Who is the founder of evolutionary psychology?
History of evolutionary psychology
The history of evolutionary psychology began with Charles Darwin, who said that humans have social instincts that evolved by natural selection. Darwin's work inspired later psychologists such as William James and Sigmund Freud but for most of the 20th century psychologists focused more on behaviorism and proximate explanations for human behavior. E. O. Wilson's landmark 1975 book, "", synthesized recent theoretical advances in evolutionary theory to explain social behavior in animals, including humans. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby popularized the term "evolutionary psychology" in their 1992 book "The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and The Generation of Culture". Like sociobiology before it, evolutionary psychology has been embroiled in controversy, but evolutionary psychologists see their field as gaining increased acceptance overall.
Egon Brunswik
Egon Brunswik Edler von Korompa (18 March 1903, Budapest7 July 1955, Berkeley, California) was a psychologist who made contributions to functionalism and the history of psychology.
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary biology as an academic discipline emerged with the modern synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s the study of animal behavior (ethology) emerged with the work of the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch.
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, political activist, and social critic. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and is the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
Born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He began studying at the University of Pennsylvania at age 16, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. From 1951 to 1955, he was appointed to Harvard University's Society of Fellows. While at Harvard, he developed the theory of transformational grammar; for this, he was awarded his doctorate in 1955. Chomsky began teaching at MIT in 1957 and emerged as a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his landmark work "Syntactic Structures", which remodelled the scientific study of language. From 1958 to 1959, he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. Chomsky is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. He also played a pivotal role in the decline of behaviorism, being particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.
Chomsky vocally opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, believing the war to be an act of American imperialism. In 1967, he attracted widespread public attention for his antiwar essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and was placed on Richard Nixon's Enemies List. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the Linguistics Wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later co-wrote "", which articulated the propaganda model of media criticism and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Additionally, his defense of freedom of speech—including free speech for Holocaust deniers—generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. Since retiring from active teaching, Chomsky has continued his vocal political activism by opposing the War on Terror and supporting the Occupy Movement.
One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced a broad array of academic fields. He is widely recognized as a paradigm shifter who helped spark a major revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. In addition to his continued scholarly research, he remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mainstream news media. His ideas have proved highly significant within the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Some of his critics have accused him of anti-Americanism.
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is founded on several core premises.Evolutionary psychology has its historical roots in Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. In "The Origin of Species", Darwin predicted that psychology would develop an evolutionary basis:
Lewis Petrinovich
Lewis Franklin Petrinovich (born June 12, 1930) is an American evolutionary psychologist and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. His work has included research on lefthandedness, the potential evolutionary origins of cannibalism, and evolutionary ornithology.
Petrinovich received his bachelor's degree from the University of Idaho in 1952 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962.
Theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychologists consider Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection to be important to an understanding of psychology. Natural selection occurs because individual organisms who are genetically better suited to the current environment leave more descendants, and their genes spread through the population, thus explaining why organisms fit their environments so closely. This process is slow and cumulative, with new traits layered over older traits. The advantages created by natural selection are known as adaptations. Evolutionary psychologists say that animals, just as they evolve physical adaptations, evolve psychological adaptations.
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach that views human nature as the product of a universal set of evolved psychological adaptations to recurring problems in the ancestral environment. Proponents suggest that it seeks to integrate psychology into the other natural sciences, rooting it in the organizing theory of biology (evolutionary theory), and thus understanding psychology as a branch of biology. Anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides note:
James Mark Baldwin
Baldwin's contribution to this field places him at the heart of contemporary controversies in the fields of evolutionary psychology and wider sociobiology. Few people did more than Robert Wozniak, Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College, for the rediscovery of the significance of James Mark Baldwin in the history of ideas.
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand psychological mechanisms by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might have served over the course of evolutionary history. These might include abilities to infer others' emotions, discern kin from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, cooperate with others and follow leaders. Consistent with the theory of natural selection, evolutionary psychology sees humans as often in conflict with others, including mates and relatives. For instance, a mother may wish to wean her offspring from breastfeeding earlier than does her infant, which frees up the mother to invest in additional offspring. Evolutionary psychology also recognizes the role of kin selection and reciprocity in evolving prosocial traits such as altruism. Like chimpanzees and bonobos, humans have subtle and flexible social instincts, allowing them to form extended families, lifelong friendships, and political alliances. In studies testing theoretical predictions, evolutionary psychologists have made modest findings on topics such as infanticide, intelligence, marriage patterns, promiscuity, perception of beauty, bride price and parental investment.
The Adapted Mind
The theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology are discussed in the introduction, by Cosmides, Tooby and Barkow, in an essay by Tooby and Cosmides on "The Psychological Foundations of Culture", and an essay by anthropologist Donald Symons "On the Use and Misuse of Darwinism in the Study of Human Behavior". The book also includes empirical research papers meant to introduce topics of interest in evolutionary psychology, such as mating, social and developmental psychology, and perceptual adaptations. It includes contributions from evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker, David Buss, Martin Daly, and Margo Wilson.
Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; ; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physician, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. Wundt, who noted psychology as a science apart from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. By creating this laboratory he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other disciplines. He also formed the first academic journal for psychological research, "Philosophische Studien" (from 1881 to 1902), set up to publish the Institute's research.
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Eastern philosophy in clinical psychology
Abraham Maslow, an American-born Jew who struggled to make his way as a psychologist in an academic atmosphere which was not then ready to receive Jews. He believed his theories of motivation and self-actualization were, despite his avowed atheism, driven by a Jewish consciousness. The Transpersonal psychology that Maslow founded is a blend of Eastern and Western mystic traditions.
Paul Baltes
Paul B. Baltes (June 18, 1939 – November 7, 2006) was a German psychologist whose broad scientific agenda was devoted to establishing and promoting the life-span orientation of human development. He was also a theorist in the field of the psychology of aging. He has been described by "American Psychologist" as one of the most influential developmental psychologists.
Evolutionary psychology
The theories on which evolutionary psychology is based originated with Charles Darwin's work, including his speculations about the evolutionary origins of social instincts in humans. Modern evolutionary psychology, however, is possible only because of advances in evolutionary theory in the 20th century.
Neal E. Miller
Neal Elgar Miller (August 3, 1909 – March 23, 2002) was an American experimental psychologist. Described as an energetic man with a variety of interests, including physics, biology and writing, Miller entered the field of psychology to pursue these. With a background training in the sciences, he was inspired by professors and leading psychologists at the time to work on various areas in behavioral psychology and physiological psychology, specifically, relating visceral responses to behavior.
Psychology
Evolutionary psychology examines cognition and personality traits from an evolutionary perspective. This perspective suggests that psychological adaptations evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments. Evolutionary psychology offers complementary explanations for the mostly proximate or developmental explanations developed by other areas of psychology: that is, it focuses mostly on ultimate or "why?" questions, rather than proximate or "how?" questions. "How?" questions are more directly tackled by behavioral genetics research, which aims to understand how genes and environment impact behavior.
Max Wertheimer
Max Wertheimer (April 15, 1880 – October 12, 1943) was an Austro-Hungarian-born psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. He is known for his book, "Productive Thinking", and for conceiving the phi phenomenon as part of his work in Gestalt psychology.
Donald O. Clifton
Donald O. Clifton (February 5, 1924 – September 14, 2003) was an American psychologist, educator, author, researcher, and entrepreneur. He founded Selection Research, Inc., which later acquired Gallup Inc., where he became chairman, and developed CliftonStrengths, Gallup's online psychological assessment. Clifton was recognized with a presidential commendation from the American Psychological Association as "the father of strengths-based psychology and the grandfather of positive psychology".
Carl Rogers
Carl Ransom Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (or client-centered approach) to psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1956.
Les Greenberg
Les Greenberg (Leslie Samuel Greenberg) (born 30 September 1945) is a Canadian psychologist born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is one of the originators and primary developers of Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals and couples. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at York University in Toronto, and also director of the Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic in Toronto. His research has addressed questions regarding empathy, psychotherapy process, the therapeutic alliance, and emotion in human functioning.
Ulric Neisser
Ulric Gustav Neisser (December 8, 1928 – February 17, 2012) was a German-born American psychologist and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive psychology." Neisser researched and wrote about perception and memory. He posited that a person's mental processes could be measured and subsequently analyzed. In 1967, Neisser published "Cognitive Psychology", which he later said was considered an attack on behaviorist psychological paradigms. "Cognitive Psychology" brought Neisser instant fame and recognition in the field of psychology. While "Cognitive Psychology" was considered unconventional, it was Neisser's "Cognition and Reality" that contained some of his most controversial ideas. A main theme in "Cognition and Reality" is Neisser's advocacy for experiments on perception occurring in natural ("ecologically valid") settings. Neisser postulated that memory is, largely, reconstructed and not a snap shot of the moment. Neisser illustrated this during one of his highly publicized studies on people's memories of the Challenger explosion. In his later career, he summed up current research on human intelligence and edited the first major scholarly monograph on the Flynn effect. A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Neisser as the 32nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Walter Samuel Hunter
Walter Samuel Hunter (March 22, 1889 – August 3, 1954) contributed to psychology by leading an effort to develop psychology as a science. Hunter was one of the first scholars of the time to focus not on the study of subjective mental processes but rather on the observation of animal behavior. In 1912, Hunter completed his doctoral dissertation on Delayed Reaction in Animals and Children. He was a pioneer in the effort of scientific documentation, having created Psychological Abstracts in 1927, which contained documents from psychologists in the U.S. and abroad.
Adapting Minds
Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature is a book published by MIT Press written by philosopher of science David Buller, piecing together his criticism of evolutionary psychology. A large portion of the book is dedicated to a critique of empirical findings from three research groups in the field: that of David Buss, that of Cosmides and Tooby, and that of Daly and Wilson. Buller argues that the evolutionary psychology paradigms are "mistaken in almost every detail."
The book got a strongly negative review from anthropologist Clark Barrett in the "American Journal of Human Biology" who wrote: "Buller’s book has many useful elements, but it is based on simplistic assumptions and fallacious arguments that lead to faulty conclusions. If taken seriously, Buller’s denial of human nature would invalidate not only evolutionary psychology but also any field that attempts to produce generalizable knowledge about humans, including behavioral ecology, biological anthropology, and most branches of psychology, not to mention medicine."
John Dewey
John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey is one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology. A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Dewey as the 93rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century. A well-known public intellectual, he was also a major voice of progressive education and liberalism. Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics. He was a major educational reformer for the 20th century.
Early theories in child psychology
Early theories in child psychology was advocated by three famous theorists. They are John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Charles Darwin. They represent three famous schools of thought namely influence of Child’s environment, role of Child’s cognitive development and relationship with evolutionary origins of behavior. These three schools formed the basis of modern developments in Child Psychology
George Romanes
George John Romanes FRS (20 May 1848 – 23 May 1894) was a Canadian-Scots evolutionary biologist and physiologist who laid the foundation of what he called comparative psychology, postulating a similarity of cognitive processes and mechanisms between humans and other animals.
Abraham Maslow
Abraham Harold Maslow (; April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. Maslow was a psychology professor at Alliant International University, Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, New School for Social Research, and Columbia University. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms." A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Maslow as the tenth most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Evolutionary psychology
In the 1970s and 1980s university departments began to include the term "evolutionary biology" in their titles. The modern era of evolutionary psychology was ushered in, in particular, by Donald Symons' 1979 book "The Evolution of Human Sexuality" and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby's 1992 book "The Adapted Mind".
Floyd Henry Allport
Floyd Henry Allport (August 22, 1890 – October 15, 1979) was an American psychologist who is often considered "the father of experimental social psychology", having played a key role in the creation of social psychology as a legitimate field of behavioral science. His book "Social Psychology" (1924) impacted all future writings in the field. He was particularly interested in public opinion, attitudes, morale, rumors, and behavior. He focused on exploration of these topics through laboratory experimentation and survey research.
History of evolutionary psychology
While Darwin's theories on natural selection gained acceptance in the early part of the 20th century, his theories on evolutionary psychology were largely ignored. Only after the second world war, in the 1950s, did interest increase in the systematic study of animal behavior. It was during this period that the modern field of ethology emerged. Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen were pioneers in developing the theoretical framework for ethology for which they would receive a Nobel prize in 1973.
Evolutionary psychology
A frequent critique of the discipline is that the hypotheses of evolutionary psychology are frequently arbitrary and difficult or impossible to adequately test, thus questioning its status as an actual scientific discipline, for example because many current traits probably evolved to serve different functions than they do now. While evolutionary psychology hypotheses are difficult to test, evolutionary psychologists assert that it is not impossible. Part of the critique of the scientific base of evolutionary psychology includes a critique of the concept of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation. Some critics have argued that researchers know so little about the environment in which "Homo sapiens" evolved that explaining specific traits as an adaption to that environment becomes highly speculative. Evolutionary psychologists respond that they do know many things about this environment, including the facts that present day humans' ancestors were hunter-gatherers, that they generally lived in small tribes, etc.
Emory L. Cowen
Emory L. Cowen (1926 – November 30, 2000) was an American psychologist who pioneered the promotion of wellness in mental health. Cowen is widely considered one of the fathers of community psychology and community mental health due to his research and implementation of early detection and primary and secondary prevention in mental health. In the field of psychology, he initiated the shift from treating dysfunction to preventing problems before they occurred.
John Tooby
John Tooby is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology. Tooby received his PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University in 1989 and is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
William Kaye Estes
William Kaye Estes (June 17, 1919 – August 17, 2011) was an American psychologist. A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Estes as the 77th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. In order to develop a statistical explanation for the learning phenomena, William Kaye Estes developed the Stimulus Sampling Theory in 1950 which suggested that a stimulus-response association is learned on a single trial; however, the learning process is continuous and consists of the accumulation of distinct stimulus-response pairings.
Polly Young-Eisendrath
Polly Young-Eisendrath (born 1947) is a psychologist, feminist, author, teacher, speaker, Jungian analyst, Zen Buddhist, and the founder of Enlightening Conversations: Buddhism and Psychoanalysis Meeting in Person. She has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, TED-X, and is the recipient of the Otto Weininger Award for Lifetime Achievement in Psychoanalysis. Polly Young-Eisendrath is the originator of Dialogue Therapy—designed to help couples and others transform chronic conflict into greater closeness and development. In 1983, Polly and her late husband, Ed Epstein, designed Dialogue Therapy as a new form of couples therapy that combined psychoanalysis, Jungian theory, psychodrama, and gender theory. Polly published two books on Dialogue Therapy (1984 and 1993), detailing its theory and methods for clinicians and the general public. She has now re-visioned and updated Dialogue Therapy to include the unique combination of psychodrama, Object Relations, and Mindfulness. In 2018, Shambhala Publications will release "True Love Ways: Relationship as Psycho-Spiritual Development" that offers her vision of personal love as a spiritual path and draws on her experience of 30 years as a Dialogue Therapist and Jungian psychoanalyst. Polly maintains a clinical practice of Jungian psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Vermont, U.S.A.
Daniel Levinson
Daniel J. Levinson (May 28, 1920 – April 12, 1994), a psychologist, was one of the founders of the field of positive adult development. Levinson is most well known for his theory of stage-crisis view, however he also made major contributions to the fields of behavioral, social, and developmental psychology. His interest in the social sciences began with studies on personality and authoritarianism, and eventually progressed to studies on development. Greatly influenced by the work of Erik Erikson, Elliott Jaques, and Bernice Neugarten, his stage-crisis view sought to incorporate all aspects of adult development in order to establish a more holistic approach to understanding the life cycle. In doing so, Levinson discussed the various developmental tasks and/or crises that one must address within each stage as well as how they contribute to the progression of development. Although much controversy surrounds his research methods, Levinson interviewed both men and women to uncover concrete patterns that occur within similar age ranges. Through these studies, he determined that men and women essentially progress through the same cycle of life, however they differentiate in what he refers to as "The Dream". He published his findings and theory within his two major books, "The Seasons of a Man's Life" and "The Seasons of a Woman's Life"; both of which remain as influential publications within the field of psychology. Being both simple in nature and open to further investigation, Daniel Levinson's legacy and lasting contributions are mainly to theory and entail profound implications for social as well as behavioral psychology.
Subfields of psychology
Evolutionary psychology explores the evolutionary roots of mental and behavioral patterns, and posits that common patterns may have emerged because they were highly adaptive for humans in the environments of their evolutionary past—even if some of these patterns are maladaptive in today's environments. Fields closely related to evolutionary psychology are animal behavioral ecology, human behavioral ecology, dual inheritance theory, and sociobiology. Evolutionary psychology is distinct from, although related to, behavioral genetics. Memetics, founded by Richard Dawkins, is a related but competing field that proposes that cultural evolution can occur in a Darwinian sense but independently of Mendelian mechanisms; it therefore examines the ways in which thoughts, or memes, may evolve independently of genes.
Natural selection
More recently, work among anthropologists and psychologists has led to the development of sociobiology and later of evolutionary psychology, a field that attempts to explain features of human psychology in terms of adaptation to the ancestral environment. The most prominent example of evolutionary psychology, notably advanced in the early work of Noam Chomsky and later by Steven Pinker, is the hypothesis that the human brain has adapted to acquire the grammatical rules of natural language. Other aspects of human behaviour and social structures, from specific cultural norms such as incest avoidance to broader patterns such as gender roles, have been hypothesised to have similar origins as adaptations to the early environment in which modern humans evolved. By analogy to the action of natural selection on genes, the concept of memes—"units of cultural transmission," or culture's equivalents of genes undergoing selection and recombination—has arisen, first described in this form by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and subsequently expanded upon by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett as explanations for complex cultural activities, including human consciousness.
Evolutionary developmental psychology
Evolutionary developmental psychology can be viewed as a more focused theoretical framework derived from the larger field of evolutionary psychology (EP). Mainstream evolutionary psychology grew out of earlier movements which applied the principles of evolutionary biology to understand the mind and behavior such as sociobiology, ethology, and behavioral ecology, differing from these earlier approaches by focusing on identifying psychological adaptations rather than adaptive behavior. While EDP theory generally aligns with that of mainstream EP, it is distinguished by a conscious effort to reconcile theories of both evolution and development. EDP theory diverges from mainstream evolutionary psychology in both the degree of importance placed on the environment in influencing behavior, and in how evolution has shaped the development of human psychology.
C. H. Waddington
Conrad Hal Waddington CBE FRS FRSE (8 November 1905 – 26 September 1975) was a British developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist and philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology, epigenetics, and evolutionary developmental biology.
Criticism of evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is based on the theory that human physiology and psychology are influenced by genes. Evolutionary psychologists assume that genes contain instructions for building and operating an organism and that these instructions are passed from one generation to the next via genes.
Evolutionary developmental psychology
Despite the minimization of development in evolutionary theory, early developmental psychology was influenced by evolution. Both Darwin's theory of evolution and Karl Ernst von Baer's developmental principles of ontogeny shaped early thought in developmental psychology. Wilhelm T. Preyer, a pioneer of child psychology, was heavily inspired by Darwin's work and approached the mental development of children from an evolutionary perspective.
Evolutionary psychology
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 on a full and equal basis, but that systematically works out all of the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires.
History of evolutionary psychology
In 1975, E. O. Wilson built upon the works of Lorenz and Tinbergen by combining studies of animal behavior, social behavior and evolutionary theory in his book "." Wilson included a chapter on human behavior. Wilson's application of evolutionary analysis to human behavior caused bitter debate.
Jerome Kagan
Jerome Kagan (born February 25, 1929) is an American psychologist, and Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology, Emeritus at Harvard University, and co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
Basic science (psychology)
A goal of evolutionary psychology is to explain psychological traits and processes such as memory, perception, or language in terms of adaptations that arose in the evolutionary history of humans. Traits and processes are thought to be functional products of random mutations and natural selection. Evolutionary biologists view physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, in similar terms. Evolutionary psychology applies the same thinking to psychology. Evolutionary psychologists advance the view that much of human behavior is the cumulative result of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve problems in human ancestral environments. For example, Steven Pinker hypothesized that humans have inherited special mental capacities for acquiring language, making language acquisition nearly automatic, while inheriting no capacity specifically for reading and writing.
Comparative psychology
Charles Darwin was central in the development of comparative psychology; it is thought that psychology should be spoken in terms of "pre-" and "post-Darwin" because his contributions were so influential. theory led to several hypotheses, one being that the factors that set humans apart, such as higher mental, moral and spiritual faculties, could be accounted for by evolutionary principles. In response to the vehement opposition to Darwinism was the "anecdotal movement" led by George Romanes who set out to demonstrate that animals possessed a "rudimentary human mind". Romanes is most famous for two major flaws in his work: his focus on anecdotal observations and entrenched anthropomorphism.
Criticism of evolutionary psychology
Part of the critique of the scientific basis of evolutionary psychology is of the concept of the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Evolutionary psychology often assumes that human evolution occurred in a uniform environment, and critics suggest that we know so little about the environment (or probably multiple environments) in which homo sapiens evolved, that explaining specific traits as an adaption to that environment becomes highly speculative.
David Elliot Loye
David Elliot Loye (born 26 April 1925), is an American author, psychologist, and evolutionary systems scientist.
Evolutionary developmental psychology
Advocates of EDP assert that evolutionary psychologists, while acknowledging the role of the environment in shaping behavior and making claims as to its effects, rarely develop explicit models (i.e., predictions of how the environment might shape behavior) to support their claims . EDP seeks to distinguish itself from mainstream evolutionary psychology in this way by embracing a developmental systems approach, and emphasizing that function at one level of organization (e.g., the genetic level) effects organization at adjacent levels of an organization. Developmental systems theorists such as Robert Lickliter point out that the products of development are both genetic and epigenetic, and have questioned the strictly gene-centric view of evolution. However, some authors have rebutted the claim that mainstream evolutionary psychologists do not integrate developmental theory into their theoretical programs, and have further questioned the value of developmental systems theory (see Criticism).
Emanuel Rádl
Emanuel Rádl (December 21, 1873 – May 12, 1942) was an original Czech biologist, historian of science, philosopher and a critical supporter of Masaryk´s pre-war democratic Czechoslovakia. He earned international renown by his works on the evolution of neural system and as historian of evolution theories.
Hermann Emminghaus
Hermann Emminghaus (20 May 1845 – 17 February 1904) was a German psychiatrist who was a native of Weimar. He was a pioneer of child and adolescent psychology, and a founder of developmental psychopathology.
David C. Geary
Geary’s research in evolutionary psychology also ranges across a variety of issues, from evolution of the hominid brain to men’s hormonal responses while competing against members of their in-group or against an out-group. He has also written extensively on human paternal investment (fatherhood) and the evolution of the human family, and is one of the pioneers in evolutionary developmental psychology and evolutionary educational psychology.
Albert Ellis
Albert Ellis (September 27, 1913 – July 24, 2007) was an American psychologist who in 1955 developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). He held MA and PhD degrees in clinical psychology from Columbia University and the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). He also founded and was the President of the New York City-based Albert Ellis Institute for decades. He is generally considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and one of the founders of cognitive-behavioral therapies.
Bernard de Montréal
Bernard de Montréal (1939–2003) was a Canadian author and lecturer. The author defined his teachings as "Psychologie Évolutionnaire", which translates into English as Evolutionary Psychology (not to be confused with the similar term dealing with a branch of cognitive psychology that draws on the sociobiological theories of natural evolution).
Juan Pascual-Leone
Pascual-Leone also studied under the American psychologist Herman Witkin (1916-1979). Witkin—a student of Max Wertheimer, a founder of Gestalt Psychology—conducted organismic-experimental research on individual differences (cognitive styles) in cognitive and perceptional psychology as well as personality development; his focus was on psycho-social processes and cognitive differentiation. Witkin was an innovator who pioneered, from an organismic perspective, theories of cognitive styles, psychological differentiation, and learning styles.
Psychodynamics
John Bowlby was originally a follower of the Freudian tradition at the Tavistock Clinic in London, but broke away from Freud's key ideas and revolutionised the field. Bowlby's inspiration came from reading the work of Konrad Lorenz, the famous Nobel Prize–winning founder of the field of ethology or animal behaviour. In particular Bowlby was struck by the phenomenon of imprinting, which Lorenz had studied in birds, and he saw the possibility that infants might imprint on their mother in a similar way. Along with his student Mary Ainsworth he studied infant behaviour, and developed what he called attachment theory. He rejected Freud's ideas of damage caused by frustrated impulses, in favour of the idea that maternal deprivation is a major cause of disturbed development and later psychological problems. Later he realised that infants need a stable, safe person or persons to provide a feeling of security from which they can venture out and explore. Many other workers in the field have since carried out experiments on infants and on animals which seem to confirm and refine this idea.
Han F. de Wit
Han Frederik de Wit (born 1944) Research psychologist at the University of Amsterdam in 1974. He moved to expanded outside the formal psychology field in search for guidance in his spirituality. De Wit became internationally acknowledged as one of the founders of Contemplative Psychology. Today he teaches mediation at the Shambhala centers in the Netherlands and instructs seminars in the psychology of Buddhism.
Wilhelm Wundt
In 1875, Wundt was promoted to professor of "Inductive Philosophy" in Zurich, and in 1875, Wundt was made professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig where Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878) and Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) had initiated research on sensory psychology and psychophysics – and where two centuries earlier Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had developed his philosophy and theoretical psychology, which strongly influenced Wundt's intellectual path. Wundt’s admiration for Ernst Heinrich Weber was clear from his memoirs where he proclaimed that Weber should be regarded as the father of experimental psychology. . “I would rather call Weber the father of experimental psychology…It was Weber’s great contribution to think of measuring psychic quantities and of showing the exact relationships between them, to be the first to understand this and carry it out.”
Emil Kraepelin
Emil Kraepelin (; ; 15 February 1856 – 7 October 1926) was a German psychiatrist. H. J. Eysenck's "Encyclopedia of Psychology" identifies him as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics.
Cognitive psychology
One of the foremost minds with regard to developmental psychology, Jean Piaget, focused much of his attention on cognitive development from birth through adulthood. Though there have been considerable challenges to parts of his stages of cognitive development, they remain a staple in the realm of education. Piaget's concepts and ideas predated the cognitive revolution but inspired a wealth of research in the field of cognitive psychology and many of his principles have been blended with modern theory to synthesize the predominant views of today.
Eleanor Maccoby
Eleanor Emmons Maccoby (May 15, 1917 – December 11, 2018) was an American psychologist who is most recognized for her research and scholarly contributions to the field of child and family psychology. Throughout her career she studied developmental psychology, specifically, sex differences, gender development, gender differentiation, parent-child relations, child development, and social development from the child perspective.
Evolutionary developmental psychology
Additionally, evolutionary developmental psychologists emphasize research on psychological "development" and behaviors across the lifespan. Pioneers of EDP contrast their work with that of mainstream evolutionary psychologists, who they argue focus primarily on adults, especially on behaviors related to socializing and mating.
Evolutionary ecology
The basis of the central principles of evolutionary ecology can be attributed to Charles Darwin (1809–1882), specifically in referencing his theory of natural selection and population dynamics, which discusses how populations of a species change over time. According to Ernst Mayr, professor of Zoology at Harvard University, Darwin’s most distinct contributions to evolutionary biology and ecology are as follows: “The first is the non-constancy of species, or the modern conception of evolution itself. The second is the notion of branching evolution, implying the common descent of all species of living things on earth from a single unique origin.” Additionally, “Darwin further noted that evolution must be gradual, with no major breaks or discontinuities. Finally, he reasoned that the mechanism of evolution was natural selection.”
Richard Crutchfield
Richard Crutchfield (June 20, 1912 in Pittsburgh, USA – July 19, 1977 in Berkeley, California, USA) was an American experimental, personality and social psychologist who, in the 1930s, was instrumental in moving psychology from a tradition of single-factor experiments to an experimental design based on analysis of variance and covariance.
Mike Abrams (psychologist)
Mike Abrams (born July 16, 1953) is an American psychologist and co-author with Albert Ellis of several works on rational emotive and cognitive behavior therapy. He was instrumental in the formalization of Ellis' model of personality while coauthoring Ellis's only college textbook. Abrams' research with Ellis into rational emotive and cognitive behavior therapies (CBT) led him to propose that all successful psychotherapies were actually performing CBT - irrespective of their stated theoretical orientation. After Ellis' death Abrams continued Ellis' work on sexuality taking an evolutionary perspective to love and intimacy. This work reached fruition in his book on sexuality in press by Sage Publications. It is among a few texts on human sexuality taking an exclusively evolutionary perspective. Abrams took a new approach by interviewing many of the best known evolutionary psychologists such as David Buss, Doug Kendrick, Helen Fisher, and J. Philipe Rushton to provide multiple and often conflicting perspectives.
William James
William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James was a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential U.S. philosophers, and has been labelled the "Father of American psychology".
Evolutionary psychology
The idea of an "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" was first explored as a part of attachment theory by John Bowlby. This is the environment to which a particular evolved mechanism is adapted. More specifically, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness is defined as the set of historically recurring selection pressures that formed a given adaptation, as well as those aspects of the environment that were necessary for the proper development and functioning of the adaptation.
James Mark Baldwin
James Mark Baldwin (January 12, 1861, Columbia, South Carolina – November 8, 1934, Paris) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh and who was one of the founders of the Department of Psychology at the university. He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.
George M. Stratton
George Malcolm Stratton (September 26, 1865 – October 8, 1957) was an American psychologist who pioneered the study of perception in vision by wearing special glasses which inverted images up and down and left and right. He studied under one of the founders of modern psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, and started one of the first experimental psychology labs in America, at the University of California, Berkeley. Stratton's studies on binocular vision inspired many later studies on the subject. He was one of the initial members of the philosophy department at Berkeley, and the first chair of its psychology department. He also worked on sociology, focusing on international relations and peace. Stratton presided over the American Psychological Association in 1908, and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He wrote a book on experimental psychology and its methods and scope; published articles on the studies at his labs on perception, and on reviews of studies in the field; served on several psychological committees during and after World War I; and served as advisor to doctoral students who would go on to head psychology departments.
Phillip E. Johnson
Phillip E. Johnson (born June 18, 1940) is a retired UC Berkeley law professor, opponent of evolutionary science, co-founder of the pseudo-scientific intelligent design movement, author of the "Wedge strategy" and co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC) . He has described himself as "in a sense the father of the intelligent design movement". He is a critic of Darwinism, which he has described as "fully naturalistic evolution, involving chance mechanisms and natural selection". The wedge strategy aims to change public opinion and scientific consensus, and seeks to convince the scientific community to allow a role for theism, or causes beyond naturalistic explanation, in scientific discourse. Johnson has argued that scientists accepted the theory of evolution "before it was rigorously tested, and thereafter used all their authority to convince the public that naturalistic processes are sufficient to produce a human from a bacterium, and a bacterium from a mix of chemicals."
Evolutionary psychology
Adaptationist hypotheses regarding the etiology of psychological disorders are often based on analogies between physiological and psychological dysfunctions, as noted in the table below. Prominent theorists and evolutionary psychiatrists include Michael T. McGuire, Anthony Stevens, and Randolph M. Nesse. They, and others, suggest that mental disorders are due to the interactive effects of both nature and nurture, and often have multiple contributing causes.
Norman Adler
Norman Tenner Adler (June 7, 1941 - September 11, 2016) through his research, teaching, writing, and academic administration, made major contributions to the modern study of biological psychology and in American higher education, having helped develop the fields that are now labeled behavioral neurobiology and evolutionary psychology. One of Adler's prominent experiments included an in depth analysis of mating performance of male rats and its relation to fertilization in the female, which led him to observe how behaviour could affect reproduction in species. With his students and colleagues, he has worked at the interface between biology and behavior. They have stressed the importance of combining the study of physiological mechanisms controlling behavior with the functional/adaptive significance of behavior in an evolutionary context. He was influenced in this approach by his undergraduate teachers at Harvard, especially Paul Rozin, Jerry Hogan, and Gordon Bermant, and his student colleagues like Don Pfaff with whom he has maintained scientific relationships over the years. His research was also impacted by Daniel Lehrman, and he worked closely with Lehrman's student, Barry Komisaruk, on hormones and neural functioning. Adler is also a prominent figure in American higher education, especially the role of behavioral neuroscience in liberal arts education and religion in the college classroom. He participated in Phillip Zimbardo's PBS TV series Discovering Psychology, one of the first distance-learning courses in psychology.
Evolutionary psychology
Just as human physiology and evolutionary physiology have worked to identify physical adaptations of the body that represent "human physiological nature," the purpose of evolutionary psychology is to identify evolved emotional and cognitive adaptations that represent "human psychological nature." According to Steven Pinker, it is "not a single theory but a large set of hypotheses" and a term that "has also come to refer to a particular way of applying evolutionary theory to the mind, with an emphasis on adaptation, gene-level selection, and modularity." Evolutionary psychology adopts an understanding of the mind that is based on the computational theory of mind. It describes mental processes as computational operations, so that, for example, a fear response is described as arising from a neurological computation that inputs the perceptional data, e.g. a visual image of a spider, and outputs the appropriate reaction, e.g. fear of possibly dangerous animals. Under this view, any Domain-general learning is impossible because of the Combinatorial explosion. This implies Domain-specific learning. Evolutionary Psychology specifies the domain as the problems of survival and reproduction.
Oswald Külpe
Oswald Külpe (; 3 August 1862 – 30 December 1915) was one of the structural psychologists of the late 19th and early 20th century. Külpe, who is lesser known than his German mentor, Wilhelm Wundt, revolutionized experimental psychology at his time. In his obituary, Aloys Fischer wrote that, “undoubtedly Külpe was the second founder of experimental psychology on German soil; for with every change of base he made it a requirement that an experimental laboratory should be provided.”
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget (, ; ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
Eugene Gendlin
Eugene T. Gendlin (born "Eugen Gendelin" in Vienna, Austria; 25 December 1926 – 1 May 2017) was an American philosopher who developed ways of thinking about and working with living process, the bodily felt sense and the 'philosophy of the implicit'. Though he had no degree in the field of psychology, his advanced study with Carl Rogers, his longtime practice of psychotherapy and his extensive writings in the field of psychology have made him perhaps better known in that field than in philosophy. He studied under Carl Rogers, the founder of client-centered therapy, at the University of Chicago and received his PhD in philosophy in 1958. Gendlin’s theories impacted Rogers’ own beliefs and played a role in Rogers’ view of psychotherapy. From 1958 to 1963 Gendlin was Research Director at the Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute of the University of Wisconsin. He served as an Associate Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago from 1964 until 1995.
Eviatar Nevo
Eviatar Nevo (, born Feb. 2, 1929 in Haifa, Israel), is Professor Emeritus, founder and director of the Institute of Evolution at University of Haifa, Israel.
Nevo received a M.Sc and PhD (1964) from Hebrew University. His Ph.D thesis was entitled "Population studies of Anurans from the lower Cretaceous of Makhtesh Ramon, Israel". He founded the Institute of Evolution at Haifa in 1973. 
Nevo works with many evolutionary subjects, involving understanding and tracking of speciation processes, modifications of highly evolved traits (vision), climatic and geographic effects in sympatric speciation in insects, bacteria, fungi, mammals and crops. He is a proponent of evolutionary models where environmental stressors acting positively to shape genetic polymorphisms. The model of "Evolution Canyon" is a microscale open environment where two opposite slopes with contrasting climatic conditions have also finer biotic adaptations that have been researched at different biological scales, supporting the evolution in action generating evidence of sympatric speciation, and of particular impact and interest are the works in Drosophila and in wild barley.
Robert Ranulph Marett
Robert Ranulph Marett (13 June 1866 – 18 February 1943) was a British ethnologist. He was an exponent of what is sometimes called the Evolutionary School or more precisely the British Evolutionary School of Cultural anthropology. Founded by Marett's older colleague, Edward Burnett Tylor, it asserted that modern primitive societies evidence remnants of phases in the evolution of culture, which it attempted to recapture by comparative and historical methods. Marett focused primarily on the anthropology of religion. Asserting with Tylor the evolutionary origin of religions he modified Tylor's animistic theory to include the concept of mana. His anthropological teaching and writing career at Oxford University spanned the earlier 20th century prior to the Second World War. He trained many notable anthropologists. He was a colleague of John Myres and through him connected to the world of Aegean archaeology.
Functional psychology
Evolutionary psychology is based on the idea that knowledge concerning the function of the psychological phenomena affecting human evolution is necessary for a complete understanding of the human psyche. Even the project of studying the evolutionary functions of consciousness is now an active topic of study. Like evolutionary psychology, James's functionalism was inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Marcus Feldman
Marcus William Feldman (born 14 November 1942) is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, and co-director of the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics (CEHG) at Stanford University. He is an Australian-born mathematician turned American theoretical biologist, best known for his mathematical evolutionary theory and computational studies in evolutionary biology, and for originating with L. L. Cavalli-Sforza the theory of cultural evolution.
Donald Symons
Donald Symons (born 1942) is an American anthropologist best known as one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, and for pioneering the study of human sexuality from an evolutionary perspective. He is one of the most cited researchers in contemporary sex research. His work is referenced by scientists investigating an extremely diverse range of sexual phenomena. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker describes Symons' "The Evolution of Human Sexuality" (1979) as a "groundbreaking book" and "a landmark in its synthesis of evolutionary biology, anthropology, physiology, psychology, fiction, and cultural analysis, written with a combination of rigor and wit. It was a model for all subsequent books that apply evolution to human affairs, particularly mine."
Emil Wolfgang Menzel Jr.
Emil Wolfgang Menzel Jr. (April 16, 1929, Champa, India – April 7, 2012, Birmingham, Alabama) was a prominent primatologist and comparative psychologist.
In many ways, his pioneering observations and research laid the foundation and set the precedent for many contemporary research topics in psychology and primatology including nonverbal and gestural communication, theory of mind and behavioral economics.
Satoshi Kanazawa
Satoshi Kanazawa (born 16 November 1962) is an American-born British evolutionary psychologist and author. He is currently Reader in Management at the London School of Economics. His work uses evolutionary psychology to analyse social sciences such as sociology, economics, and anthropology. Kanazawa has been very controversial on subjects relating to race and intelligence, health and intelligence, multiculturalism, as well as the relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence. He attributes this to "political correctness" and "censorship", while his critics claim that what he does is "bad science" and "racist".
List of evolutionary psychologists
The following is a list of evolutionary psychologists or prominent contributors to the field of evolutionary psychology.
William Stern (psychologist)
William Stern (29 April 1871 – 27 March 1938), born Louis William Stern, was a German psychologist and philosopher. He is known for the development of personalistic psychology, which placed emphasis on the individual by examining measurable personality traits as well as the interaction of those traits within each person to create the self. Stern also coined the term intelligence quotient, or IQ, and invented the tone variator as a new way to study human perception of sound. Stern studied psychology and philosophy under Hermann Ebbinghaus at the University of Berlin, and quickly moved on to teach at the University of Breslau. Later he was appointed the position of professor at the University of Hamburg. Over the course of his career, Stern wrote many books pioneering new fields in psychology such as differential psychology, critical personalism, forensic psychology, and intelligence testing. Stern was also a pioneer in the field of child psychology. Working with his wife, Clara Joesephy, Stern kept meticulous diaries detailing the lives of their 3 children for 18 years. He used these journals to write several books that offered an unprecedented look into the psychological development of children over time.
Andrzej Nowak (psychologist)
Andrzej Nowak (born June 12, 1953 in Warsaw) – Polish psychologist, one of the founders of dynamical social psychology. He is a pioneer in applying computer simulations in social sciences.
Nowak received his M.A. (1978) and his Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Warsaw. His scientific interests include complex systems in psychology and social sciences.
Developmental psychology
Evolutionary developmental psychology is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of Darwinian evolution, particularly natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic (gene-environment interactions) processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.
Karola Stotz
According to Stotz there is a natural afﬁnity between the theoretical view of the nature of the mind and an understanding of how the mind developed and evolved. “Which kind of evolutionary theory you apply matters deeply to which kind of (evolutionary) psychology you get.”
For example, the ideas of nativist’s evolutionary psychologists are often based on the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis which explains the origin of behavioral, social and cognitive capacities by the sudden appearance of genetically determined mental modules or representational systems. 
As an alternative, Stotz proposes an Extended Evolutionary Psychology based on ideas of an Extended Evolutionary synthesis, Developmental Systems Theory, and embodied, embedded, enacted and extended models of cognition. She states that these approaches are a more appropriate alternative to traditional cognitivism and methodological individualism because they emphasise the importance of external scaffolding of cognition through developmental, ecological, cognitive and cultural niche construction.
Theodore Holmes Bullock
Theodore Holmes Bullock (16 May 1915 – 20 December 2005) is one of the founding fathers of neuroethology. During a career spanning nearly seven decades, this American academic was esteemed both as a pioneering and influential neuroscientist, examining the physiology and evolution of the nervous system across organizational levels, and as a champion of the comparative approach, studying species from nearly all major animal groups—coelenterates, annelids, arthropods, echinoderms, molluscs, and chordates.
Geoffrey Miller (psychologist)
Geoffrey F. Miller (born 1965 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American evolutionary psychologist, serving as an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico who has researched sexual selection in human evolution.
Elliot Aronson
Elliot Aronson (born January 9, 1932) is an American psychologist who is best known for his experiments on the theory of cognitive dissonance and for his invention of the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative teaching technique which facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice. In his popular (1972) social psychology textbook, "The Social Animal," (now in its 11th edition), he stated Aronson's First Law: "People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy," thus asserting the importance of situational factors in bizarre behavior. He is the only person in the 120-year history of the American Psychological Association to have won all three of its major awards: for writing, for teaching, and for research. In 2007 he received the William James Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science, in which he was cited as the scientist who "fundamentally changed the way we look at everyday life.” A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Aronson as the 78th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He officially retired in 1994 but continues to teach and write.
John Bowlby
Edward John Mostyn Bowlby CBE, MA (Cantab), BChir, MD, MRCP, FRCP, FRCPsych, Hon ScD (; 26 February 1907 – 2 September 1990) was a British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and for his pioneering work in attachment theory. A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Bowlby as the 49th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
History of evolutionary psychology
After his seminal work in developing theories of natural selection, Charles Darwin devoted much of his final years to the study of animal emotions and psychology. He wrote two books;"The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" in 1871 and "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" in 1872 that dealt with topics related to evolutionary psychology. He introduced the concepts of sexual selection to explain the presence of animal structures that seemed unrelated to survival, such as the peacock's tail. He also introduced theories concerning group selection and kin selection to explain altruism. Darwin pondered why humans and animals were often generous to their group members. Darwin felt that acts of generosity decreased the fitness of generous individuals. This fact contradicted natural selection which favored the fittest individual. Darwin concluded that while generosity decreased the fitness of individuals, generosity would increase the fitness of a group. In this case, altruism arose due to competition between groups. The following quote, from Darwin's "Origin of Species", is often interpreted by evolutionary psychologists as indication of his foreshadowing the emergence of the field:
Darwin's theory inspired William James's functionalist approach to psychology. At the core of his theory was a system of "instincts." James wrote that humans had many instincts, even more than other animals. These instincts, he said, could be overridden by experience and by each other, as many of the instincts were actually in conflict with each other.
The Adapted Mind
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture is a 1992 book edited by the anthropologist Jerome H. Barkow, the psychologist Leda Cosmides and the anthropologist John Tooby. First published by Oxford University Press, it is widely considered the foundational text of evolutionary psychology (EP), and outlines Cosmides and Tooby's integration of concepts from evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, as well as many other concepts that would become important in adaptationist research.
Władysław Witwicki
Władysław Witwicki (30 April 1878, Lubaczów – 21 December 1948, Konstancin) was a Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator, historian (of philosophy and art) and artist. Seen as one of the fathers of psychology in Poland. He studied at the University of Lwów and became a professor at the University of Warsaw.
Theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology
The theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology are the general and specific scientific theories that explain the ultimate origins of psychological traits in terms of evolution. These theories originated with Charles Darwin's work, including his speculations about the evolutionary origins of social instincts in humans. Modern evolutionary psychology, however, is possible only because of advances in evolutionary theory in the 20th century.
Gordon Allport
Gordon Willard Allport (November 11, 1897 – October 9, 1967) was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology. He contributed to the formation of values scales and rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often was too deeply interpretive, and a behavioral approach, which he thought did not provide deep enough interpretations from their data. He emphasized the uniqueness of each individual, and the importance of the present context, as opposed to past history, for understanding the personality.
Robert Boyd (anthropologist)
Robert Turner Boyd (born February 11, 1948) is an American anthropologist. He is Professor of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (SHESC) at Arizona State University (ASU). His research interests include evolutionary psychology and in particular the evolutionary roots of culture. Together with his primatologist wife, Joan B. Silk (who is also a Professor in SHESC at ASU), he wrote the textbook "How Humans Evolved".