The adaptive programme of evolutionary psychology

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the adaptive program of evolutionary psychology. The goal of the chapter is not just to defend the idea that humans evolved but to offer evolutionary explanations of specific human features in terms of natural selection. These explanations are intended to reflect evolutionary origins. Human language and cognition are certainly complex capacities. Evolutionary psychologists offer the explanations of psychological mechanisms in terms of the specific environmental demands, which shaped them in the evolutionary past. An understanding of these mechanisms and of their evolutionary functions is intended to illuminate the functions of these psychological mechanisms. Evolutionary explanation motivates the reform of psychological practice. The evolutionary psychology embraces an ambitious reform of psychology based on evolutionary principles. It also embraces an ambitious evolutionary program based on the centrality of adaptation to evolutionary thinking. Together, these result in a proposed reform of psychology based on evolutionary and adaptive psychological explanations. The program of evolutionary psychology, therefore, depends on convincing adaptive explanations. There are three methods for confirming adaptive explanations prevalent in evolutionary biology: first depends on reverse engineering, second on dynamic models, and the third on the comparative method.