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The killer ape theory or killer ape hypothesis is the theory that war and interpersonal aggression was the driving force behind human evolution.It was originated by Raymond Dart in his 1953 article "The predatory transition from ape to man"; it was developed further in African Genesis by Robert Ardrey in 1961. [1]
In cognitive psychology, the term anthropocentric thinking has been defined as "the tendency to reason about unfamiliar biological species or processes by analogy to humans." [ 20 ] Reasoning by analogy is an attractive thinking strategy, and it can be tempting to apply one's own experience of being human to other biological systems. [ 20 ]
Anthropologists do not take the hypothesis seriously: John Langdon characterized it as an "umbrella hypothesis" (a hypothesis that tries to explain many separate traits of humans as a result of a single adaptive pressure) that was not consistent with the fossil record, and said that its claim that it was simpler and therefore more likely to be ...
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes.This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception ...
Donald Brown's perspective echoes a common belief held by many anthropologists of his time and earlier (increasingly those who have transitioned into the fields of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, sociobiology and human behavioral ecology) who were critical of the cultural relativism of the Boas-Sapir school which has ...
Human ethology is the study of human behavior. Ethology as a discipline is generally thought of as a sub-category of biology, though psychological theories have been developed based on ethological ideas (e.g. sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, and theories about human universals such as gender differences, incest avoidance, mourning, hierarchy and pursuit of possession).
Darwinian anthropology was critiqued by Symonds for its agnosticism as to the psychological mechanisms governing how social behavior is actually expressed in the human species, and its reliance on interpreting inclusive fitness theory to simply imply that humans have evolved to be inclusive fitness maximizers. This section will review some of ...
The history of the debate from a critic's perspective is detailed by Gannon (2002). [2] Critics of evolutionary psychology include the philosophers of science David Buller (author of Adapting Minds), [3] Robert C. Richardson (author of Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology), [4] and Brendan Wallace (author of Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won't Work).