Evolutionary Psychology

Richard Dawkins: “The gene is immortal. In fact, a publisher once, when I showed him the first couple of chapters of the “Selfish Gene”, he said: “You shouldn’t call it that… you should call it the “Immortal Gene”. And perhaps I should have done. Genes are immortal in the sense that the coded information they contain is reproduced, is replicated with almost total fidelity… Significantly, not absolutely total fidelity. Generation, after generation, after generation… such that there are genes which are identical to what they were tens of millions of years ago… Hundreds of millions of years ago in a few cases. So genes are immortal. Not the DNA, of course that’s not, that turns over in a very short space of time. But the coded information is potentially immortal. And that means that the difference between a successful gene and unsuccessful gene, really matters. It’s going to matter for millions of years. So, the genes that make it through those millions of years are the ones that are good at it. And good at it means good at building bodies, good at controlling the processes of embryology. To make bodies which have what it takes to preserve those genes and pass them on. So I use this phrase: “survival machine”, a body, an individual is a survival machine, and that’s, by far, the most powerful way of interpreting what an individual organism is. An individual organism is a throwaway survival machine for the self-replicating coded information which it contains. And the fate of that coded information is crucially bound up with the fate of the body in which it sits. If the body in which it sits dies before reproducing than that coded information is not going to go on to the next generation, and the next, and potentially for tens of millions of years. So, the genes that are in the world today, distributed as they are in bodies of millions of different species are here today, because they were good at what they did in the past. They’ve come through, literally, unbroken line of successful ancestors, where unsuccessful non-ancestors have been littered by the wayside. And so the genes in a swallow, or in a kangaroo, or in a hedgehog or in a human are all very, very good at making swallows, or hedgehogs, or kangaroos, or humans. They had to be good at it or they wouldn’t have come through the generations today…”

According to Britannica: Evolutionary psychology, the study of behavior, thought, and feeling as viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology. It combines two sciences, psychology and biology. Evolutionary psychologists presume all human behaviors reflect the influence of physical and psychological predispositions that helped human ancestors survive and reproduce. In the evolutionary view, any animal’s brain and body are composed of mechanisms designed to work together to facilitate success within the environments that were commonly encountered by that animal’s ancestors. Thus, a killer whale, though distantly related to a cow, would not do well with a cow’s brain, since the killer whale needs a brain designed to control a body that tracks prey in the ocean rather than eating grass in a meadow. Likewise, a bat, though also a mammal, needs a brain designed to run a tiny body that flies around catching insects at high speeds in the dark. Evolutionary psychologists ask: What are the implications of human evolutionary history (e.g., living in omnivorous and hierarchical primate groups populated by kin) for the design of the human mind?

Darwin’s work inspired William James’s functionalist approach to psychology. Darwin’s theories of evolution, adaptation, and natural selection have provided insight into why brains function the way they do.

Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce.

Two major evolutionary psychological theories are described: Sexual strategies theory describes the psychology of human mating strategies and the ways in which women and men differ in those strategies. It proposes that humans have evolved a list of different mating strategies, both short-term and long-term, that vary depending on culture, social context, parental influence, and personal mate value (desirability in the “mating market”).

Error management theory describes the evolution of biases in the way we think about everything. Error Management Theory (EMT) suggests that cognitive adaptations evolved to minimize the cost of false negative and false positive errors in detections of consequential environmental conditions. These adaptations manifest as biases tailored to specific environmental conditions. People must make inferences about a potential mate’s desirability based on incomplete information. Under such uncertainty, there are two possible errors: people could overperceive a mate’s desirability, which might lead to regrettable mating behavior, or they could underperceive the mate’s desirability, which might lead to missing a valuable opportunity.