Evolutionary psychology
School · 1980s onward, United States, with roots in Darwin · Psychology, stage 2: Map the schools
Evolutionary psychology explains psychological traits as adaptations: mechanisms shaped by natural selection because they solved recurring problems faced by ancestral humans. The field was organised as a research programme in the late 1980s and 1990s by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and David Buss, and its strong version holds that the mind consists of many specialised mechanisms rather than one general-purpose learning system. John Bowlby is a genuine precursor rather than a member: his account of attachment was explicitly ethological, and his term for the ancestral conditions a system was shaped by, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, was taken up as standard vocabulary in the later field. The programme is seriously contested. Critics argue that the ancestral environment is largely unknown, that adaptive stories can be constructed after the fact for almost any trait, and that this makes many specific hypotheses hard to test.
What it claims
- Psychological mechanisms were shaped by natural selection to solve recurring ancestral problems.
- The mind contains many specialised mechanisms rather than a single general learning system.
- Behaviour should be explained partly by the function a mechanism evolved to serve, not only by its immediate cause.
Key ideas
People
Sources
- Evolutionary Psychology Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyA detailed critical assessment, including the standard objections to adaptationist reasoning.
- Evolutionary psychology Wikipedia
- Innateness and Contemporary Theories of Cognition Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
