Evolutionary developmental psychology involves the expression of evolved, epigenetic programs, as described by the developmental systems approach, over the course of ontogeny. There have been different selection pressures on organisms at different times in ontogeny, and some characteristics of infants and children were selected in evolution to serve an adaptive function at that time in their li...

The human brain is the result of a long evolutionary trajectory. Using this fact to understand the human brain’s particular capacities and limitations, evolutionary psychology has provided many key insights into human behavior. First, since the human brain is extremely costly to nurture and maintain, its general contribution to human fitness must be high, and hence the brain must be an adaptati...

I argue that evolutionary strategies of kin selection and game-theoretic reciprocity are apt to generate agent-centered and agentneutral moral intuitions, respectively. Such intuitions are the building blocks of moral theories, resulting in a fundamental schism between agent-centered theories on the one hand and agentneutral theories on the other. An agent-neutral moral theory is one according ...

The human face communicates an impressive number of v i sua l s igna l s . A l though adults’ ratings of facial attractiveness are consistent across studies, even cross-culturally, there has been considerable controversy surrounding attempts to identify the facial features that cause faces to be judged attractive or unattractive. Studies of physical attractiveness have attempted to identify the...

This paper reviews theory and research on the evolutionary psychology of violence. First, I examine evidence suggesting that humans have experienced an evolutionary history of violence. Next, I discuss violence as a context-sensitive strategy that might have provided benefits to our ancestors under certain circumstances. I then focus on the two most common forms of violence that plague humans -...

The human brain is a set of computational machines, each of which was designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These machines are adaptive specializations: systems equipped with design features that are organized such that they solve an ancestral problem reliably, economically and efficiently. The search for functionally specialized comput...

I argue that Evolutionary Psychologists’ notion of adaptationism is closest to what Peter Godfrey-Smith (2001) calls explanatory adaptationism and as a result, is not a good organizing principle for research in the biology of human behavior. I also argue that adopting an alternate notion of adaptationism presents much more explanatory resources to the biology of human behavior. I proceed by int...

Department of Psychology, Early Childhood and Comparative Psychology, University of Berne, Switzerland, Department of Psychology, Developmental Psychology, University of Zurich, Switzerland, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Leipzig, Germany, Anthropological Institute &Museum, University of Zurich, Switzerland Swiss Journal of Psycholo...

Does evolutionary theorizing have a role in psychology? This is a more contentious issue than one might imagine, given that, as evolved creatures, the answer must surely be yes. The contested nature of evolutionary psychology lies not in our status as evolved beings, but in the extent to which evolutionary ideas add value to studies of human behavior, and the rigor with which these ideas are te...

T HE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the human mind 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 sc...