Because of the intellectual attraction of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, its concepts are often borrowed to conceptualized evolutionary change also in non-biological domains. However, a heuristic strategy like that is problematic. An attempt is therefore made to identify generic features of evolution which transcend domain-specific characteristics. Epistemological, conceptual, and metho...

Social psychological theories tend to be primarily concerned with the immediate causes of altruism, whereas evolutionary explanations focus more on the origins and ultimate functions of altruistic behavior. Recent developments in the evolutionary psychology of altruism promise an even richer understanding of this important category of social behaviors. Specifically, new perspectives offered by ...

Several recent works have addressed the issue of the origin of religion. Some have linked this occurrence to evolutionary mechanisms, others to sociological processes, and still others to psychological functions. Each position has interest and sheds a different light on a necessarily complex process. The paper examines several of these theories and offers a synthetic perspective which integrate...

In theories of evolution, fitness is the only property of the organism which determines the evolutionary dynamics. The fitness can be described as a function of the genome, but it is more directly related to the phenome. Variations in the fitness as a function of changes in either phenome or genome may sometimes be large and may sometimes be insignificant. Conventional evolutionary theory is, h...

We review and discuss the evolutionary psychological literature on violence, homicide, and war in humans and nonhumans, and in doing so we argue that an evolutionary perspective can substantially enhance our understanding of these behaviors. We provide a brief primer on evolutionary psychology, describing basic tenets of the field. The theories of sexual selection and parental investment are ex...

Cultural evolutionary theory, like other evolutionary theories, links individual-level and population or society-level phenomena. It provides numerous bridges between social psychology and other disciplines and sub-disciplines. The theory uses mathematical models to understand the population-level consequences of the individual-level processes of individual and social learning. The theory has b...

In the present article, a reinterpretation of the concept of social capital is forwarded that incorporates the principles of evolutionary psychology. The authors propose that social capital, from the evolutionary psychological perspective, is any social relationship that, directly or indirectly, helps an individual maximize reproductive success through promoting survival, the acquisition of res...

Extending recent information-theoretic phase transition approaches to evolutionary and cognitive process via the Rate Distortion Theorem in the circumstance of interaction with a structured environment suggests that learning plateaus in cognitive systems and punctuated equilibria in evolutionary process are formally analogous, even though evolution is most certainly not cognitive. The result is...

Cultural evolutionary theory, like other evolutionary theories, links individual-level and population or society-level phenomena. It provides numerous bridges between social psychology and other disciplines and sub-disciplines. The theory uses mathematical models to understand the population level consequences of the individual-level processes of individual and social learning. The theory has b...