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Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve.
Wilhelm T. Preyer, a pioneer of child psychology, was heavily inspired by Darwin's work and approached the mental development of children from an evolutionary perspective. [14] However, evolutionary theory has had a limited impact on developmental psychology as a whole, [5] and some authors argue that even its early influence was minimal. [15]
Evolutionary psychologists consider Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to be important to an understanding of psychology. [1] Natural selection occurs because individual organisms who are genetically better suited to the current environment leave more descendants, and their genes spread through the population, thus explaining why organisms fit their environments so closely. [1]
For example, James J. Gibson, a founder of ecological psychology, believes that human evolutionary success is enhanced by the ability to analyze social costs and benefits so that humans can recognize and functionally respond to threats and opportunities, and that errors in judgment will be biased toward minimizing costs to reproductive fitness. [4]
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 ...
Human ethology is the study of human behavior. Ethology as a discipline is generally thought of as a sub-category of biology, though psychological theories have been developed based on ethological ideas (e.g. sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, and theories about human universals such as gender differences, incest avoidance, mourning, hierarchy and pursuit of possession).
Evolutionary anthropology studies both the biological and the cultural evolution of humans, past and present. Based on a scientific approach, it brings together fields such as archaeology, behavioral ecology , psychology , primatology, and genetics .
The most prominent example of evolutionary psychology, notably advanced in the early work of Noam Chomsky and later by Steven Pinker, is the hypothesis that the human brain has adapted to acquire the grammatical rules of natural language. [125]