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In evolutionary psychology, people often speak of the four Fs which are said to be the four basic and most primal drives (motivations or instincts) that animals (including humans) are evolutionarily adapted to have, follow, and achieve: fighting, fleeing, feeding and fucking (a more polite synonym is the word "mating"). [1]
Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing innate (inborn) elements.The simplest example of an instinctive behaviour is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a corresponding clearly defined stimulus.
Similarities between the behavior of humans and animals have sometimes been used in an attempt to understand the evolutionary significance of particular behaviors. Differences in the treatment of animals have been said to reflect a society's understanding of human nature and the place of humans and animals in the scheme of things.
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.
The ethological concept of species-typical behavior is based on the premise that certain behavioral similarities are shared by almost all members of a species. [1] Some of these behaviors are unique to certain species, but to be 'species-typical' they do not have to be unique, they simply have to be characteristic of that species.
Darwin explores the biological aspects of emotional behaviour and the animal origins of human characteristics like smiling and frowning, shrugging shoulders, lifting eyebrows in surprise, and baring teeth in an angry sneer. A German translation of Expression appeared in 1872, and Dutch and French versions followed in 1873 and 1874.
The main purpose of Darwin's work was to support the theory of evolution by demonstrating that emotions in humans and other animals are similar. Most of the similarities he found were between species closely related, but he found some similarities between distantly related species as well.
The existence and nature of emotions in non-human animals are believed to be correlated with those of humans and to have evolved from the same mechanisms. Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to write about the subject, and his observational (and sometimes anecdotal) approach has since developed into a more robust, hypothesis-driven ...