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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]
Both Darwin's theory of evolution and Karl Ernst von Baer's developmental principles of ontogeny shaped early thought in developmental psychology. [12] 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.
Charles Darwin in 1868. Darwinism is a term used to describe a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others. The theory states that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
Ecological systems theory is a broad term used to capture the theoretical contributions of developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner. [1] Bronfenbrenner developed the foundations of the theory throughout his career, [2] published a major statement of the theory in American Psychologist, [3] articulated it in a series of propositions and hypotheses in his most cited book, The Ecology of ...
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. [126]
As philosopher G. E. Moore famously argued, many early versions of normative evolutionary ethics seemed to commit a logical mistake that Moore dubbed the naturalistic fallacy. This was the mistake of defining a normative property, such as goodness, in terms of some non-normative, naturalistic property, such as pleasure or survival.
The study of the evolution of emotions dates back to the 19th century. Evolution and natural selection has been applied to the study of human communication , mainly by Charles Darwin in his 1872 work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals . [ 1 ]