[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology is the study of the evolutionary bases of behavior and mind. It is the most recent major development in psychology. Indeed, it is a new theoretical perspective that is likely to be quite influential in the years to come.
Evolutionary psychology began to take form in the mid to late 1980s, and by the mid 1990s, it became clear that psychology was witnessing the birth of its first major, new theoretical perspective since the cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 1960s. Interestingly, however, evolutionary psychology would seem to be a reflection of William James’ Functionalism a hundred years earlier (at the birth of American psychology), which itself had its bases in Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (Buss, 23-28).
Evolutionary psychology is the combination of two sciences evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology. It is the approach of explaining human behavior based on the combination of evolutionary biology, anthropology, cognitive science, and the neurosciences. Evolutionary psychology is not a specific sub field of psychology, such as the study of vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.
Evolutionary psychology is the science that seeks to explain through universal mechanisms of behavior why humans act the way they do. Evolutionary psychology seeks to reconstruct problems that our ancestors faced in their primitive environments, and the problem-solving mechanisms they created to meet those particular challenges. From these reconstructed problem-solving adaptations, the science then attempts to establish the common roots of our ancestral behavior, and how those common behavioral roots are manifested today in the widely scattered cultures of the planet.The goal is to understand human behavior that is universally aimed at the passing of one's genes into the next generation (Badcock, 42-45)......................
