Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology assumes that operating beneath the surface of historical and cultural variability, the human mind is a system of functionally specialized, developmentally constructed neural information processors that were naturally selected because they solved particular adaptive problems faced during the evolution of the hunter-gatherer ancestors of human beings. Evolutionary psychology assumes a computational theory of mind rooted in the information processing revolution of the 1960s. It also draws on insights from the socio-biology of the 1970s, which describes how "selfish" genes, in benefiting their own replication and that of copies amongst kin (William D. Hamilton's "inclusive fitness"), direct the generation of organic structures, including those that may incidentally benefit the organism. With the natural selection of species-wide characteristics, evolutionary psychology considers sexual selection, including the effects of parental investment, and has made empirical contributions to understanding the proximal mechanisms behind mate choice, cheater detection, and language acquisition.

Evolutionary psychology avoids a collapse to genetic determinism through its attention to development and environment, including social interaction and coevolutionary systems. Nevertheless, any computational theory of mind may ultimately be inadequate, and there are questions about the empirical robustness of its findings.

See also EVOLUTIONARY EPISTEMOLOGY; EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS; SELFISH GENE; SOCIOBIOLOGY

Bibliography

Hamilton, William D. "The Genetic Evolution of Social Behavior." Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 17–18.

Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 1997.

Wright, Robert. The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Pantheon, 1994.

JOHN A. TESKE