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Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery of new abstract entities such as abstract number or abstract value that necessarily precede the individual acquisition and usage of such abstractions.
The underlying theme of the essay is the need to teach biological evolution in the context of debate about creation and evolution in public education in the United States. [5] The fact that evolution occurs explains the interrelatedness of the various facts of biology, and so makes biology make sense. [6]
Mainstream evolutionary psychology grew out of earlier movements which applied the principles of evolutionary biology to understand the mind and behavior such as sociobiology, ethology, and behavioral ecology, [5] differing from these earlier approaches by focusing on identifying psychological adaptations rather than adaptive behavior. [20]
Studying the evolution of cognition is accomplished through a comparative cognitive approach [1] [2] [3] where a cognitive ability and comparing it between closely related species and distantly related species. For example, a researcher may want to analyze the connection between spatial memory and food caching behavior.
Evolutionary psychology primarily uses the theories of natural selection, sexual selection, and inclusive fitness to explain the evolution of psychological adaptations. Evolutionary psychology is sometimes seen not simply as a subdiscipline of psychology but as a metatheoretical framework in which the entire field of psychology can be examined. [4]
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
The content of evolutionary psychology has derived from, on the one hand, the biological sciences (especially evolutionary theory as it relates to ancient human environments, the study of paleoanthropology and animal behavior) and, on the other, the human sciences, especially psychology. Evolutionary biology as an academic discipline emerged ...
Others have suggested that evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, and cultural evolution all fit nicely with each other, ultimately answering different questions on human behavioral diversity; gene-culture coevolution may be at odds with other research programs though by placing more emphasis on socially-learned behavior and its ...