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The history of the debate from a critic's perspective is detailed by Gannon (2002). [2] Critics of evolutionary psychology include the philosophers of science David Buller (author of Adapting Minds), [3] Robert C. Richardson (author of Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology), [4] and Brendan Wallace (author of Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won't Work).
A number of factors combine to influence the development of sex differences, including genetics and epigenetics; [5] differences in brain structure and function; [6] hormones, [7] and socialization. [3] [4] [8] [page needed] The formation of gender is controversial in many scientific fields, including psychology. Specifically, researchers and ...
Despite the minimization of development in evolutionary theory, early developmental psychology was influenced by evolution. Both Darwin's theory of evolution and Karl Ernst von Baer's developmental principles of ontogeny shaped early thought in developmental psychology. [12]
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has a slightly different perspective by trying to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. DIT is seen by some as a "middle-ground" between views that emphasize human ...
The term has thus moved away from its original connotation of "cultural influences" to include all effects of the environment, including; indeed, a substantial source of environmental input to human nature may arise from stochastic variations in prenatal development and is thus in no sense of the term "cultural".
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).
In contrast to genetic programs, cultural evolution investigates how culture itself may evolve (Mesoudi, 2009 [7]). Gene-culture coevolution studies how culture and genetic evolution influence each other, ultimately shaping behavior, as well. Cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology may not be as disparate as one may think, though.
Miller is critical of theories that imply that human culture arose as accidents or by-products of human evolution. He believes that human culture arose through sexual selection for creative traits. In that view, many human artifacts could be considered subject to sexual selection as part of the extended phenotype, for instance clothing that ...