Evolutionary psychology - Old School, New School

30-Second Psychology: The 50 Most Thought-provoking Psychology Theories, Each Explained in Half a Minute - Christian Jarrett 2011

Evolutionary psychology
Old School, New School

The human body evolved according to natural selection, and has many things in common with the bodies of other animals. Evolutionary psychology extends this logic to the human mind. Like behaviourism, the focus of evolutionary psychology is to find common principles in the behaviour of humans and animals. Evolutionary biologists have shown how animals have evolved strategies to deal with core activities such as food finding, parenting, conflict resolution and mate selection. Interesting work in evolutionary psychology shows how these activities are influenced by evolutionary necessity even when carried out by supposedly rational humans. There are two versions of evolutionary psychology. A broad version of the theory includes everybody who thinks about psychology from an evolutionary perspective, including anthropologists, biologists interested in behaviour, primatologists and psychologists in many areas. The second, more narrow, version — sometimes distinguished by capital letters (’Evolutionary Psychology’ or ’EP’) — focuses on applying ideas from evolutionary theory to human reasoning and social behaviour, and particularly to human sexual behaviour.

3-SECOND PSYCHE

Evolution shaped your mind to pass on your genes to your offspring.

3-MINUTE ANALYSIS

Critics accuse evolutionary psychologists of telling ’just-so stories’ about behaviour — plausible tales that capture the imagination but which cannot be proved true or false. Worse, critics claim some people use evolutionary arguments to justify unfair or implausible theories about how society should be organized. Despite this, most psychologists would agree that psychology is part of biology, and so must be understood within the framework of evolution — they just disagree about the extent to which evolution is directly relevant to human behaviour.

RELATED THEORIES

EKMAN’S UNIVERSAL EMOTIONS

CHOMKSY’S UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES

DAVID BUSS

1953—

LEDA COSMIDES

1957—

CHARLES DARWIN

1809—1882

STEVEN PINKER

1954—

JOHN TOOBY

1954—

30-SECOND TEXT

Tom Stafford

Image

Chimps, like humans, form groups, laugh, recognize themselves in the mirror, and use tools, suggesting that we have a shared evolutionary heritage.