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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.
Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture (Tooby and Cosmides, 1989). [ 1 ]
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.
A psychological adaptation seen universally in humans is to easily learn a fear of snakes. [1] A psychological adaptation is a functional, cognitive or behavioral trait that benefits an organism in its environment. Psychological adaptations fall under the scope of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs), [2] however, EPMs refer to a less ...
On the issue of whether language is best seen as having evolved as an adaptation or as a by product, evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch, following Stephen J. Gould, argues that it is unwarranted to assume that every aspect of language is an adaptation, or that language as a whole is an adaptation. [4]
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So, step by step, as natural selection constructs the species' gene set (chosen from the available mutations), it constructs in tandem the species' developmentally relevant environment (selected from the set of all properties of the world). Thus, both the genes and the developmentally relevant environment are the product of evolution' (p. 84). [1]