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Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth.
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]
Mainstream evolutionary psychology grew out of earlier movements which applied the principles of evolutionary biology to understand the mind and behavior such as sociobiology, ethology, and behavioral ecology, [5] differing from these earlier approaches by focusing on identifying psychological adaptations rather than adaptive behavior. [20]
The Trivers–Willard hypothesis has been applied to resource differences among individuals in a society as well as to resource differences among societies.Investigations in humans pose a number of practical and methodological difficulties, [6] but while a 2007 review of previous research found that empirical evidence for the hypothesis was mixed, the author noted that it received greater ...
Costly signaling theory in evolutionary psychology refers to uses of costly signaling theory and adaptationism in explanations for psychological traits and states. Often informed by the closely related fields of human behavioral ecology and cultural evolution, such explanations are predominantly focused on humans and emphasize the benefits of altering the perceptions of others and the need to ...
The history of evolutionary psychology began with Charles Darwin, who said that humans have social instincts that evolved by natural selection.Darwin's work inspired later psychologists such as William James and Sigmund Freud but for most of the 20th century psychologists focused more on behaviorism and proximate explanations for human behavior.
The first half of the book explores Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law (recapitulation)—the discredited idea that embryonic developmental stages replay the evolutionary transitions of adult forms of an organism's past descendants—and how this idea influenced thinking in biology, theology, and psychology.
In biology, evolution is the process of change in all forms of life over generations, and evolutionary biology is the study of how evolution occurs. Biological populations evolve through genetic changes that correspond to changes in the organisms ' observable traits .