutionary psychological science in general, is no more true than claiming that all of social psychology operates within the theoretical framework of the research on priming effects, or that potential faults of the latter threaten to undermine social psychology in general.

Fundamental Points of Disagreement Among Evolutionary Psychologists

Having presented some problems with the view that there is a unifying research program in evolutionary psychology, this section will offer support for the opposing perspective—according to which the discipline has not reached the Kuhnian stage of normal science—by showing that there are several fundamental points of disagreement among its practitioners. The examples discussed in the current paper are summarized and presented in Table  1 . More specifically, the idea is that the (non-ideological) controversy and disputes that evolutionary psychology clearly engenders can be explained as a consequence of the fact that the practitioners of the discipline disagree about fundamental theoretical issues, such as the structure of human psychological mechanisms, the theoretical and conceptual assumptions underlying adaptationist explanations, and also the very nature of how evolutionary processes function as they sculpt our heritable phenotypes.

Examples of fundamental theoretical disagreements in evolutionary psychology

Massive Modularity

A core thesis of the Santa Barbara school is that the human mind consists of a large number of mental modules, which are domain-specific cognitive subsystems that have evolved due to their adaptive function in the EEA:

From an evolutionary perspective, the human cognitive architecture is far more likely to resemble a confederation of hundreds or thousands of functionally dedicated computers […] than it is to resemble a single general purpose computer equipped with a small number of domain-general procedures (Tooby and Cosmides 2000 , 1171). 18

In other words, the massive modularity thesis says that our cognitive architecture can be likened to that of a Swiss army knife, insofar as both have a number independent designs that each serve to solve specific kinds of problem (Pinker, 1995 ).

Several arguments have been forwarded in defense of this thesis, such as that “[t]here is no such thing as a ‘general problem solver’ because there is no such thing as a general problem” (Symons, 1992 , 142), and that a domain-general mechanism that serves to solve adaptive problems cannot have evolved since it would (in the absence of any domain-specific procedure) have to evaluate all conceivable behavioral solutions, which would be too time consuming for practical purposes (due to combinatorial explosion) and, hence, ultimately leave the individual paralyzed (Cosmides and Tooby 1994 , 94).

However, despite these (and other) arguments, 19 proponents of massive modularity no longer seem to have the upper hand against their dialectical opponents. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which function as responses to the arguments briefly mentioned above, and others that also provide support for the idea that the human mind does have domain-general mechanisms or systems. For example, although our ancestors faced different adaptive problems, it does not follow that the solutions had to be implemented by independent domain-specific cognitive subsystems; rather, it is possible that a small number of domain-general mechanisms that are provided with domain-specific input (such as input from the visual system) can offer adaptive solutions (e.g., Samuels 1998 , 587). Moreover, it is not necessarily the case that domain-general mechanisms will hamper someone’s fitness due to the computational complexity it faces, since a proper analysis of what a domain-general mechanism really is will open up for the possibility that domain-general mechanisms can solve different domain-specific problems in a timely and efficient manner by leveraging and coordinating the actions of relevant domain-specific subsystems. Indeed, this is plausibly how the immune system functions (Wilson, 2003 , 30–31, Buller 2005 , ch. 4).

The biggest problem for the massive modularity thesis is, however, that much of the empirical evidence indicates that the human mind has several domain-general problem-solving mechanisms. For example, one of psychology’s most replicated findings is that seemingly independent indicators of (say) cognitive ability or personality are both highly heritable (when properly measured) and correlated with each other, such that a general factor of intelligence ( g ) and a general factor of personality (GFP) typically explain more of the variance among individuals in these traits than any other relevant factor (Jensen, 1998 , Chiappe and MacDonald 2005 , Musek 2007 , de la Fuente et al., 2019 ). Moreover, associative learning and memory apparently function in a domain-general manner in both human and non-human animals, as these mechanisms allow the organism to learn and remember causal relationships between a number of different events in widely varying contexts (Bolhuis and Macphail 2001 , Lefebvre and Bolhuis 2003 , Reader, Hager et al. 2011 ). 20 That said, the point of this section is not to argue either for or against the massive modularity thesis, but rather to show that it constitutes one fundamental point of contention in evolutionary psychology. 21

Adaptationism

Evolutionary psychologists are generally committed to adaptationism, which claims that at least some psychological traits are adaptations for solving evolutionary problems faced by our ancestors. Indeed, evolutionary psychology has inherited from evolutionary biology and sociobiology the adaptationist principle that “many psychological characteristics are adaptations—just as many physical characteristics are—and that the principles of evolutionary biology that are used to explain our bodies are equally applicable to our minds” (Durrant and Ellis 2003 , 5). Now, there are many disagreements when it comes to adaptationist thinking, but the one that I will briefly mention here has to do with the idea that biologically inherited psychological adaptations have their etiological roots in genetic evolution alone.

It is not uncommon for adaptationists to assume a gene-centered view of evolution. For example, as Cronin ( 2005 , 19–20) notes: “The purpose of adaptations is to further the replication of genes […] Genes have been designed by natural selection to exploit properties of the world that promote their self-replication; genes are ultimately machines for turning out more genes”. However, recent findings may perhaps challenge certain adaptationist assumptions that take for granted the gene-centered view of evolution. One such example is the phenomenon of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, whereby heritable phenotypic changes occur, but without any change in DNA sequence (Heard and Martienssen 2014 ). Empirical support for the phenomenon has led some evolutionary psychologist to argue that cross-generational effects of epigenetic inheritance ought to be considered evolved adaptations, and that personality variation may be produced by calibrational epigenetic systems that use certain developmental cues as inputs (Tooby & Cosmides, 2015 , 75–79).

Similarly, the discovery that an individual’s adaptive psychological mechanisms may be influenced not just by their own genotype, but by the genotypes of other conspecifics, indicates that our conceptual framework for dealing with behavioral phenotypes and their genotypic bases may need revision (see Domingue et al., 2018 , Kong, Thorleifsson et al. 2018 , for more on indirect genetic effects (IGEs)). Although the occurrence of IGEs does not threaten the gene-centered view underlying much of current adaptationist thinking, it nevertheless demonstrates that we need a refined conceptual framework for adequately understanding the complex relationships between genotypes and psychological adaptations. Just as Dawkins’ ( 2016 ) idea of the extended phenotype has been very useful for theorizing about evolution (consider the example of niche construction, whereby an organism’s genetically influenced behavior leads to an alteration in the environment), it may be time for evolutionary psychology to start focusing on organisms’ extended genotypes and their role in the development or activation of adaptive psychological mechanisms.

Human Nature

Some evolutionary psychologists believe that the psychological mechanisms of the human mind that have evolved as a response to adaptive problem-solving in our ancestral past constitute a universal, species-typical human nature. These psychological mechanisms are taken to be “universal among Homo Sapiens ” (Symons, 1992 , 139), which is to say that they are psychological universals constituting a “human nature [that] is everywhere the same” (Tooby and Cosmides 1992 , 38). On this view, individual differences in psychological adaptations are typically considered random variation resulting from “genetic noise” around a “species-typical” mean level of the adaptations in question (Tooby and Cosmides 1990 ), or environmentally mediated patterns of differential mechanism activation with variable cost-benefit tradeoffs depending on the organism’s individual or social ecological context (Lukaszewski 2021 ).

However, some evolutionists, like Penke, Denissen et al. ( 2007 ), Winegard, Winegard et al. ( 2017 ), argue that this universalist view conflicts with the fact that many psychological traits are moderately or highly heritable (for relevant evidence, see Polderman, Benyamin et al. 2015 , Plomin, DeFries et al. 2016 ), meaning that much of individual trait variation can be explained by genotypic variation (Egeland 2023 ). In response to this comparatively pluralist view, Tooby and Cosmides ( 1990 ), Lukaszewski ( 2021 ) argue that it involves a conflation of “deep” and “manifest” structures of psychological adaptations, since it only is the latter that (whether due to genetic or environmental proximate causes) can display systematic intraspecific variation. Now although this response may be successful in undermining many of the arguments forwarded by those who endorse the pluralist position regarding human nature (insofar as they conflate deep and manifest structures), it nevertheless fails to undermine said position due to the question-begging nature of the response. Why does it beg the question? The reason is that the concepts of deep and manifest structure are defined in terms of intraspecific invariance and intraspecific variance respectively (cf. Lukaszewski 2021 ), meaning that it assumes the correctness of the conclusion that there is a universal, species-typical human nature with respect to the deep structure of our psychological adaptations. However, the issue of human nature and the deep structure of our psychological adaptations—i.e., universalism vs. pluralism—cannot be settled by a priori definition, but has to be evaluated on the basis of empirical evidence and what we know to be true of evolutionary theory.

Despite their disagreements regarding human nature, evolutionary psychologists are increasingly working to develop new models of personality and other traits that display large, heritable individual differences (e.g., MacDonald 1995 , Wilson, Near et al. 1996 , Figueredo et al., 2005 , Lukaszewski, Lewis et al. 2020 ). 22 For an overview of some promising theoretical approaches to a systematic evolutionary psychological understanding of individual psychological differences, see Buss ( 2009 ). Moreover, regardless of how these debates turn out, it is nevertheless noteworthy that there still is so much disagreement about human nature and the importance of individual differences among evolutionary psychologists.

Ongoing Evolution in Modern Humans

Some proponents of the EEA concept (cf. footnote 14 above), including the Santa Barbara school, consider evolution to be a rather slow process, occurring on a relatively large timescale, and they argue that our psychological adaptations evolved when our ancestors were in the EEA, sometime during the Pleistocene. One consideration sometimes invoked to support this position is that our species spent most of its time in the Pleistocene, before the introduction of agriculture and animal domestication: “Our species spent over 99% of its evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers in Pleistocene environments. Human psychological mechanisms should be adapted to those environments, not necessarily to the twentieth-century industrialized world” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987 , 280; cf. thesis 4 in Sect. 3 above).

However, this position has become increasingly controversial during recent years, as a large number of genes have been affected by evolutionary processes since we “left” the EEA (Williamson, Hubisz et al. 2007 ), with some evidence indicating that the evolution of human psychological phenotypes actually may have sped up during the Holocene when modern humans adopted agricultural practices (Hawks et al., 2007 , Laland, Odling-Smee et al. 2010 ). Indeed, some novel traits essentially came “online” sometime during last 10 000 years (such as the continued production of lactase, due to the domestication of cattle: Cochran & Harpending 2009 , 77), and there is even evidence that natural selection has occurred with respect to a large number of psychological traits during the last century (Clark et al., 2014 , Chekalin, Rubanovich et al. 2019 , Hugh-Jones and Abdellaoui 2021 ). 23

Much of the recent evolution that has occurred during the Holocene is plausibly a result of genetic and cultural interaction, as explained by the theory of culture-gene coevolution (Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman, 1981 ; Boyd & Richerson, 1988 ; Lumsden & Wilson, 2005 ). The theory posits that cultural practices change as a result of changes in a population’s genes. But once a new cultural practice is established, it creates selection pressures that may open up new evolutionary spaces and lead to novel adaptations. 24 However, the resultant changes in gene frequencies may spur the development of even newer cultural practices, and so on as genes and culture continually interact and create a feedback loop that speeds up the evolutionary process. Cochran & Harpending ( 2009 ), Bolhuis, Brown et al. ( 2011 ) provide several examples of such culture-gene coevolution, and recent data indicate that cultural complexification characteristic of the Holocene has sped up adaptive evolution in certain populations (Richerson and Boyd 2005 , Hawks et al., 2007 , Laland, Odling-Smee et al. 2010 ).

Group Selection

There is a lot of disagreement among evolutionary psychologists as to whether evolution only operates at the level of the individual, or whether it also operates at the group level. In order to get a grip on where exactly the disagreement lies, it is necessary to differentiate the unit of selection from levels of selection . In the case of genetical evolution, the unit of selection is individual genes that produce copies of themselves. Moreover, genes interact with their environments in order to influence their own survival, as well as that of their copies, and their influence is manifested (via the process of natural selection) at the level of individual organisms and, some argue, at the level of groups (and perhaps other levels also). Using Dawkins’s ( 1978 , 2006 ) distinction between replicators and vehicles , we can say that the unit of selection is genes that function as replicators, whereas organisms (and, perhaps, the groups they comprise) are vehicles in which the replicators travel about, and on which they exert their fitness-enhancing influence in order to ensure their own and their copies’ survival. 25

Some evolutionary psychologists and proponents of adaptationist reasoning in general have adamantly argued that the only level at which selection acts is the individual organism. For example, Dawkins ( 2006 ) and Pinker ( 2018 ) strongly argue against group selection, which the latter “contrasts with mainstream evolutionary psychology, in which the unit of selection is the gene” (Pinker, 2018 , 448). However, a problem with this particular piece of reasoning is that it appears to erect a straw man that easily can be knocked down by referencing the generally agreed upon proposition that it is the gene (and not the group) that is the unit of selection. However, as contemporary proponents of multilevel selection theory argue that groups (and other levels of biological organization) under certain conditions constitute a level at which selection can act, the aforementioned critique may very well rest on a conflation of units and levels of selection in its presentation of the group selectionist position (Okasha, 2006 , 13–18).

One of the strengths of group selection is that it is able to explain why certain types of behavior in both human and non-human animals have not been eliminated by natural selection, even though they incur a fitness cost to the individual animal. A clear example of this is altruism, which can be defined as any behavior that somehow benefits some other organism, while at the same time reducing the likelihood that the animal that acts altruistically will reproduce. Darwin and other group selectionists following him have argued that a group containing altruists that are prepared to behave in a manner that is detrimental to their own fitness but for the good of the group, may have an evolutionary advantage over groups without such members—which means that group selection can account for the Darwinian puzzle that is the existence of altruists: “a tribe including many members who […] were always ready to give aid to each other and sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection” (Darwin, 1871 , 166). This may perhaps be why multilevel selection theory is seeing an increasing number of adherents in the scientific community (Yaworsky, Horowitz et al. 2015 ). However, a potential problem with the group selectionist explanation is the existence of free-riders who exploit the altruists by consistently behaving in a selfish manner, and who therefore eventually should out-compete them in an evolutionary sense of the of term. 26 Briefly put, the issue of group selection in general, and altruistic behavior in particular, continues to puzzle evolutionary psychologists, who still pursue different models and theoretical approaches to the understanding of seemingly groupish psychological traits.

Novelty Adaptations

The last source of disagreement that I will mention is what may be called novelty adaptations , which are evolutionary adaptations to environmental novelty. Some evolutionary psychologists have argued that novelty adaptations cannot exist, since a necessary condition for an adaptation is the recurrence of some relevant environmental signal:

It is only those conditions that recur, statistically accumulating across many generations, that lead to the construction of complex adaptations […] For this reason, a major part of adaptationist analysis involves sifting for these environmental or organismic regularities or invariances (Tooby and Cosmides 1992 , 69). [A]t a certain level, the terms “design” and “novelty” are incompatible with each other, because adaptation is impossible without some environmental signal, even if statistically fuzzy, to adapt to. If “novel” means “bears no resemblance to anything in the past,” then design to deal with novelty is a priori impossible (Barrett and Kurzban 2012 , 686).

However, some evolutionary psychologists have criticized this position (e.g., Potts 1998 ), arguing instead that certain psychological traits, like general intelligence, indeed are novelty adaptations. For example, Kanazawa ( 2012 ) hypothesizes that human general intelligence is a domain-specific adaptation that was selected for when humans migrated out of the evolutionarily familiar African Savanna, and he predicts that behaviors that are in some sense “evolutionarily novel” will correlate with IQ. However, Kanazawa’s hypothesis has a number of problems, such as that human intelligence does not appear to be domain-specific, it arguably relies on an outdated conception of the EEA, and the hypothesis allows for the derivation of contradictory predictions (Penke, Borsboom et al. 2011 , Dutton 2013 ).

In a recent review of the literature on the evolution of intelligence, MacDonald and Woodley of Menie ( 2016 ) synthesize finding from a large number of disciplines—including psychometrics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and animal intelligence research—arguing that the most coherent perspective on the evolution of general intelligence sees it as a domain-general adaptation that interacts with motivational mechanisms that provide the organism with information about whether certain evolutionary problems whose solutions are underspecified (i.e., novel) have been solved, by inducing in the organism positive or negative subjective feelings:

The affective basis of domain generality is evolutionarily ancient, resulting primitively in simple associative learning mechanisms (classical and operant conditioning), then elaborated greatly with social learning, and finally general intelligence as a suite of mechanisms, particularly the executive process of working memory […] underlying the ability to manipulate information from a variety of sources in order to achieve goals that may or may not be linked with affective motivational systems derived from the evolutionary past. (MacDonald and Woodley of Menie 2016 , 2547).

Now although this is a coherent hypothesis that is consilient with the latest research in various disciplines (especially if it is combined with the idea that a distal cause of human general intelligence, as well as a number of other traits that are unique to our species, is runaway social selection: Alexander 1989 , Flinn, Geary et al. 2005 , Crespi et al., 2022 ), the idea that there really is such a thing as adaptations to environmental novelty remains controversial. Indeed, this is just one example of how evolutionary psychology is mired in controversy and disagreements, and as the examples discussed above illustrate, a plausible explanation of this fact is that evolutionary psychology has not reached the Kuhnian stage of mature, normal science, in the sense that there is no unifying research program that guides its individual researchers. Rather, what we find is that evolutionary psychologists systematically disagree about fundamental theoretical issues, at least some of which need to be resolved before progress that is recognized as progress by both those who work within the discipline and by those who are outsiders looking in can be made.

This paper has argued that the primary cause of (non-ideological) controversy in evolutionary psychology is that the discipline does not have a unifying research program, which means that it has not reached the stage of normal science. This is evidenced by the fact that evolutionary psychologists disagree about a large number of fundamental theoretical issues, such as the structure of human psychological mechanisms, the importance of the gene-centered perspective in adaptationist explanations, and the very nature of how evolutionary processes function as they sculpt our heritable phenotypes.

Another potential source of controversy, however, is the methods or inferential strategies used by evolutionary psychologists in order to arrive at plausible adaptationist explanations. In a nutshell, one starts by identifying adaptive problems that our ancestors likely faced, and from this one infers hypotheses about which psychological mechanisms must have evolved to solve these problems. The hypotheses are then evaluated by testing their predictions (or by seeing how much of the relevant data they can explain), and by comparing them to other, non-adaptationist hypotheses. 27 However, this type of reasoning has been subject to fierce criticism, the most prominent of which has been articulated by Gould & Lewontin ( 1979 , 43; cf. Pigliucci, 2010 ), who argue that evolutionary psychological hypotheses and theories are not really tested in a way that makes them vulnerable to falsification, but that they rather constitute “just-so-stories” that never can be established as facts.

There are two reasons why methodological objections of this kind are not particularly problematic for evolutionary psychology, and why this paper has focused on theoretical issues instead. The first reason is that it is neither true that all hypotheses in evolutionary psychology are not vulnerable to falsification, nor that they are all just-so-stories without any basis in fact. Just to give one example, the replicated finding that there are sex differences in romantic jealousy was discovered only subsequent to the development of hypotheses about evolved psychological mechanisms which predicted that sex-differentiated patterns should be observable (Symons 1979 , Buss, Larsen et al. 1992 ). The second reason is that since scientific theories and hypotheses never can proven to be true with complete certainty, one must always ask how fruitful a certain scientific approach is compared to other competing approaches. And when it comes to alternative approaches to providing explanations of the ultimate causes of human behavior, they generally fare much less well. For example, Gould’s spandrel concept simply does not generate predictions in the way that adaptationist thinking (sometimes) does. Rather, spandrel-based explanations are usually only offered in the absence of some convincing adaptationist explanation—and in this sense it seems, ironically enough, much more fitting to consider those explanations just-so-stories. 28

That said, there are certainly both good and bad theories in evolutionary psychology, 29 and the discipline should not be rejected tout court just because some theory or research program therein is problematic. Moreover, my argument that evolutionary psychology has not reached the stage of normal science should not be interpreted as implying that it has the properties associated with Kuhn’s previous stage (the pre-paradigm stage), which would imply that there is almost no agreement at all in the discipline, and that there virtually is no progress being made. Although there is not at the moment any unifying research program in evolutionary psychology, one nevertheless finds fruitful and progressive theoretical developments being made, and it is certainly possible that the discipline will enter the stage of normal science in the near future.

Authors’ Contributions

Jonathan Egeland is the only author.

(information that explains whether and by whom the research was supported) – not applicable.

Open access funding provided by University of Agder

Declarations

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. It has not involved any research on animals or humans.

On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

The author has no conflicts of interest.

Not applicable.

1 In The Descent of Man , Darwin ( 1871 ) himself argues that human “mental faculties” are adaptations produced by natural and sexual selection.

2 It should be noted that the different levels of analysis with respect to which different explanations of biological and psychological phenomena operate in some sense impose a certain normative structure on how we ought to conceptualize our understanding of human behavior. Theoretical developments and empirical findings at one level may be suggestive of how hypotheses at other levels should be formulated or tested, and failure to recognize that certain kinds of question only can be answered at a certain level of analysis may lead to false debates or verbal disputes. Moreover, the possibility of integrative, between-level approaches also has to be considered, especially in light of the reductionism-holism debate. For helpful discussions of some of these issues, see Tinbergen ( 1963 ), MacDougall-Shackleton ( 2011 ).

3 See also Fodor ( 2001 ), Higgs ( 2001 ), Richardson ( 2007 ), Bolhuis ( 2008 ), Bolhuis and Wynne ( 2009 ), Bolhuis, Brown et al. ( 2011 ), Woodley of Menie and Sarraf ( 2018 ).

4 I will primarily focus on controversies and disagreements that aren’t motivated by ideology. For more on political or ideological criticisms that assume a blank slate view of the human mind, see Pinker ( 2003 ), Jonason and Schmitt ( 2016 ), Buss and von Hippel ( 2018 ).

5 That said, Lakatos’s conceptual framework does (just like any other conceptual framework in philosophy of science) have certain problems. See, e.g., Musgrave ( 1976 ), Laudan ( 1977 , 77–78), Egeland ( 2022 ).

6 It was actually Lakatos himself who persuaded Urbach to write on environmentalism from the perspective of Lakatosian philosophy of science. For more on this, see Lakatos & Feyerabend ( 1999 , 348–349).

7 See also Meehl ( 1978 , 1990 ), Newell ( 1990 ), who argue that Lakatos’s philosophy of science provides a better framework for understanding and evaluating psychological science, compared to more standard falsificationist philosophies, such as that of Popper ( 1959 ).

8 Again, I reiterate that this should not be read as a criticism of any particular theory in evolutionary psychology. There are indeed many such theories that are plausible, important and supported by the evidence. The claim that evolutionary psychology is not a normal science must be interpreted from the philosophical perspective of Kuhn (cf. Section 2), in which case it will be understood that the purpose of this claim rather is to note that there is a sense in which evolutionary psychology is a fragmented discipline, since it is not uncommon for different practitioners to take on incompatible theoretical commitments (cf. Section 4). In other words: the paper completely agrees with the statement of Dobzhansky ( 1973 ) that “nothing in biology [including human behavior] makes sense except in the light of evolution”—it’s just that we need a unifying research program to guide our understanding of human psychology.

9 Exaptation occurs when the evolutionary function of a phenotypic trait changes over time. A spandrel is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of some evolutionary process, rather than (say) a fitness-enhancing adaptation.

10 Some, such as Buller ( 2005 ), Bolhuis, Brown et al. ( 2011 ), Grossi, Kelly et al. ( 2014 ), Walter (IEP-article), characterize the theoretical foundation of EP in similar, but slightly different ways.

11 Tooby and Cosmides’s first thesis assumes a computational model of the mind that is inspired by the works of Putnam ( 1963 ), Fodor ( 1975 , 1981 ).

In the rush to apply evolutionary insights to a science of human behavior, many researchers have made a conceptual ‘wrong turn’, leaving a gap in the evolutionary approach that has limited its effectiveness. This wrong turn has consisted of attempting to apply evolutionary theory directly to the level of manifest behavior, rather than using it as a heuristic guide for the discovery of innate psychological mechanisms” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987 , 278–279).

13 Cf. Cosmides & Tooby’s ( 1997 ) famous statement that “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind”.

14 Theses 3 and 4 are closely related to the concepts of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) (Bowlby, 1969 ) and gradualism . The former concept refers to the idea that human psychological mechanisms are evolved adaptations produced by selection pressures that existed in ancestral environments, such as the African Savanna during the Pleistocene (Tooby and Cosmides 1990 , Barkow, Cosmides et al. 1992 ). However, (and this is related to the latter concept) since these psychological mechanisms are adaptations to the EEA, it follows that contemporary humans may experience an adaptive lag or evolutionary mismatch , in the sense our psychological mechanisms may no longer lead to the same adaptive outcomes (cf. Laland and Brown 2006 , and Symons’s, 1990 , 430, distinction between a trait that is an adaptation and a trait that is adaptive).

15 This is also known as the massive modularity thesis , which claims that our psychological architecture consists of a large number of domain-specific, modular mechanisms or programs.

16 This is a reductionist thesis—one that arguably isn’t essential to EP, as reflected in the re-edited version of Tooby & Cosmides’ ( 2015 ) paper—claiming that social phenomena in general can be adequately explained from an EP perspective.

17 Buller ( 2005 , 10 ff.) uses the Kuhnian notion of a paradigm, rather than Lakatos’s research program. However, for reasons given in the second section, I have decided to consistently use the latter term throughout this article.

18 Cf. Barrett and Kurzban ( 2006 ), Carruthers ( 2006 ).

19 For other arguments, see the reviews by Dowens ( 2021 ), Walter (IEP-article).

20 For more on these, as well as other objections to the massive modularity thesis, see Bolhuis, Brown et al. ( 2011 ), Woodley of Menie and Sarraf ( 2018 ).

21 For an interesting contribution, arguing that the whole debate about modularity is spurred by the confusion of different levels of analysis, see Pietraszewski and Wertz ( 2022 ).

22 It is not just heritable individual differences that call for an evolutionary explanation, but between-culture variation in behavioral traits also does so. An interesting development in this area is the niche diversity hypothesis by Smaldino, Lukaszewski et al. ( 2019 ), according to which more diverse social and ecological niches produce diverging behavioral profiles designed to be especially adaptive in a subset of such niches. This is an environmentalist hypothesis of cross-cultural differences in personality, claiming that assortment and plasticity (not heredity) are the primary mechanisms accounting for behavioral variation; and its prediction that lower niche diversity is inversely correlated with covariation among personality factors at the nation-level has been corroborated and replicated (Durkee, Lukaszewski et al. 2022 ).

23 It should also be noted that Cosmides and Tooby’s inference in the quoted paragraph above is not entirely sound. The reason is that just because humans as a species spent most of its time in the Pleistocene, it does not follow that significant evolutionary changes cannot have happened during, say, the last 10 000 years (cf. Walter IEP-article).

24 Indeed, the emergence of new cultural practices may, as work on the Baldwin effect suggests, favor the selection of a general learning ability, rather than more fixed abilities or behavioral dispositions (Richards, 1989 ). Moreover, the evolution of a general learning ability is plausibly conducive to the development of novel and useful cultural practices, since the individual now has a greater capacity for learning new skills and behaviors.

25 See, e.g., Dawkins ( 2016 , 126), who presents the debate between individual selection and group selection as concerning which biological levels of organization can function as vehicles of selection.

26 A possible solution to this problem of “subversion from within”, as Dawkins ( 2006 ) has called it, is that groups may develop strategies for punishing free riders, so that they cannot outcompete the altruists. Moreover, it should also be noted that Hamilton’s ( 1964a , 1964b ) theory of inclusive fitness, often invoked in order to explain altruistic behavior in a way that supports the idea that selection cannot operate at the level of groups, actually may be more consistent with the group selection idea. Indeed, Hamilton later gave up on the idea that altruism could only be adaptive when the individual that benefits shares genes that are “identical by descent”. This is how he puts it in his ( 1975 ) paper on the Innate social aptitudes of man : “Because of the way it was first explained, the approach using inclusive fitness has often been identified with ‘kin selection’ as a way of establishing altruistic social behavior by natural selection […] But the foregoing discussion shows that kinship should be considered just one way of getting positive regression of genotype in the recipient, and that it is this positive regression that is vitally necessary for altruism. Thus the inclusive-fitness concept is more general than ‘kin-selection’.” Furthermore, in some of his less known work, Hamilton ( 1987/2001 ) also uses his theory of inclusive fitness to explain phenomena such as groupish nepotism, and he offers some interesting reflections on why he initially included the clause about genes having to be “identical by descent”.

27 For a more detailed description of the patterns of reasoning used by evolutionary psychologists, see Lukaszewski, Lewis et al. ( 2020 ).

28 Stewart-Williams ( 2018 , 290–291) has aptly noted that there is a sense in which any scientific hypothesis is a just-so-story before it has been tested, but that this sort of objection seldom is levelled at other fields.

29 Compare, e.g., the hypothesis about sex differences in romantic jealousy, and Kanazawa’s hypothesis about cognitive ability, which predicts that it should be correlated with “evolutionarily novel” behaviors in general—both of which are discussed above.

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Psychology Discussion

Essay on evolutionary psychology: top 6 essays | psychology.

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Essay on Evolutionary Psychology

Essay Contents:

• Essay on the Principles of Evolutionary Psychology

Essay # 1. Social Behaviour of Apes:

Evolutionary psychology is ripe with examples from the animal world. Usually, a number of species, many of them quite distant to we humans, are used with each species illustrating a basic principle.

Let us depart from this formula by first examining thumbnail sketches of the social organization, mating styles, and aggression of the three great apes that are our genetically closest relatives—gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. By comparing and contrasting the behaviour of these three species, we can illustrate many of the major issues of evolutionary psychology.

i. Gorillas:

A gorilla community is dominated by a single adult male silverback, although sometimes the silverback will allow a good buddy or two to share his reign. The rest of the group consists of several adult females and their juvenile and adolescent offspring. The silverback(s) vigorously defend their harem against the attempts of single males to entice away one or more of the breeding females.

Young adult males almost always leave their natal group and try to gather a harem of their own. Life is tough for the bachelor. He will either wander alone or join several other bachelors and form a group of their own. Gathering a harem is not easy. By dumb luck, an old silverback may die and the closest bachelor, after fending off attempts by rival males, may claim most of the harem.

More typically, however, the male collects a female at a time by challenging a silverback in an established group and luring a female away. As a result, most males do not mate while the lucky few sire a large number of offspring.

Gorilla mating begins when a female enters estrus. In response to hormones, her labia change colour and swell, and the females “present” their bottoms to the adult male(s) of the group. Because of the social structure, the female gorilla mates only with the silverback(s) in the group. In such a system, paternity is assured—if the father is not the dominant male, then it is his best buddy.

Although gorillas are remarkably peaceful in general, males engage in infanticide in two situations. The first is when a male gains a new female or takes over a whole troop. Here, he will often kill all the infants of his new mate(s). The second situation is more insidious. A male may invade an established harem and kill an infant, despite an aggressive defense from the silverback and the infant’s mother.

When this occurs, a strange phenomenon takes place—within a few days, the infant’s mother will abandon her group and take up with the strange male who killed her offspring! While a human mother would plot murderous revenge, the gorilla mother prefers to desert a male who proved incapable of defending her infant in favour of another male who is more likely to protect her future infants. For the killer, this type of infanticide is a tactic to gain a mating female.

ii. Chimpanzees:

Chimps are organized into communities centered on a cadre of adult males. Males remain within the troop into which they are born and forge strong social bonds with one another. They will travel together, groom one another, and aggregate into opportunistic hunting parties.

Although power politics and alliances are a way of life among the males in a chimp community, the males of a group unite against the males in neighbouring communities. They actively patrol their own groups’ territory to prevent incursion, and they form “party gangs” to raid a neighbouring chimp community in order to kill a male or abduct a female.

Females emigrate from their natal community and become associated with another group of males. Females do not bond with other females or with males as strongly as the males of a troop bond to one another, and they live in home ranges that overlap the troop’s territory. In the dominance hierarchy within the group, all the adult males are invariably dominant to the females.

According to Wrangham and Petersona young male “enters the world of adult males by being systematically brutal toward each female in turn until he has dominated all of them. … In a typical interaction, he might charge at the female, hit her, kick her, pull her off balance, jump on top of her huddled and screaming form, slap her, lift her and slam her to the ground, and charge off again.”

Like gorillas, chimp mating begins with estrus and has three forms. The first and most typical form is for the female to mate promiscuously and frequently with virtually every male in her group. In the second form, which often occurs close to ovulation, one of the high-ranking males may form a short-term, possessive bond with the female.

Here, the male will remain close to the female and use combinations of threats and aggression to discourage her from leaving and to prevent subordinate males from copulating. Both the promiscuous and possessive forms can take place within a single estrous period. The third and rarest form is the consortship.

Like gorillas, male chimps may practice infanticide when a new female joins their group with an infant. Males will gang up on the new female and despite her defense, eventually rip the infant away from her, take it to a secluded area, and kill it.

Essay # 2. Human Social Organization and Mating:

To illustrate predispositions and constraints shaped by evolution, let us compare human social organization, mating patterns, and aggression to those of gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. Imagine, for the moment, the college-aged men and women belonging to a human culture that followed the pattern of gorillas.

There could be sororities and fraternities, of course, but they would take a decidedly different form. Each sorority would be small and headed by a mature adult male who would jealously guard his harem and their offspring from contact with any other college male. In order to keep his females under eye, the male would probably demand that they all take the same classes that he takes.

Perhaps two or three different harem groups may share the same classroom, but there would probably be physical barriers in the room to prevent them from interacting. Otherwise, the males would disrupt the class by their displays, posturing, games of one-upmanship, and even overt aggression to prevent any female in their harem from leaving and/or to entice another female into joining their harem.

Each coed would feel that is quite natural to have sex with the male and have him as the father of her children. Although there may be squabbles among the women, there would be no possessiveness or jealousy about sharing him with the others. Both the male and the females may feel physical and perhaps even emotional attraction to one another. However, the concept of casually dating someone else would never even cross anyone’s mind.

Males without a harem would either live solitary lives or join together into an all-male fraternity. Bachelor males could easily take classes with other bachelor males, but to maintain order, the college would prohibit bachelors from taking courses with harems. If a harem master gets a bit long in the tooth, a bachelor will engage in repeated displays of dominance and aggression with him in order to drive him away and take over the women. If the bachelor succeeds, the females will not follow their former mate and father of their children. They will placidly go with the victor, have sex with him, and have his children.

There would be continual games of dominance between the bachelors and a harem male as he leads his harem and children across campus. Sometimes a bachelor might find a female and her infant isolated from the main group. Here, he might grab and kill the infant despite vigorous protests and attacks from the mother.

It may take a few days for the female to get over this event, but soon she would find herself attracted to her child’s killer and will leave her own harem group to join up with him. There would be no charges of murder or any disciplinary action from the university. The bachelor is doing what any reasonable unattached male would do to try to get a mate.

Now imagine a different scenario. Again, let us again consider collegiate life, but this time, one organized on the basis of the chimpanzee. Here, there are no dominant males with their harems. Instead, there would be very strong fraternities with fierce—perhaps even murderous—rivalries among them.

Sororities, if there were any, would have poor internal organization compared to the fraternities. In general, the women would act a bit more as loners while the males would almost always be found with their buds. Each sorority would be strongly associated with a fraternity.

A coed would go through cycles of heat and sexual abstinence. As she enters heat, the guys would pay closer attention to her and quarrel among themselves to get near her. Although she might prefer some males to others, she would find it very natural to have sex repeatedly with all the frat boys.

She must be careful in spurning someone’s advances; if she protests too much, she may be beaten and raped. As ovulation nears, one of the more dominant males might try to sequester her for himself by challenging any subordinate who tries to mate with her. He may be successful for a while, but he usually fails to inhibit her promiscuity—after all, he cannot guard her 24 hours a day. If she becomes pregnant, she will not know who the father was.

Essay # 3. Inclusive Fitness and Kin Selection:

Sometimes, mothering ring-neck pheasants perform a marvelous act of self-sacrifice. If a large animal trod too close to her nest, she will make a great deal of noise and run through the field flapping her wings. The safest course of action for her is to be silent, run a few steps to build up the momentum for flight and then soar away.

Yet she makes herself deliberately conspicuous to a potential predator and is sometimes caught in the process. Prairie dogs also show similar behaviour. When a raptor soars overhead or a land based predator approaches the colony, the prairie dogs who initially spot the threat stand upright on their hind legs and issue a series of loud barks that act as alarm codes for their colony mates to run post haste to their boroughs. This behaviour assists the colony as a whole, but at the expense of making the signaller conspicuous to the predator.

These are examples of altruism, a behaviour that can reduce the reproductive fitness of the altruist but increase the fitness of conspecifics. Ever since Darwin’s time, altruism posed a problem for natural selection. Certainly any heritable behaviour that reduced fitness should decrease over time.

Just consider a prairie dog colony that consists of 50% altruists and 50% cheats. When a cheater spots a predator, he hightails it to the nearest borough. The odds that the predator eats an altruist are slightly increased because the cheater has just removed one of his own kind from the denominator of vulnerable prairie dogs.

When the altruist spies the threat, she announces her position to the predator and places herself in danger. Both the other altruists and the cheaters benefit, but if anyone is to be devoured, it is once again more likely to be the altruist than the cheater.

Using mathematical models, Hamilton showed that altruism could evolve when altruistic genotypes preferentially benefit other altruistic genotypes over cheater genotypes. The clearest way for an altruistic genotype to do this is to have mechanisms that bias it to work altruistically for close genetic relatives.

Hamilton’s work presented the twin ideas of inclusive fitness and kin selection. Inclusive fitness is defined as the fitness of an individual along with the fitness of close relatives. Your inclusive fitness would be a weighted sum of your own reproductive fitness, that of your first-degree relatives, second degree relatives, etc.

Kin selection refers to implication of inclusive fitness that natural selection can work on the close genetic relatives of the organism actually performing the behaviour. In a loose sense, fitness can be expressed in terms of kinships just as we have seen it being expressed in terms of genotypes, phenotypes, and individuals.

Inclusive fitness and kin selection have been used to explain different human behaviours. The very fact that we humans recognize and pay close attention to genealogy may reflect a cognitive mechanism developed through evolution that helps in kin recognition.

The phrase “blood is thicker than water” has been interpreted as a realistic description of human emotions and behaviours that preferentially benefit kin over others. Several aspects of altruistic parental behaviour may have evolved through kin selection. Continual themes in fiction portray noble parents shielding their young children from potential harm, but evil stepparents threatening their stepchildren.

Daly and Wilson have pointed out how familial homicide patterns agree quite well with kin selection. Although rare, parents do murder a child, but the perpetrator of such a heinous act is much more likely to be a stepparent than a biological parent. Despite the hyperbolic threat “do that again and I’ll kill you” echoed by many a frustrated parent, very few parents ever even contemplate homicide when it comes to their offspring. The inhibition of homicide is not restricted to parents and their offspring.

Ask yourself the following two questions – “In your whole lifetime, which person has shouted at you and hit you the most?” and “Which person have you yelled at and fought with the most?” If you respond like most people, then you will nominate a brother or sister. Yet fratricide is very rare. Humans are much more likely to kill a spouse than an offspring or sibling.

Essay # 4. Reciprocity and Cooperation:

A close cousin to inclusive fitness is the concept of reciprocity and cooperation, sometimes called reciprocal altruism. Traditionally, inclusive fitness and kin selection have been used to refer to altruism towards genetic relatives.

Reciprocity and cooperation deal with behaviour that requires some “sacrifice” but also has beneficial consequences between conspecifics who are not necessarily genetic relatives. Hence, the target of the behaviour—a genetic relative versus another conspecific—distinguishes inclusive fitness from reciprocity/cooperation.

To understand reciprocity and the problem it posed for evolutionists, we must once again consider cheaters. Lions and wolves hunt large prey cooperatively. Although it is mentioned infrequently on the nature shows, chasing, grabbing, and killing large prey is not a safe enterprise.

Zebras kick and bite, wildebeest have horns, and caribou have antlers, so predators can be hurt, sometimes even mortally so, in the hunt. Imagine a cheating lioness who approaches the prey only after it is dead. Would not her behaviour be advantageous? She can participate in the feast but avoids the risk of injury.

If cheating has a selective advantage, then would it not eventually result in the extinction of cooperative hunting? Another problem is how cooperative hunting ever got started in the first place. Most feline predators like the lynx, tiger, cheetah, leopard, and jaguar, make a perfectly fine living at solitary hunting. Why did lions ever develop cooperation?

According to Trivers cooperation cannot evolve alone. It must be accompanied with mechanisms that detect and reward mutual cooperators and detect and punish cheaters. Consider grooming in primates. It serves the very useful function of eliminating large parasites (fleas, lice, etc.) from a hairy monkey or ape.

Imagine that you are a chimp and that a fellow chimp, Clyde, is continually presenting himself to you to be groomed. Being the nice chimp that you are, you groom Clyde every time that he requests it. After a while, however, you notice something peculiar. Whenever you present yourself to Clyde for grooming, he refuses.

Ask yourself how you truly feel about this situation and how you are likely to respond to Clyde’s future presentations. Again, if you are like most people, when Clyde presents to you, you would feel some form of negative emotion that could range from mild exasperation to downright contempt, depending on the type of chimp you are. At some point, you are also likely to refuse to groom Clyde. Evolutionary psychologists would say that this is your “cheat detection and punishment” mechanism in action.

Reciprocity evolves when reciprocity and cheating can be recognized or anticipated and then acted upon. If your roommate, Mary, is cramming for her physics exam, you are likely to bake some banana bread for her when you suspect that Mary will do something nice for you on the eve of your big chemistry exam next week.

But if Mary were the type of roommate who clutters and trashes the place leaving you to do all the cleaning up, then you are likely to feel irritated and aggravated at her. No banana bread tonight! We feel that it is right and just that everyone does their fair share, and as parents, we spend considerable time and effort inculcating this ethos into our children.

One of the strengths of the modern evolutionists is their ability to uncover subtle and non-obvious phenomenon that fit better with evolutionary theory than other theory. You were correct to express skepticism of the Mary example— after all, there is really no way to determine the relative influences of a biologically soft wired “cheat detector” and your upbringing on the behaviour. But consider the following example, taken from Pinker.

Essay # 5. Parental Investment:

Robert Trivers, who first explicated reciprocity and cooperation, also gave us parental investment theory. This theory states that in any species the parent (male or female) that invests the most time, energy, and resources on its offspring will be the choosier mate.

The theory begins by asking the fundamental question of why many species act finicky in choosing mates. Most evolutionists explain mate preferences as mechanisms that genes have developed in organisms to assist in their own (i.e., the genes own) replication.

Triver’s theory maintains that the fastidiousness of mate preferences will be stronger in the sex that expends the most resources in producing offspring. Ordinarily, this will be the female because biologists define a female as the sex of a species that produces the larger gamete. The sex that produces the larger gamete produces fewer of those gametes. Hence, each gamete is more “precious” in a reproductive sense.

In mammals, the female expends more resources on offspring than the male. Fertilization in mammals is internal to the female, offspring development takes place in the female’s uterus, and the female must suckle the infant for a significant period of time. Hence, female mammals should be choosier mates than the males. Indeed, this is always the case.

In species where one sex competes for mating, males compete with other males for the opportunity of having sex with females. Females do not butt heads with each other for the opportunity of mating with any random guy in the herd.

Even in chimps and bonobos, where mating is largely promiscuous, every male in a troop tries quite hard to have a go at any female in estrus. Whenever one sex shuns a mating attempt, it is the female shunning a male and not a male shunning a female.

Parental investment theory, along with the concept of certainty of parenthood, has been used to explain many different types of human mate preferences. Females must commit nine months to pregnancy and then, before the advent of manufactured baby formula, more than a year to feeding a single offspring.

Even if a woman conceived after her first menstruation, she could bear one child per year until menopause, and the most likely number of offspring for a female during most of human evolution was probably no more than five. A human male, on the other hand, has the potential of fathering a baby every single day after puberty.

Female humans are biologically constrained to devote considerable resources to a single offspring; human males lack such constraints. Hence, human females should have more discriminating mate preferences than males.

A litany of empirical observations is used to support of this conclusion. Certainly in our Western cultures, anecdotal observations agree with it. Males are more ready than females to engage in anonymous sex, even to the point of paying for it. Women report more sexual advances made on them by men than men report sexual advances initiated by women.

Consider the following questions—how long would you have to know someone before feeling comfortable going out on a date with that person, and how long would you have to know someone before getting married? Both males and females have similar time frames—a short time frame for dating and a longer one for matrimony.

Now consider this question—how long would you have to know someone before having sex? The average woman picks a time frame somewhere between dating and marriage. Males pick a time frame shorter than dating.

This account of human parental investment, however, faces a real problem—why should men ever stick around at all? If sleeping around with as many women as possible maximizes the reproductive fitness of the genes in a male organism, why would these genes ever develop mechanisms that predispose a man to settle down with a woman? The evolutionists answer to this is that it effectively “takes two to tango.”

Just like the peacock’s tail, men’s behaviour is influenced by women’s mate preferences. If mutations arose that influenced women to prefer men who stuck around, and if there were men who actually did stick around, and if the pairing between this type of woman and this type of man had high reproductive fitness, then females who prefer stabile males would increase in frequency as will males who actually remain stabile.

Essay # 6. Principles of Evolutionary Psychology:

Several decades ago, American psychology held several laws of learning as sacred. One law was equipotentiality and it stated that an organism could learn to associate any stimulus to any response with equal ease. The classic example is Pavlov’s dog who, according to this law, could have learned to associate a bright light to the food as easily as it learned to associate the bell with food.

The two stimuli, light and bell, are equipotent in the sense that given the same learning parameters, both could eventually lead the dog to salivate. A second law was temporal contiguity. This law stated that the presentation of a novel stimulus with a learned stimulus must occur quickly in time. In Pavlov’s case, the food must be presented shortly after the bell was rung in order for learning to occur.

The dog never would learn to salivate to the bell if the food were presented three days after the bell. The third and final law was practice—it took many trials before the behaviour was fully learned.

These laws begin to crumble after a series of fortuitous studies in the 1950s and 1960s by the psychologist John Garcia and his colleagues. Garcia’s initial interest centered on the behavioural effects of low doses of radiation.

In the experimental paradigm, rats were placed into a special chamber for a relatively long time while they were exposed to a constant amount of low level X-ray radiation. To keep the rats healthy, the chamber was equipped with water bottles containing saccharin-flavoured water.

Garcia and his colleagues noticed three important things:

(i) As expected, the rats became sick from the doses of X-rays;

(ii) Quite unexpectedly, the rats stopped drinking the sweetened water; and

(iii) The rats needed no practice to avoid the water—they learned after one and only one trial.

Garcia’s genius consisted in asking one simple question, “Why should these rats avoid drinking the water when the learning situation violated the accepted laws of learning?” According to the Pavlovian tradition, the unconditioned response (sickness) occurred several hours after the conditioned stimulus (sweetened water).

This clearly violated the law of temporal contiguity because the paring of sweetened water and sickness did not occur within a short time interval. Second, there was no need for practice. Most rats learned to avoid the water a single trial.

Garcia abandoned his initial interest in radiation poisoning to focus on this peculiar phenomenon of learning. His general results and conclusions are illustrated by the study of Garcia and Koelling. Here, rats were assigned to one of four groups in a two by two-factorial design.

The first factor was the sensory quality of water given to the rats—it could either be coloured with a food dye and oxygenated with bubbles (coloured, bubbly water) or mixed with saccharin (sweetened water).

The rats in the coloured, bubbly water/shock group eventually learned to avoid drinking the water, albeit after a number of trials. This accords well with the established laws of learning at the time. Rats shocked after drinking sweetened water, however, failed to learn avoidance within the time limit of the study. This fact clearly violated the established law of equipotentiality under which sweetness should lead to just as much avoidance as the visually coloured water.

Curiously, the effect of making the rats sick had showed the opposite pattern. Rats made sick by the coloured water had a difficult time learning to avoid it while rats sickened by lithium learned to avoid the water after one trial. The coloured-water/lithium group followed the established laws of learning because sickness did not occur in temporal contiguity with the water. The sweetened-water/ lithium group, on the other hand, violated the laws just as much as those rats made sick by X-rays did.

The current explanation for this curious state of affairs is that the laws of learning depend importantly on the biological predisposition of a species. The rat has evolved into a highly olfactory creature that perceives the world in terms of smell and taste. Indeed, rat colonies develop a characteristic smell that is used to recognize colony mates and identify intruders.

Rats are also scavengers who dine on a surprisingly wide variety of organic material. Because they locate food though smell, they are especially attracted to rotting fruit, vegetable, and animal matter because of its pungent odour. Rotting food, however, poses a problem for digestion because it can create sickness when it is too far gone.

Rats react to their food in a peculiar way. When a rat locates a novel food source, he seldom gobbles it all up. Instead, he will nibble a little bit of it, go way for several hours, and then return. The rat may repeat this another time or two—a quick taste, a lengthy departure, and then a return—but soon he will return and gorge on the food.

Interestingly, if an experimenter laces the original food source with enough poison to make the rat sick but not enough to kill him, the rat may return but will not eat the food any more. It is usually a quick, one trial learning experience.

Evolutionary psychologists speculate that rats evolved a biological predisposition and a behavioural repertoire to avoid rotting foods that may make them ill. At some point rats that nibbled at a novel food source out-reproduced those who gobbled the whole thing down, presumably because the gobbling strategy had a high probability of incapacitation or even death through sickness.

Similarly, rats who nibbled and learned quickly out-reproduced those who nibbled but took a long time to learn. And what sensory cues would the rat use to bad food from good food? Most likely they would be olfactory cues.

In this way, rats in the Garcia and Koelling study would easily learn to associate an olfactory cue (water sweetness) with eventual sickness but would have a harder time associating a visual cue (coloured, bubbly water) with sickness. Rats who learned to avoid sweetened water when they became sick were biologically predisposed to learn this and to learn it quickly.

Proponents of this interpretation of the data are quick to point out the role reversal that happens in different species. Birds, who are highly visual like us humans, associate visual cues with sickness with the ease that rats learn about olfactory cues and illness. Birds will readily learn to avoid, say, blue food pellets and eat red pellets. When presented with a novel pellet that is half blue and half red, the bird will peck at the middle, break the pellet in two, and then eat the red half.

The general phenomenon has now come to be called prepared learning or biological constraints on learning, a hypothesis that was initially proposed in 1911 by the famous learning theorist, E.L. Thorndike, but was ignored by later researchers. The prepared or constrained part of the learning process is due to the biology that has been evolutionarily bequeathed to a species.

Human Fears and Phobias From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, fear and panic—like most of our emotions—should be viewed as adaptive responses. They may be unpleasant to experience, but they serve the useful function of prompting us to avoid dangerous situations and/ or to energize our bodies for fight or flight.

The relationship between fear and adaptiveness resembles the inverted U- shaped function of stabilizing selection. In general, it is good to be in the middle of distribution. Too little fear could lead to maladaptive risk-taking while too much fear might incapacitate a person.

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Essay , Psychology , Evolutionary Psychology , Essay on Evolutionary Psychology

505 Evolution Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best evolution topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on evolution, ✅ simple & easy evolution essay titles, 🔍 good research topics about evolution, 🎓 writing prompts about evolution, 📌 interesting topics to write about evolution, ❓ evolution essay questions.

• The History and Evolution of the Visual Basic Programming Language It is a specific language that is used by users to have a flexible environment in which they interact easily with the computer it is the best programming language and the easiest to use.
• The Rise and Evolution of the World of Islam Prophet Muhammad, who was was born and raised in Mecca, started spreading the teachings of Islam in Saudi Arabia and this marked the origin of Islam.
• The Stone Age Period and Its Evolution Therefore, the term is associated with the tools and the equipments that the ancient people made from the stones. In the Neolithic age, there was development of weaving, pottery and metal weapons and tools began […]
• Computer Technology: Evolution and Developments The development of computer technology is characterized by the change in the technology used in building the devices. The semiconductors in the computers were improved to increase the scale of operation with the development of […]
• Web Form Evolution: From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0 The webmaster got concerned with updating the website and providing information to the users. This leads to the birth of web 2.0.
• Urbanism in Architecture: Definition and Evolution In general urbanism is a very wide concept that is used to describe an urban centre architectural system in its totality beyond the mere building structures and includes a city’s infrastructure system, economy, geography, social-cultural […]
• Importance of History and Evolution of Businesses to Managers Business managers are expected to organize, plan, control and oversee the implementation of business plans and strategies with the ultimate aim of accomplishing the goals and objectives of the firm.
• The evolution of McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y in relation to the development of management theory The natural response of managers was to be more stringent and consequently the employees reacted to it, resulting in a viscous cycle.
• International Organizations and Their Evolution In this context, it can be stated that this strategy of international politics recognizes the belief that organizations and institutions are key ways of promoting peace around the world.
• Geography, its Evolution and Future Geography is the study of the earth and the natural features that characterize it. The revolution was related in some way, to the methods in which the researchers studied the earth and the processes occurring […]
• The Evolution of the Automobile & Its Effects on Society This piece of work will give an exhaustive discussion of the evolution of the automobile and the effects it has had on the society.
• Evolution of the Clock In this light, the paper tracks changes in the operation mechanisms of the clock in the quest to provide theoretical records of evolution of engineering.
• Evolution of Television Throughout the decade, the cable television was the means of transmission between the transmitters in television network premises and the receivers at the viewer’s home.
• Biosphere Evolution and Threats The biosphere, however, overlaps between all the spheres that include the lithosphere, which is found on the surface of the earth.
• Principles & Concept of Total Quality Management Essay The second principle of TQM is that the problem in most companies is the processes but not the people. This was based on the fact that the quality of the products was determined by all […]
• The Evolution of Electricity In one of her works Diana Bocce observes, “The kite experiment helped Franklin establish a relationship between lightening and electricity, which led to the invention of the lightning rod” This is considered one of the […]
• The American Military and the Evolution of Computer Technology From the Early 1940s to Early 1960s During the 1940s-1960, the American military was the only wouldriver’ of computer development and innovations.”Though most of the research work took place at universities and in commercial firms, military research organizations such as the Office […]
• Illustration’ Evolution in 20th Century There was, however, an increase in publications of novels that needed illustrations in form of drawings and paintings. Notable works by Avati are in the field of paperback illustration.
• The Times New Roman Font: Evolution and Readability The typography used in a newspaper represents a sample of the state of the medium. 7There is however, a strong tendency to ensure the legibility of the style and the readability of the writing, at […]
• Hebrew Monotheism: Origins and Evolution In the book of Exodus, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God and one of the commandments was to worship one God only.
• “Why Evolution Is True?” by Jerry A. Coyne The reader is able to use this vivid substantiation of claims to understand the author’s need to introduce the aspect of God who is at the center of these natural happenings.
• Stellar Evolution The mass of the star is, however, the most essential and influential factor that determines its lifetime especially when other factors are kept to a constant.
• Computer Evolution, Its Future and Societal Impact In spite of the computers being in existence since the abacus, it is the contemporary computers that have had a significant impact on the human life.
• Nursing History and Theory Evolution This paper aims to offer a comprehensive view of the history of nursing, major influences on the profession, and the evolution of nursing theory.
• Evolution of Humans: The Human Evolutionary Theory The earliest best-known theory of evolution was propounded by Charles Darwin, whose main thesis was that life has evolved from simple single-celled organisms to multi-cellular, complex living things through the process of natural selection and […]
• Sociology. Evolution of Formal Organizations In the past, work used to be done in a particular way and employees had to work towards a stated goal and at the end of the day be answerable to a specific supervisor.
• Creationism and Evolution The bible in the book of Genesis describes the origin of heaven and earth and everything that is in it; God created everything.
• Evolution of Makkah as a City The first pattern is a central business district, in this pattern the shape has been affected by the natural topography of the city of Makkah.
• History and Evolution of the Guitar Instrument According to Scott, one final and significant development in the evolution of the guitar is the increasing attention given to musical composers.
• Creationism vs. Evolution A piece of art showcases the aptitude of an artist, so does the earth and the universe that imply the reality and the potentiality of its stylist.
• The Automotive Technology Evolution This marked the beginning of the car industry, which ultimately led to the development of modern automobiles and opened the way for their production. The reliability and safety of automobiles have increased due to technological […]
• The Evolution of Heavy Metal Rock Music in UK and US In the United States, the tempo of heavy metal music is slower than the heavy metal rock music in Great Britain.
• Dove as a Brand and Its Evolution The brand is the world’s number one cleansing brand in the category of health and beauty. The brand was never to be put in the category of soaps in its history.
• English Language Evolution Because of the consolidation processes which England was experiencing in the course of the sixteenth century and the following strengthening of the empire, as well as the establishment of the relationships with other states of […]
• Why Evolution Is True? A study of some of the fossil evidence using some of the modern tools shows a clear pattern of evolutionary change that make it easy to appreciate that evolution could be true.
• Co-Evolution: Angiosperms and Pollinating Animals The birds need nectar from the flowers, the plants that produce nectar consequently only do so to attract these birds and insects, for the process of drawing nectar from these plants to be possible, the […]
• The Evolution of Behavioral and Cognitive Development Theories of Crime Behavioral theory is based upon the principles of behavioral psychology and is the basis for behavior modification and change. This theory is founded on the belief that the way in which people organize their thoughts […]
• Charles Darwin: Evolution Theory The naturalist of the time believed that everything in the world had a key role in the economic of nature and the credit was given to an intelligent creator.
• Origin of the Earth: The Creation and Evolution Theory The Catholic Church believes in both the creation and evolution theory. According to the Catholics, all Christians believe in a unique creation carried out by God in six days, and there is a strong belief […]
• Personal Computer Evolution Overview It is important to note that the first evolution of a personal computer occurred in the first century. This is because of the slowness of the mainframe computers to process information and deliver the output.
• History of Hunting: Evolution and Improvement Contrary to the modern trend of hunting being more of a sport, during the pre-civilization era hunting was one of the main means of survival.
• Internet Evolution and Structure The creation of the network was meant to be a security measure to ensure that data and information belonging to ARPA remained within the system.
• Technology Evolution in The Modern Society Service perspective – which holds that e-commerce constitute a tool that fulfills the needs and desires of companies, customers and management with aim of reducing the transaction costs while at the same time being able […]
• Phonograph Invention and Evolution The time period the phonograph was invented and the circumstances that led to the invention. The invention and advancement of the phonograph and its operations has had a part to play on other inventions.
• Hominids and Stages of Human Evolution Ardipithecus ramidus, Australopithecines, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo Neanderthal are stages of human evolution with distinct physical appearances and behavior. The molars and premolars of Homo habilis were comparatively smaller than Ardipithecus and Australopithecus.
• The Evolution of Nursing Overview When defining the notion of nursing in the context of the 21st century, many people fail to reflect on the historical precedents that contributed to the development of nursing as a separate qualification.
• Harry Winston Fashion Brand and Its Evolution Harry Winston Diamond Corporation was founded in the year 1932 and is headquartered in New York. Harry Winston has remained a powerful brand in the global jewelry industry.
• Historical Evolution of Technology in Healthcare During the 18th century, the medical field was in disarray due to the lack of organization and deaths resulting from inefficiencies and negligence of doctors.
• Sports Photography and Its Evolution The death of Niepce was announced in 1833, but the experiment was still been performed by Daguerre and he succeeded in the development of the daguerreotype finally in 1837.
• Popular Culture in America Today: Evolution, Features, and Impact in Other Parts of the World This essay discusses the evolution of popular culture in America, the main features of this culture, the impact of American culture in other parts of the world, etc.
• Theory of Evolution and Religion The organic life on this planet was not created it evolved out of set of non-organic elements, and it took millions and millions of years, before the most perfected product of evolution, homo sapiens, was […]
• Soccer in America: Its History, Origin, Evolution, and Popularize This Sport Among Americans The coverage of the history of this game which is also popularly known as soccer is quite diverse and different ideas have been put across as to where the game originated and its evolution to […]
• Modern City and Human Society Evolution In this regard, it is possible to suggest that the evolution of the modern city will be conditioned by the blistering development of the business world and other tendencies related to the sphere of the […]
• Horse Family and Its Evolution Fossil records reveal a wide study of the evolution of the horse. This paper examines the evolutionary trend of the horse.
• The Evolution of the Car Engine France and the Great Britain reinforced the notion of the electric powered cars in the late 1800s. At the beginning of the century, a number of 33,842 electric vehicles in the United States became registered.
• Earth Atmospheric Evolution It is believed that the different geological evolutions of the earth and the atmosphere have come up with very new species of animals following a transformation of the then existing animals, as well as extinction […]
• The Evolution of the Greek Temple Admittedly, the architecture of ancient Greece had a great impact on the development of the architecture of the entire western civilization.
• Human Circulatory System and Evolution The coronary circulation involves the movement of blood through the tissues of the heart while the systemic circulation involves taking blood to all the rest of the body tissues and back to the heart”.
• Tracing Our Roots: Early Human Evolution and Socioeconomic Practices This was due to the need to know the past in order to understand the present and be able to predict the future as an effort to satisfy human curiosity through knowledge The socioeconomic practices […]
• The Evolution of Dragons in Fantasy Fiction One of the most significant figures among the range of the animals inhabiting the land of fantasy is a dragon, the symbol of wisdom and power.
• Controversies on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Although there are many theories which explain the origin of the earth, Darwin’s theory evokes strong responses due to the fact that it opposes religion and it does not meet all the requirements of a […]
• Phyletic Gradualism and Punctuated Equilibrium Evolution Theory The evolution happens very fast and in response to the effects of the toxicants present in the water of the rivers.
• Candy Evolution Through the History The evolution of candy similar to those of the organism, may explain the reason why candy has found a centre spot in celebrating Darwin’s days. Valentine candy was used in the past and presently with […]
• First Reptiles Adaptation: Amniotic Egg Evolution The amniotic egg evolution is an adaptation that allowed the first reptiles to thrive in a dry land the development occurred over 300 million years ago. The robust shell protects the egg from drying out, […]
• Nigeria’s Economic Evolution and Future Growth The Federal Republic of Nigeria is a country located in the western part of the African Continent. The paper is going to tackle the economic evolution and the current economic status of Nigeria.
• Evolution of Computers in Commercial Industries and Healthcare Overall, healthcare information systems are ultimately vital and should be encouraged in all organizations to improve the quality of healthcare which is a very important need for all human beings.
• The Expression of the Bmp4 Gene and Its Role in the Evolutionary Process The scientists studied the expression of the Bmp4 gene due to the molecular basis in the size and shape of the beaks.
• Evolution of Warfare and Weapons The creation of kingdoms led to the creation of the first stage of warfare known as the Chariots Age. The Age of the Knight was the third warfare stage.
• Communication Evolution and Media at the Wartime Modern revolutionary transformations in the system of communication involve the interplay of technology, human actors, and institutions. Similar to the industrial revolution, communication technology developments appear in response to human needs.
• Durkheim’s Labor Division Theory and Legal Evolution In particular, it is apparent that the complexity of the moshav in comparison to kibbutz was a result not of higher specialization of labor, but rather of the right to have private property; and the […]
• The Theory of Evolution It must be admitted that the theory of evolution has a number of legit points and has all the rights to be considered the most valid theory of all existing.
• Money: Evolution, Functions, and Characteristics It acts as medium of exchange where it is accepted by both buyers and sellers; the buyer gives money to the seller in exchange of commodities.
• Evolution and History of Fire Science Fire science involves the study of the origins of fire, cycles of fire and the stages of fire in the future.
• Artificial Intelligence: The Trend in the Evolution Thus, the lens of history is a great way to consider knowledge and understanding of society and technology from a different angle in terms of comprehending the dynamics of society and the importance of technology […]
• Greek Sculpture and Its Evolution Over Time The shape of the hands was sculptured to be held close to the sides of the statue; their fists were clenched, their knees were rigid, and their hair was stylized.
• Technical Evolution of Automobiles In 1888, the practically of Benz’s car would come to test when his wife, Bertha, and their two sons embarked on a journey using a better version of the car.
• The Importance of Teaching Alternative Evolution Theories The theory of evolution should be the basis of the entire course of biology at school. The general representation of the leading alternative evolution concepts should be provided before the arguments for these theories implementation […]
• Sociology: History, Early Theories, and Evolution In the middle of the first millennium BC, the awareness of the inevitability of social inequality resulted in a conceptual justification of its necessity.
• The Evolutionary Theory in the Context of Modern Sociology A theory is a connected system of general concepts, constructs, or propositions presenting a systematic view of phenomena through the specification of variables to explain the phenomena.
• Scientist Charles Darwin & Evolution By the year 1846, Darwin had a number of publications relating to zoological and geological discoveries of his expedition works that catapulted him in the scientists front rank.
• Music, Its Definition and Evolution It is in a romantic era when different types and functions of music were developed, followed by 20th-century music, where there was an increase in music listening and the emergence of new technology which made […]
• Graphic Card Industry and Evolution A graphic card, usually, referred to as a video card or a graphic accelerator card is an electronic circuit installed on the motherboard inside the central power unit, mostly on Laptops and desktop computers.
• Darwin’s Theory of Human Evolution Although Darwin seems to refute the religious claim on the origin of man, it is apparent that both religion and science share a common hypothesis that man has a distinct origin. Darwin is also concerned […]
• The Evolution of Television The discovery of the photoconductive properties of selenium by Willoughby Smith and his assistant in 1873 completely changed the things in the history of television.
• How the Way of Reading Books Changed due to Rapid Evolution of Technology The introduction of digital reading has led to an increase in the number of readers because e-books and other online publications are cheap and more accessible.
• Childhood Evolution and History The psychogenic modes range from the time of antiquity to the mid twentieth century, and explain how parents began to develop the increasing capacity to empathize with their children. Yet, a handful of parents during […]
• Evolution of Humans: The Main Theories The process of evolution is one of the closest to the human being as people constantly invent new technologies and expand their minds.
• Evolutionary and Revolutionary Models of Change in Management At the same time, the rush and the absence of back-and-forth communication usually mean that revolutionary change has to be maintained to prevent the company from reverting to the old ways.
• Human Evolution and Animal Extinction The recent scholarly findings prove that invasions of Homo sapiens to the Austronesian and American continents were the major factors that conditioned the extinction of numerous animal species.
• The Evolution of Insect Wings This theory states that wings developed from a section of the legs of wingless insects. According to Carpenter, wings developed from gills through the evolution of gene expression with similarities between winged and wingless insects.
• The FBI and Its Evolution Through the History To talk competently and properly about the start of the FBI, you need to know and understand the main purpose they are keeping to; “The mission of the FBI is to upload the law through […]
• Evolutionary Psychology: Cognition and Culture Based on such observations, this essay concurs with the statement that cognition is constrained and directed by both evolutionary and cultural processes with references to the domain of religion and cultural transmission.
• Evolutionary Psychology: Definition and Key Concepts Evolutionary psychology is a field of study, which explores the ways in which information and main beliefs from biology are applied in the understanding of the organization of the brain.
• Evolution of Planning and Design It has been argued that, ‘While Environmental Planning emerged as a profession in the 1970s, the environmental planning movement was evident sometime before this.’ The main purpose of this paper is to explore the origins […]
• Evolution of Predator and Prey Pairings Given the fact that prey and predator pairings threatens the survival of the prey there are other external factors that contribute to the elimination of the prey species.
• The Reasons for Amazon’s Evolution of Supply Chain and Distribution Systems in the United States Amazon.com is known to be utilizing the use of modern technologies such as EDI for the purposes of differentiating itself within the online market.
• West Coast Jazz: History and Evolution This essay seeks to analyze the development of West Coast jazz as well as to evaluate the appropriateness of the names allotted to this genre of music.
• Natural Selection: Darwin’s Theory of Evolution It is commonly known by the phrase, “survival of the fittest”, which means that only the species that have well adapted to their environment, is well suited to survive in that habitat.
• Classical Symphonies: Investigating Style Evolution of Western Classical Music The formative period of classical music was between the 18th and 19th centuries. Beethoven wrote music slowly and purposely with the romantics’ guidance.
• Modernist Movement in Music: Investigating Style Evolution of Western Classical Music The modernist movement in music seems appropriate for this paper because of the unique and exciting styles of composing modern-era music, such as jazz, pop, and rock.
• Evolutionary Psychology and Christian Worldview Since psychology studies the human mind and behavior of people and thus it incorporates and implements various scientific fields and methods to do so.
• Hominin Evolution: Biological and Cultural Aspects The brain capacity of Homo habilis creatures was greater compared to their ancestors enabling them to become more intelligent. The locomotion of Homo habilis was aided by their legs and forelimbs.
• The Evolution of Boy and Girl Characters Through the Decades That depiction of the boy character reflects the expectations for boys in the 1940s, which were heavily influenced by the traditional values of the time.
• The Juvenile Justice System Evolution Process The notion of due legal process, in turn, implies the maturity and autonomy of the person involved in the due process.
• Linguistic Evolution: Language Development The ability to acquire new things and keep the brain active and healthy is greatly enhanced by acquiring a second language other than one’s native tongue. Identifying language as a tool for forming connections and […]
• Unveiling the Evolution of Geography Much of the Middle Ages’ astronomy and geography may be traced back to the claims of Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and geographer. He wrote about it in The Almagest, a book about the […]
• Transhumanism and Its Impact on Human Evolution The same thoughts began to spread within the framework of eugenics in the early 20th century in the form of various conferences and meetings.
• Human Evolution and Bio-Cultural Changes The concept of the human sphere was introduced in the 30s of the XX century simultaneously in different countries by several scientists.
• The Origin of Man and Primates’ Evolution However, one can merely comprehend the origin of man if one considers history from the beginning of the evolution of the order of primates. Primates are masters of living in the trees due to their […]
• The Evolution of Modern US Society: The US Foreign Policy The economy of the antebellum era was characterized by significant growth, which was attributed to the slave economy, which was common among the southerners and the family farms in the northern states, and the waged […]
• The Evolution and Impact of Advertising in the Medical Sector The negative impact of advertising has often been a myth and has not been adapted to the specific influence in the area under consideration.
• Telehealth’s Evolution: Navigating Health and Equality Across Pandemic Phases By offering estimates of the effect of improved access to telehealth services on the general public, this research adds to the larger body of work on telecare.
• Aspects of Human Evolution and Progress The concepts of human evolution and progress have evolved throughout history leading to different perspectives on the scientific, agricultural, and language themes resulting in universal similarities that have shaped the nature of the world today.
• The Evolution of Private and Public Unions Public sector unions first appeared in the 1900s, after private sector unions in the middle of the 1800s. Since the middle of the 20th century, the membership of unions in the public and commercial sectors […]
• Primal Vocal Communication and Evolution of Speech The focus on primate vocal communication and its significance to the evolution of speech, the main form of human communication, led to the selection of a paper by Fischer J, “Primate Vocal Communication and the […]
• Philosophizing About Music and Its Evolution Applying the cultural lens to the notion of music and the associated concepts implies revisiting the current understanding of the specified notions.
• Theories of Galaxy Evolution: Looking at the Bigger Picture From the point of galaxy evolution, it means that the stellar mass of the galaxy also intensifies with time due to the existence of trends in the spectral energy distribution.
• Evolution of Political Philosophy: Smith & Arendt The flowering of the ideas of political economy in the historical sense came in the works of the eighteenth-century English economist Adam Smith.
• The Video Game Industry Evolution The first mention of the creation of such games dates back to the 1940s, but it was in 1952 that Alexander Shafto “Sandy” Douglas officially presented his dissertation at the University of Cambridge. One of […]
• Social Darwinism: Evolutionary Explanations in Sociology In order to understand the reasons behind the failure of social Darwinism to describe society objectively, it is essential to review this ideology’s common arguments.
• Hyper Evolution: The Rise of the Robots From the video, the robots look like real human beings, and they have been capacitated to act in a human way in what is known as machine learning technology powered by artificial intelligence. Hyper evolution […]
• Evolutionary Psychology and Psychological Anthropology Coupled with the tendency to avoid uncertainty and the positive activation of the emotional system by fantasies about winning, humans’ reliance on crude calculations of odds makes lottery gambling something attractive.
• Computer Usage Evolution Through Years In the history of mankind, the computer has become one of the most important inventions. The diagnostics and treatment methods will be much easier with the help of computer intervention.
• Aggression in Nonhuman Primates and Human Evolution Comparing and analyzing the sources of aggression among chimpanzees and bonobos revealed that environmental factors, such as food availability, determined key differences of social structure and aggression patterns in chimps and bonobos.
• The US Federal Authority: History and Evolution Moreover, according to Grodzins, the sheer force employed in persecuting African-Americans in their movements for Civil rights was also facilitated by Federalism.
• Evolutionary Biology and Darwin The lack of knowledge about the laws of heredity, the genetic and ecological structure of species, and the lack of experimental evidence of natural selection served as the basis for the growth of critical attitudes […]
• Early Evolution of Parole in the US In Chapter 3, there is a discussion on the early evolution of parole in the US, as well as its utilization in the current sentencing practices.
• Study About the Greek Evolution Following the development of the polis, the Greeks initiated the formation of different political structures in the country. Athens played a vital role in the Persian war by defeating the Persians in the salamis and […]
• Healthcare Evolution and Its Effect on the US Thus, presuming inequality in the fabric of the nation and lack of the feeling of “sameness” is one part of the reason for the lack of unified healthcare.
• Materiality, Agency and Evolution of Lithic Technology The authors’ hypothesis is to conduct a re-assessment of materiality theory and to broadly re-articulate the debate about the evolution of the human species.
• The Historical Evolution of Perceptions Towards Gender Some of the main questions of what is appropriate to the people of certain gender have been present and debated about for a long time.
• Racism Evolution: Experience of African Diaspora As a result, distinct foundations fostered the necessity of inequality to establish effectiveness of inferiority and superiority complexes. To determine the effect of slavery and racism to modern society.
• Emotional Evolution and Mental Problems in Postmodern Literature For the first time, the authors started talking about the horrors of war and the animal fear that a person experiences.
• Researching of Evolution of Love Intimacy, as a component of the triangular theory of love, is the feeling of bondedness, connectedness, and closeness in a relationship.
• Northwest Coast Masks: Evolution of Cultural Complexity According to Coupland, “the development of the Northwest Coast ethnographic pattern those uniquely complex ethnographic hunting-and-gathering societies has been the focus of many archaeological investigations on the Northwest Coast of North America”.
• History: Evolution of Humans The first picture demonstrates the areas of the settlement of modern humans’ predecessors, namely, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens, as well as the times of the migration of Homo sapiens to different regions.
• Evolutionary Ethics vs. Belief in God In addition, the disadvantage of the evolutionary theory is that moral and ethical norms cannot be determined only to a biological degree.
• Lenski’s Theory of Sociocultural Evolution An evaluation of the progression of crime, deviance, and social control through these stages is demonstrative of the theory’s applicability. The forms and means of crime and deviance were rudimentary during the pre-industrial age, and […]
• Categorizing Human-Made Objects: How It Shaped the Evolution of Display Spaces Due to the introduction of museums and display spaces in the 1500s-1830s, the opportunity to apply the historical lens to historical objects has emerged, helping to discover and appreciate the information about the specifics of […]
• The Evolution of Women’s Rights Through American History From the property-owning women of the late 18th century to the proponents of the women’s liberation in the 1960s, women always succeeded in using the influential political theories of their time to eventually make feminist […]
• Aspects of Evolution and Creationism The adheres to the theory of divine spark and pays special attention to the ability of organisms to adapt to various conditions and the complexity of their structure.
• Evolution of Construction Management From 1960s to Today Thus, the basic features of management within the scope of construction were visible already throughout the undertakings of the first people.
• Evolution: Natural Selection in Action The population of these moths will have both dark and white moths at the starting point. The dark moths reproduced successfully due to lack of predation.
• Evolution of Public Policies in Healthcare – Role and Impact of Nurses In California in the 1990s changes in health care delivery resulted in reduced nursing jobs and consequent higher stress for nurses, affecting the safety of patients.
• Evolutionary Changes of Animals and Plants This presentation will show how animals and plants evolved with time passing. It is critical to examine the factors that underlie these processes and their outcomes.
• The Evolution of Human Skin Color The amount of UV light depends on the latitude: the highest concentration is spread throughout the equator, while the areas close to the Earth’s poles had it in scarcity. Both folate and vitamin D contributed […]
• Evolution of Autonomous Driving Technology The torpedo could travel hundreds of meters while maintaining underwater depth due to its pressurization system known as ‘The Secret.’ The Secret was a combination of hydrostatic and pendulum that gave the hydroplane stability to […]
• Anthropology: Evolution of Human Language and Tongue According to the anatomical characteristics of humans the ability to produce speech was pursuant to them. They lived among hominids which noise and sounds they tried to come after.
• Evolutionary and Socioemotional Selectivity Theories Namely, interpersonal relationships in the family are the basis of socialization and intellectual development as they connect a person with other people, allowing the developing of a personality and forming an identity.
• Evolution: Taxonomy, Primate Physiology The bones in the snake are the last remaining parts of the pelvis though the snake’s bones however, the snake does not have bones.
• American Popular Music and Its Evolution Compared to the country blues popular in the 1900s, classic female blues combines its features with urban theater music, and “Crazy Blues” is one of the first songs of this genre.
• On the Evolution of MTV and Music Videos The nature of the music industry had a great transformation with the birth of MTV and acquired a glory in the next several years.
• The Evolution Of Cell Types: Evolution of a Menace Antibiotic resistance The capability of a bacterial species to survive the impact of the administration of chemicals that are designed to induce death is known as antibiotic resistance.
• Organ System and Evolution The resistant bacteria can survive and continue to multiply even in the presence of the antibiotics that were once used to eradicate them.
• “Molecular Insights Into Classic Examples of Evolution” Current research, as discussed by the symposium speakers explicitly cited in this article, reveals that genetics plays a fundamental role in evolution science and it is indeed the mutation of genes that actually allows organisms […]
• Evolution of Community Correctional Programs One of the varieties of the sanctuary was applied to all members of the public while the other was reserved to the church members only.
• Evolution of Understanding of Medical Ethics From Past to the Present A look at the concern about the treatment of human subjects, the history of human subjects, the current treatment of human subjects and the real impact of the treatment of human subjects and research done […]
• Parasite Toxicity: Parasite Evolution and Host Adaptation The most devastating effects of a parasite to the host are related to the toxicity of the parasite. The phenomenon of natural selection leads to the molecular evolution and ultimately changes the chemical and biological […]
• Parasites and Hosts Relations Over Evolutionary Time Subsequently, within the secondary host, the behavior of the parasite that makes the secondary host more at vulnerable risk to being consumed by the primary host would be anticipated to evolve.
• How Biogeography Supports the Theory of Human Evolution
• Emerging Infectious Disease: Epidemiology and Evolution of Influenza Viruses
• Humans Are Not the “Last Point” in the Evolution of Vertebrates
• Impact of Specialization and Evolution in Law
• “The Evolution of the New Environmental Metaparadigms of Nursing” by Kleffel
• The Evolution of Probation, Parole, Prisons, Jails, and Sentencing
• Evidence for Biological Evolution
• The Theory of Evolution. Gene Responsible for Hairiness
• Structure and Evolution of Plants
• Evolution: Debunking Darwin’s and Lincoln’s Contributions
• Theories of Galaxy Formation and Evolution
• Biological Diversity Origin and Evolution Directionality
• Evolutionary Theory: Misconceptions Analysis
• Healthcare Evolution and Current Financial Decision-Making Situation
• Healthcare Facilities’ Design Evolution
• Summary Article and Video of Evolutionary Process
• Evolution of Segmentation Among the Chordates, Annelids, and Arthropods
• The Origin and Evolution of Segmentation by Davis and Patel
• The Origin and Evolution of Segmentation: Analysis
• Origin and Evolution of Segmentation
• Finches and Worms’ Evolutionary Pattern
• Technological Evolution in the Financial Industry
• Evidence of the Evolutionary Process
• Evolution Development: Introducing New Species
• Patterns of Evolution in Humans and Other Organisms
• The Evolution of Vertebrae Teeth
• Evolutionary Analysis of Asymmetric Limits
• Evolutionary Biology: Sleep Patterns in Mammals
• Darwin’s Ideas of Natural Selection and Evolution
• Society and Evolutionary History: The Question of the Origin of Life
• Evolution and Natural Selection
• The Evolution of Communication Structures in Animals
• Evolution of the Cichlid Fish Species in Lake Victoria
• Prison Gangs’ Evolution and Solutions to Them
• Evolution of the Caregiving Experience in the Initial 2 Years Following Stroke
• Charitable Organizations and Trust Models: Duties and Ethics
• Photosynthesis Rate Determination From the Oxygen Gas Evolution
• Insect Evolution
• Evolution: Three Different Modes of Selection
• Medicare: Comparison With Medicaid and Its Evolution
• Evolutionary Theory and Linguistics in Africa’s Historiography
• Nursing as a Discipline: Evolution and Education
• The History Of Drag Queens and The Evolution Of Drag
• Microeconomic Perspective on Poverty Evolution in Pakistan
• How Customer Evolution Has Affected Airlines
• The Evolution of Marketing Activities
• Convergent Evolution of Health Information Management and Health Informatics
• Transgenic Organisms and Evolution
• Evolution of Clothes and Fashion in Twentieth Century
• Screen Readers’ Evolution and Their Current Usability
• Hip Hop Evolution and Racial & Political Conditions
• DNA and Evolution – What’s Similar
• Creationism and Evolution Theories
• Human Evolution: Electronic Immortality
• Evolution of Mating by Charles Darwin
• The Positive Evolution of Art in the Twentieth Century
• Non-Aligned Movement History and Evolution
• Primate Evolutionary Context
• Criminal Justice System in the United States Evolution
• Morality Evolution, Its Explanations, and Definitions
• Franklin Roosevelt: The Evolution of an American Idea
• “Why Evolution Is True” by J. A. Coyne
• Evolution of Social Behaviour and Attitudes
• History and Evolution of the Public Policy
• Evolutionary Explanation for Sex and Gender Differences
• “Evolution of Federal Cyber Security” by J. Roth
• The Evolutionary Psychology Key Points
• Evolutionary Paradigm Theory by Alan Malachowski
• God and Darwin’s Evolution Theory: A Theological Approach
• The Evolution of the Chinese Brush Painting
• The Origin and Evolution of Religious Pro-sociality
• Evolution Process and the Study of Hominids
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• Anthropology: Homo Erectus in Evolution
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• The American Revolution and Political Legitimacy Evolution
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• An Evolutionary Window on the Worlds of Pornography and Romance
• From Classics to Our Time: the Evolution of the Cinema
• Money Evolution in Ancient Times and Nowadays
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• Evolution of a Firm: Linear Regression
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• The Evolution Future Architecture
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• Does Evolution Explain Why Men Rape
• “The Link Between Fire Research and Process Safety” by Cadena and Munoz
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• Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism
• Canadian Child Welfare System Evolution
• The Evolution of Education in Hong Kong
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• Evolution of Organizational Knowledge Creation Theory
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• Evolutionary Psychology Issues
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• The Problem of People’s ‘Dangerous Evolutionary Baggage’
• Evolution of ERP system
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• The Four Forces of Evolution and Variation
• The Individual and Game Theory Criticisms and the Evolutionary Theory
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• History of the Gradual Radical Evolution in America
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• Major Historical Vents: Evolution or Revolution
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• Theories of the Language Evolution
• Evolution of the Chilean Government After the Ruthless Regime of Augusto Pinochet
• How primary resources can debunk the misconception that Darwin proposed the first theory of evolution
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• Capitalism Concept Evolution
• Evolution in the English Language
• The background and evolution of British policy regarding the Palestine issue
• The Evolution of Industrialized Workers in Chicago
• The Evolutionary Genetics of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis
• Evolutionary Account of Female Mating Preferences
• The Four Forces of Evolution
• The Development and Evolution of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology
• Feminism and Evolution or Emergence of Psychology
• Paleontology and The Evolutionary Theory
• Global Evolution in “Midaq Alley” by Mahfouz Naguib
• Evolution of Fire Fighting Gear
• Evolution and Importance of Advertising in a Context of Modern Society
• Women and the Evolution of World Politics
• “The Indian Challenge: The Evolution of a Successful New Global Strategy in the Pharmaceutical Industry” by D. Jane Bower and Julian C. Sulez
• The Evolution of the Division of Labor Theory Starting From Ancient Greek Economists to the Present
• The Evolution of Woman’s Work From the 19th Century
• Evolution of the IRA
• The Evolution of US Military Logistical Procurement
• Does Evolution explain human nature?
• The Evolution of the American Hero
• Evolution of Dogs from the Gray Wolf
• Comparing Knauft’s Study on Violence and Sociality with Darwin’s Evolutionary Perspectives
• Evolution of Power Production
• Evolution of Photography: Trying to Seize the Moment
• Evolution of Hospice Care
• The Evolution of American Federalism
• The Relevance of Evolutionary Psychology
• The Evolution of the iPhone from Inception to Today’s iPhone 4
• Are Economic Crises Inherent to Capitalist Evolution?
• Are Spatial Planning Objectives Reflected in the Evolution of Urban Landscape Patterns?
• Can Evolution and Creation Co-exist?
• Can Evolution Ever Explain Why Men Rape?
• Can Evolution Fit Into Christianity?
• Did Climate Effect Human Evolution?
• Did “Desert Storm” Represent a Revolution or Evolution in Air Power?
• Does Evolution Make Reasoning Improve Learning?
• Does Evolution Solve the Hold-up Problem?
• Does Molecular and Structural Evolution Shape the Speedy Grass Stomata?
• Ecological Rationality and Evolution: The Mind Works That Way?
• Evolution Versus Creation: Does Biblical Religion Unravel the Mysteries That Science Forbids?
• Host-Microbe Interactions as a Driver of Brain Evolution and Development?
• How Does Bioarchaeology Reveal the Evolution of Disease?
• How Do Body Plans Relate to Nervous System Evolution Biology?
• How Did the Evolution of Oxygen-Releasing Photosynthesis?
• How Did the Evolution of the Amniote Egg-Free Amniotes?
• How Does Evolution Tune Biological Noise?
• How Does Kin Selection Explain the Evolution of Altruism?
• How Does Teilhard Justify Placing God Christ in Evolution?
• How Does Transduction Contribute to the Rapid Evolution?
• How Has Evolution Affected Our Lives Today?
• How Did Evolution Transpire?
• How Finding Yourself Comes Through the Evolution of Thought?
• How Genetic Evolution Alters Brain Development?
• How Has Mankind’s Perception of Evolution Impacted Society?
• How Human Disease Impacted Our Evolution?
• How Humans Became Athletes Through Evolution?
• How Learning About Evolution Challenged My Religious Upbringing?
• How Have Male and Female Gametophytes Changed During Evolution?
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IvyPanda . "505 Evolution Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/evolution-essay-topics/.

Embracing Menopause and Finding Empowerment

Menopause shouldn't be a taboo topic. reframe it as a transformation..

Posted August 21, 2024 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

• Reframing menopause as a transformation rather than a decline can empower women to embrace this life stage.
• Menopause is not just a physical transition; it deeply affects emotional and psychological well-being.
• Identifying and addressing unmet needs is crucial for reconnecting with oneself during menopause.

Menopause . It's a word that's whispered in hushed tones, relegated to the shadows of conversation, brushed aside as if it were something to be ashamed of. Yet, the reality is that nearly every woman will experience menopause in her lifetime. So why does it remain such a taboo subject?

When we do talk about menopause, the conversation often revolves around the physical symptoms—the hot flashes , the night sweats, the weight gain. But what about the emotional and psychological toll it can take? The fears and anxieties that creep in, the fatigue that drains us of our energy, the struggle with our sense of identity and worth?

For many women, menopause is not just a biological transition; it's a reckoning with mortality, with the passage of time, with the loss of youth and fertility. We grapple with the realization that we are no longer seen as the young, desirable women we once were. We may feel like we're being pushed to the sidelines, deemed irrelevant in a society that values youth and beauty above all else.

But what if we reframed the narrative around menopause? What if we saw it not as a decline into old age, but as a transformation—a shedding of the roles and expectations that society has placed upon us, and a rediscovery of our true selves?

Instead of mourning the loss of our youth, let's celebrate the wisdom and experience that come with age. Let's embrace our status as elders, as wise women who have lived and loved and learned. Let's use this time of transition to turn inward, to focus on our own growth and fulfillment, rather than constantly striving to meet the demands of others.

Menopause is not the end of our journey; it's a new beginning. It's a chance to redefine ourselves on our own terms, to pursue our passions and dreams without the constraints of societal expectations. It's a time to prioritize self-care and self-discovery, to nurture our bodies and minds in ways that we may have neglected in the past.

So let's start talking about menopause openly and honestly. Let's share our fears and frustrations, our triumphs and joys. Let's build a community of women who support and uplift each other through this transformative journey.

And let's remember that menopause is not a sign of weakness or decline; it's a testament to our strength and resilience as women. It's a reminder that we are so much more than our physical bodies, that our worth is not determined by our age or appearance.

Here's to embracing menopause with open arms, to facing it head-on with courage and confidence . Because together, we can rewrite the narrative and reclaim our power as women. The journey can begin with small steps intended to help navigate the transition with confidence and empowerment:

• Expressive Writing. Take 5-10 minutes a day to write anything that comes to mind. The idea behind this exercise is to lift the curtain and peek at what’s underneath, so no censoring. As you write, do not worry about punctuation, grammar, or even legibility. This is just about releasing suppressed, and potentially even repressed, emotions, allowing them to flow freely onto the page. Over time, this practice can help you process your feelings, gain clarity, and make sense of your experiences as you navigate your transition.
• Identify Needs. We all have needs; they are universal. However, for so many of us women, we have had to bury them in order to take care of others. Through that process, we lose touch with what we desire from our lives, what we hope to achieve, what we long to discover, what we love and wish to keep in our lives, and what we are ready to release. There are numerous charts on feelings and needs on the internet. Find one you like and print it out. Carry it with you and when you notice feelings (pleasant or unpleasant), take a look and see if you can identify the underlying needs. Note that when we have pleasant feelings they indicate that our needs are being met, while when we have unpleasant feelings, they let us know we have needs that are not being met. With practice, you will start connecting to yourself in a deeper and richer way.
• Incorporate Movement. Movement (and not necessarily formal exercise) is one of our basic needs. Make it part of your routine by finding something you love and doing it daily (dancing, yoga, pilates, walking, playing basketball or pickleball, etc.). Not only does this support your physical well-being but it also helps with mood and emotional regulation .
• Find a Creative Outlet. Engage creativity by exploring something new or revisiting something you have done before like writing, painting, knitting, gardening, dancing, or playing a musical instrument. Sometimes these avenues allow you to express yourself in ways that words cannot. They can be a powerful tool for processing emotions, finding joy, and reconnecting with parts of yourself that have been overshadowed by life’s responsibilities.

Alona Pulde, M.D., specializes in nutrition, lifestyle, and connection medicine and has a particular passion for women’s health. She is the author of six books, including a New York Times bestseller.

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