According to Evolutionary Psychology, the human mind is a set of cognitive adaptations designed by natural selection. Since such design takes time, the adaptive problems that shaped our mind are not the ones we know from our life as industrialists during the past 200 years, or from our life as agriculturalists during the past 10,000 years, but those characteristic of our past life as hunter-gatherers.. The task of Evolutionary Psychology is to discover these modules by means of what is called a “functional analysis,” where one starts with hypotheses about the adaptive problems faced by our ancestors, and then tries to infer the cognitive adaptations that must have evolved to solve them.

This theoretical framework of Evolutionary Psychology centers on a couple of key ideas which will be explained in this section:

(1) The cognitive mechanisms that underlie our behavior are adaptations.

(2) They have to be discovered by means of functional analysis.

(3) They are adaptations for solving recurrent adaptive problems in the evolutionary environment of our ancestors.

(4) Our mind is a complex set of such mechanisms, or domain-specific modules.

(5) These modules define our universal human nature.

These uses evolutionary ideas such as adaptation, reproduction, and natural selection as the basis for explaining specific human behaviors. David Buss (2012) argues that just as evolution molds our physical features, such as body shape, it also influences our decision making, level of aggressiveness, fears, and mating patterns. Thus, evolutionary psychologists say, the way we are is traceable to problems early humans faced in adapting to their environments (Cosmides, 2011).

Adaptations

Inheridet and developinging characteristics that come into existence through natural selection because they aided in solving problems related to survival and/ or reproduction. Example- Umbilical cord.

Psychological adaptations are hypothesized to be innate or relatively easy to learn, and to manifest in cultures worldwide. For example, the ability of toddlers to learn a language with virtually no training is likely to be a psychological adaptation. On the other hand, ancestral humans did not read or write, thus today, learning to read and write require extensive training, and presumably represent byproducts of cognitive processing that use psychological adaptations designed for other functions.^[30] However, variations in manifest behavior can result from universal mechanisms interacting with different local environments. For example, Caucasians who move from a northern climate to the equator will have darker skin. The mechanisms regulating their pigmentation do not change; rather the input to those mechanisms change, resulting in different output.

Evolutionary psychologists use several strategies to develop and test hypotheses about whether a psychological trait is likely to be an evolved adaptation. Buss (2011) notes that these methods include:

Cross-cultural Consistency. Characteristics that have been demonstrated to be cross cultural human universal such as smiling, crying, facial expressions are presumed to be evolved psychological adaptations. Several evolutionary psychologists have collected massive data sets from cultures around the world to assess cross-cultural universality.

By-Products

Characteristics that do not solve adaptative problems and do not have functional designs. They are coupled to adapations like for example belly button.

Assumptions:

• Charles Darwin described both natural selection and sexual selection, and he relied on group selection to explain the evolution of altruistic (self-sacrificing) behavior. But group selection was considered a weak explanation, because in any group the less altruistic individuals will be more likely to survive, and the group will become less self-sacrificing as a whole.
• Most of the research in evolutionary psychology proceeds from the assumptions that evolutionary theory is correct, but the research does not prove that assumption directly.
• By studying animals we can understand basic human behavior.

 

Impacts of Science and Society

• Evolutionary psychology often underestimate the role of culture in shaping.
• Little is known about the early homo sapiens, so theories are mostly hypothetical.
• Not all theories can be empirically tested and thus face confirmation bias- seeing what you want to see and avoid what you don’t.
• Described and labelled behavior does not explain much.
• Does not meet the complexity of human behavior.
• Provides survival values.