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Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Evolutionary psychology is a scientific discipline that approaches human behavior through a lens that incorporates the effects of evolution. It combines the science of psychology with the study of biology. Evolutionary psychologists seek to explain people's emotions, thoughts, and responses based on Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution Through Natural Selection, similarly to how evolutionary biologists explain an organism's physical features.
Proponents of this psychological approach posit that as our ancestors confronted problems and developed ways of solving them, some had certain innate instincts and intelligence that gave them the ability to figure out and apply the most successful solutions.
In doing so, they gained advantages, such as better health or a longer lifespan, allowing them to produce more offspring through the process of natural selection. According to evolutionary psychology, our ancestors who had psychological advantages passed down these behavioral traits to future generations, resulting in a population of offspring that then had these adaptive behaviors.
Watch it now, on Wondrium. But other patterns of consistency differ across people. Some people generally tend to be outgoing, whereas other people generally prefer quiet, solitary activities. Some people get emotional more often than other people do. Some people are agreeable and nice, and other people are disagreeable and hard to get along with. Some people are pretty consistently conscientious, and other people are typically irresponsible.
Learn more about how human nature evolved. So they might think about how giraffes got their long necks or why male peacocks ended up having big, colorful tails. But we can ask evolutionary questions about behavior, such as why cats hiss rather than making some other noise when threatened, or why many animals react to staring eyes.
Why do people tend to like attractive people more than unattractive people? Why are we are more afraid of snakes than we are of cars? Thinking about evolution is important for understanding certain mysteries of human behavior because, in some cases, the answer to the puzzle has something to do with how human nature evolved.
Charles Darwin recognized that his theory of natural selection applied not only to the evolution of physical characteristics, but also to behavioral and emotional reactions. But Darwin also knew that his ideas encountered greater acceptance when applied to the evolution of other animals, rather than that of people.
Godfrey-Smith ; Lewens ; Sober Explanatory adaptationism is the view that apparent design is one of the big questions we face in explaining our natural world and natural selection is the big and only supportable answer to such a big question. Explanatory adaptationism is often adopted by those who want to distinguish evolutionary thinking from creationism or intelligent design and is the way evolutionary psychologists often couch their work to distinguish it from their colleagues in the broader social sciences.
While explanatory adaptationism does serve to distinguish evolutionary psychology from such markedly different approaches to accounting for design in nature, it does not place many clear constraints on the way in which evolutionary explanations should be sought cf. So far these are disagreements that are located in differing views about the nature and scope of evolutionary explanation but they have ramifications in the discussion about hypothesis testing.
If the traits of interest to evolutionary psychologists are universally distributed, then we should expect to find them in all humans. This partly explains the stock that evolutionary psychologists put in cross cultural psychological tests see e. Buss If we find evidence for the trait in a huge cross section of humans, then this supports our view that the trait is an adaptation —on the assumption that adaptations are organ-like traits that are products of natural selection but not subject to variation.
But given the wider scope view of evolution defended by philosophers of biology, this method of testing seems wrong-headed as a test of an evolutionary hypothesis. Certainly such testing can result in the very interesting results that certain preference profiles are widely shared cross culturally but the test does not speak to the evolutionary hypothesis that the preferences are adaptations cf. Lloyd ; Buller Buller dedicates several chapters of his book on evolutionary psychology to an examination of hypothesis testing and many of his criticisms center around the introduction of alternate hypotheses that do as good a job, or a better job, of accounting for the data.
This debate hangs on how the empirical tests come out. The previous debate is more closely connected to theoretical issues in philosophy of biology. I said in my introduction that there is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise and some philosophers of biology continue to remind us of this sentiment see e. Dupre However the relevant consensus is not complete, there are some proponents of evolutionary psychology among philosophers of science.
One way of defending evolutionary psychology is to rebut criticism. Another way to defend evolutionary psychology is to practice it at least to the extent that philosophers can, i. This is what Robert Arp does in a recent article. I briefly review both responses below. Machery and Barrett argue that Buller has no clear critical target as there is nothing to the idea that there is a research tradition of evolutionary psychology that is distinct from the broader enterprise of the evolutionary understanding of human behavior.
They argue that theoretical tenets and methods are shared by many in the biology of human behavior. For example, many are adaptationists. But as we saw above, evolutionary psychologists and behavioral ecologists can both call themselves adaptationist but their particular approach to adaptationism dictates the range of hypotheses that they can generate, the range of traits that can be counted as adaptations and impacts upon the way in which hypotheses are tested.
Research traditions can share some broad theoretical commitments and yet still be distinct research traditions. They take this to be a claim that no adaptations can arise from an evolutionary arms race situation, for example, between predators and prey. But again, I think that the disagreement here is over what counts as an adaptation. Buller does not deny that adaptations— traits that arise as a product of natural selection—arise from all kinds of unstable environments.
What he denies is that organ-like, special purpose adaptations are the likely result of such evolutionary scenarios.
Arp defends a hypothesis about a kind of module—scenario visualization—a psychological adaptation that arose in our hominid history in response to the demands of tool making, such as constructing spear throwing devices for hunting. As neither of these alternative accounts rely on the postulation of psychological modules, evolutionary psychology is not adequately defended.
Many philosophers who work on moral psychology understand that their topic is empirically constrained. Philosophers take two main approaches to using empirical results in moral psychology. One is to use empirical results and empirically based theories from psychology to criticize philosophical accounts of moral psychology see e.
Doris and one is to generate and, in the experimental philosophy tradition, to test hypotheses about our moral psychology see e.
Nichols For those who think that some or all of our moral psychology is based in innate capacities, evolutionary psychology is a good source of empirical results and empirically based theory. One account of the make-up of our moral psychology follows from the massive modularity account of the architecture of the mind.
Our moral judgments are a product of domain specific psychological modules that are adaptations and arose in our hominid forebears in response to contingencies in our mostly social environments. This position is currently widely discussed by philosophers working in moral psychology. An example of this discussion follows. Cosmides see e. Cosmides along with Tooby argues that cheating is a violation of a particular kind of conditional rule that goes along with a social contract.
Social exchange is a system of cooperation for mutual benefit and cheaters violate the social contract that governs social exchange Cosmides and Tooby The selection pressure for a dedicated cheater-detection module is the presence of cheaters in the social world. The cheater-detection module is an adaptation that arose in response to cheaters. The cheater-detection hypothesis has been the focus of a huge amount of critical discussion. Cosmides and Tooby defend the idea that cheat detection is modular over hypotheses that more general rules of inference are involved in the kind of reasoning behind cheater detection against critics Ron Mallon and Fodor Some criticism of the cheater-detection hypothesis involves rehashing criticisms of massive modularity in general and some treats the hypothesis as a contribution to moral psychology and invokes different considerations.
For example, Mallon worries about the coherence of abandoning a domain general conception of ought in our conception of our moral psychology. This discussion is also ongoing. See e. Sterelny for a selection of alternate, non-modular explanations of aspects of our moral psychology. Evolutionary psychology is well suited to providing an account of human nature.
As noted above Section 1 , evolutionary psychology owes a theoretical debt to human sociobiology. Wilson took human sociobiology to provide us with an account of human nature For Wilson human nature is the collection of universal human behavioral repertoires and these behavioral repertoires are best understood as being products of natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists argue that human nature is not a collection of universal human behavioral repertoires but rather the universal psychological mechanisms underlying these behaviors Tooby and Cosmides These universal psychological mechanisms are products of natural selection, as we saw in Section 2.
For example, he thinks of bi-pedalism as part of the human nature trait cluster. He shares the idea that a trait must be a product of evolution, rather than say social learning or enculturation, with both these accounts. Some critical challenges to evolutionary psychological accounts of human nature and the nomological account derive from similar concerns as those driving criticism of evolutionary psychology in general.
In Section 4. Some critics charge evolutionary psychologists of assuming that adaptation cannot sustain variation. Hull ; and Sober The idea here is that humans, like all organisms, exhibit a great deal of variation, including morphological, physiological, behavioral and cultural variation cf. Amundson Buller argues that the evolutionary psychology account of human nature either ignores or fails to account for all of this variation c.
Lewens ; Odenbaugh Forthcoming; and Ramsey Any account that restricts human nature to just those traits we have in common and which also are not subject to change, cannot account for human variation. The idea that to account for human nature, we must account for human variation is presented and defended by evolutionary psychologists see e.
Barrett , anthropologists see e. Cashdan and philosophers see e. Griffiths and Ramsey Barrett agrees with Buller and others that evolutionary psychologists have failed to account for human variation in their account of human nature.
Rather than seeing this challenge as a knock down of the whole enterprise of accounting for human nature, Barrett sees this as a challenge for an account of human nature. Rather than human nature being a collection of shared fixed universal psychological traits, for Barrett, human nature is the whole human trait cluster, including all of the variation in all of our traits.
This approach to human nature is sharply different than the approach defended by either Wilson, Tooby and Cosmides or Machery but is also subject to a number of criticisms. The main thrust of the criticisms is that such a view cannot be explanatory and is instead merely a big list of all the properties that humans have had and can have See e.
Buller ; Downes ; Futuyma ; and Lewens Another example of this broader discussion is included in Section 7. Evolutionary psychology is invoked in a wide range of areas of study, for example, in English Literature, Consumer Studies and Law. See Buss for discussion of Literature and Law and Saad for a detailed presentation of evolutionary psychology and consumer studies. In these contexts, evolutionary psychology is usually introduced as providing resources for practitioners, which will advance the relevant field.
Philosophers have responded critically to some of these applications of evolutionary psychology. One concern is that often evolutionary psychology is conflated with evolution or evolutionary theory in general see e. Leiter and Weisberg and Downes The discussion reviewed in Section 4. Evolutionary psychologists offer to enhance fields such as Law and Consumer Studies by introducing evolutionary ideas but what is in fact offered is a selection of theoretical resources championed only by proponents of a specific approach to evolutionary psychology.
For example, Gad Saad argues that Consumer Studies will profit greatly from the addition of adaptive thinking, i. Many do not see this as an effort to bring evolutionary theory, broadly construed, to bear on Consumer Studies cf. Promoting disputed theoretical ideas is certainly problematic but bigger worries arise when thoroughly discredited work is promoted in the effort to apply evolutionary psychology.
Owen Jones see e. Leiter and Weisberg Aside from monitoring the expansion efforts of evolutionary psychology, there are a number of other areas in which further philosophical work on evolutionary psychology will be fruitful. The examples given above of work in moral psychology barely scratch the surface of this rapidly developing field.
There are huge numbers of empirical hypotheses that bear on our conception of our moral psychology that demand philosophical scrutiny. Hauser includes a survey of a wide range of such hypotheses. Also, work on moral psychology and the emotions can be drawn together via work on evolutionary psychology and related fields.
Griffiths directed philosophical attention to evolution and the emotions and this kind of work has been brought into closer contact with moral psychology by Nichols see e. In philosophy of mind there is still much that can be done on the topic of modules. Work on integrating biological and psychological concepts of modules is one avenue that is being pursued and could be fruitfully pursued further see e.
Barrett and Kurzban ; Carruthers and work on connecting biology to psychology via genetics is another promising area see e. Marcus In philosophy of science, I have no doubt that many more criticisms of evolutionary psychology will be presented but a relatively underdeveloped area of philosophical research is on the relations among all of the various, theoretically different, approaches to the biology of human behavior cf.
Downes ; Griffiths ; and Brown et al. Evolutionary psychologists present their work alongside the work of behavioral ecologists, developmental psychobiologists and others see e. Buss ; Buss but do not adequately confront the theoretical difficulties that face an integrated enterprise in the biology of human behavior.
Finally, while debate rages between biologically influenced and other social scientists, most philosophers have not paid much attention to potential integration of evolutionary psychology into the broader interdisciplinary study of society and culture but see Mallon and Stich on evolutionary psychology and constructivism. In such a case, the hopeful suitor would challenge the dominant male and the females would choose the winner.
Scientists have used evolutionary theory to explain human behavior patterns, such as a female tendency toward monogamy and a male tendency toward promiscuity. Humans behave in complex and variable ways, and factors such as culture strongly influence this behavior. Furthermore, it is difficult to tie variation in behavior to variation in reproductive success. Evolutionary explanations also raise controversy because people can use them to support various social and political agendas.
Some researchers criticize evolutionary explanations because anyone can work backward from an observation to develop an evolutionary explanation. These psychologists point out that the fact that a trait exists does not necessarily mean that trait is adaptive. The trait may have been helpful earlier in our human history but did not remain adaptive, or the trait could be a side effect of another adaptive trait. Jekyll and Mr.
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