Charles darwin psychology perspective
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Darwin's Impact On Psychology
In On the Origin of Species Darwin wrote:
‘In the distant future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.’
He was right. Evolutionary psychology is now an emerging, but already large field and is still growing. It has provided a framework under which to merge different areas of research and has made profound differences to the way we think about ourselves.
The Comparative Method & Tinbergen’s Questions
Darwin’s evolutionary theory provides the framework for thinking about human behaviour. His gift to psychology did not stop there; his work on human evolution and the expression of emotions demonstrated how empirical tests can be performed using data from different species to learn about how behaviour evolves. This “comparative method” is the most important method in evolutionar
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Abstract
Evolutionary Psychology (EP) views the human mind as organized into many modules, each underpinned bygd psychological adaptations designed to solve problems faced bygd our Pleistocene ancestors. We argue that the key tenets of the established EP paradigm require modification in the light of recent findings from a number of disciplines, including human genetics, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, and paleoecology. For instance, many human genes have been subject to recent selective sweeps; humans play an active, constructive role in co-directing their own development and evolution; and experimental bevis often favours a general process, rather than a modular konto, of cognition. A redefined EP could use the theoretical insights of modern evolutionary biology as a rich source of hypotheses concerning the human mind, and could exploit novel methods from a variety of adjacent research fields.
In the century and a half since Charles Darwi
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History of evolutionary psychology
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. E. O. Wilson's landmark 1975 book, Sociobiology, synthesized recent theoretical advances in evolutionary theory to explain social behavior in animals, including humans. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby popularized the term "evolutionary psychology" in their 1992 book The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and The Generation of Culture.[1] Like sociobiology before it, evolutionary psychology has been embroiled in controversy, but evolutionary psychologists see their field as gaining increased acceptance overall.
19th century
[edit]After his seminal work in developing t