The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology

THE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the humanmind and brain, as Darwin himself was the first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural science capable of precision and rapid progress. Yet, more than a century and a half after The Origin of Species was published, many of the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences continue to be grounded on assumptions that evolutionarily informed researchers know to be false; the rest have only in the past few decades set to work on the radical reformulations of their disciplines necessary to make them consistent with findings in the evolutionary sciences, information theory, computer science, physics, the neurosciences, molecular and cellular biology, genetics, behavioral ecology, hunter-gatherer studies, biological anthropology, primatology, and so on (Pinker, 1997, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences—a framework that not only incorporates the evolutionary sciences and information theory on a full and equal basis, but that systematically works out all the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The first long-term scientific goal toward which evolutionary psychologists are working is the mapping of our universal human nature. By mapping human nature, wemean the progressive construction and refinement of a set of empirically validated, high-resolution models of the evolved adaptations (genetic, developmental, anatomical, neural, information processing, etc.) that collectively constitute universal human