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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]
Evolutionary psychologists consider a number of factors in what determines a psychological adaptation, such as functionality, complexity, efficiency, and universality. [1] The Adapted Mind is considered a foundational text on evolutionary psychology, further integrating Darwinian theory into modern psychology.
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]
Noam Chomsky spearheaded the debate on the faculty of language as a cognitive by-product, or spandrel. As a linguist, rather than an evolutionary biologist, his theoretical emphasis was on the infinite capacity of speech and speaking: there are a fixed number of words, but there is an infinite combination of the words. [3]
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).
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 ...