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The theories on which evolutionary psychology is based originated with Charles Darwin's work, including his speculations about the evolutionary origins of social instincts in humans. Modern evolutionary psychology, however, is possible only because of advances in evolutionary theory in the 20th century.
Evolutionary psychologists consider Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to be important to an understanding of psychology. [1] Natural selection occurs because individual organisms who are genetically better suited to the current environment leave more descendants, and their genes spread through the population, thus explaining why organisms fit their environments so closely. [1]
Both Darwin's theory of evolution and Karl Ernst von Baer's developmental principles of ontogeny shaped early thought in developmental psychology. [12] Wilhelm T. Preyer , a pioneer of child psychology, was heavily inspired by Darwin's work and approached the mental development of children from an evolutionary perspective.
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.
Evolutionary psychologists consider a number of factors in what determines a psychological adaptation, such as functionality, complexity, efficiency, and universality. [1] The Adapted Mind is considered a foundational text on evolutionary psychology, further integrating Darwinian theory into modern psychology.
In the early 19th century prior to Darwinism, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) proposed his theory of the transmutation of species, the first fully formed theory of evolution. In 1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published a new evolutionary theory, explained in detail in Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin's theory ...
Our emotional language has comparable descriptors, such as "hot-head" and "cool-breezy". The theory offers an explanation for the evolution of common facial expressions of emotion in mammals. Little experimental work has been done to extend the theory, however. Carroll Izard discussed gains and losses associated with the evolution of emotions ...
Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery of new abstract entities such as abstract number or abstract value that necessarily precede the individual acquisition and usage of such abstractions.