The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology

Abstract

The human brain is the most highly organized system yet identified, and natural selection is the only physical process capable of pushing the designs of species uphill against entropy.Consequently, all functional mechanisms present in our species' neural architecture were constructed by selection acting on our ancestors.The design features of our psychological mechanisms are therefore linked directly as cause and effect to the specific structure of ancestral adaptive problems, allowing models of the adaptive problems identified by biologists and anthropologists to serve as maps that accelerate the discovery of previously unknown psychological mechanisms.The brain's function is specifically computational: to regulate behavior, development, and the body in ways that would have produced responses likely to have promoted genetic propagation under ancestral conditions.Evolutionary psychologists and allies are working toward two goals: The first is the progressive mapping of the program architectures (circuit logics) of the neurocomputational adaptations designed to solve ancestral adaptive problems. The second is the reformulation and theoretical unification of the social sciences made possible by an accurate, natural‐science‐based model of human nature.Here we sketch the discipline's theoretical foundations together with illustrative empirical discoveries (in reasoning, emotion and motivational programs, and parametric coordinative adaptations).