Humans, like all other organisms, were created thro ugh the process of evolution. Consequently, all innate human characteristics are the products of the evolutionary process. Although the implications of this were quickly grasped in investigating human physiology, until recently there has been a marked resistance to applying this knowledge to human behavior. But evolution and the innate algorit...

Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of the relation between evolved systems of folk knowledge and inferential and attributional biases as these relate to academic learning in modern society. Following discussion and illustration of the mechanisms of natural selection and their application to human motivational, cognitive, and behavioral evolution, the basic premises and principles ...

Members of the human family share common behavioral tendencies but are also strikingly diverse. To what extent are we shaped by our heredity and to what degree by our life history? The conclusions—that nature is crucially important and that nurture is crucially important—are central to today’s psychology. Genes provide the blueprints that design both our universal human attributes and our indiv...

The target article provides important theoretical contributions to psychology and Bayesian modeling. Despite the article’s excellent points, we suggest that it succumbs to a few misconceptions about evolutionary psychology (EP). These include a mischaracterization of evolutionary psychology’s approach to optimality; failure to appreciate the centrality of mechanism in EP; and an incorrect depic...

I comment on Eagly and Wood's biosocial constructionist evolutionary theory (2011; DOI: 10.1007/s11199-011-9949-9). Although this gender feminist theory allows for evolved physical differences between men and women and evolved psychological similarities for men and women, it fails to consider evolutionary accounts of psychological sex differences. I hypothesize that gender feminists' reluctance...

This is an introduction to this special issue on evolutionary psychology (EP) and evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP). We suggest here that, contrary to some common assumptions, mainstream psychology continues to be essentially non Darwinian and that EP and EDP are new approaches that can potentially help us to change this situation. We then present the organization of the special issue...

a College of Business and Center for Behavioral Political Economy, Stony Brook University b Center for Behavioral Political Economy, Department of Political Science, and College of Business, Stony Brook University c Center for Evolutionary Psychology and Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara d Center for Evolutionary Psychology and Department of...

Replies to comments on Evolutionary psychology: Controversies, questions, prospects, and limitations (see record 2010-02208-001) by Confer et al. The purpose of which was to clarify the logic of evolutionary psychology and clear up some of the more common misunderstandings about it. In this response, we address the key points raised by the commentators.