Examining the Acceptance of and Resistance to Evolutionary Psychology

Abstract

The field of psychology remains a divided one. Several different sub-disciplines (e.g., developmental, cognitive, behaviorism, social, etc.) form what could be a unified scientific area. However, there is no widely accepted theory of unification. Charles Darwin once theorized that evolutionary theory would change the foundation of psychology; but over the years, evolutionary psychology has been met with hostile resistance from some of the prominent psychologists within the other sub-disciplines. Yet in recent years, all of the divided sub-disciplines of psychology have been slowly implementing evolutionary principles into their literature and research. This slow integration of evolutionary psychology into the other sub-disciplines indicates the possibility of a unified psychology with evolution as its foundation. This paper briefly reviews the literature within each major sub-discipline of psychology to show their implementation of evolutionary psychological theories, indicating the possibility of evolutionary psychology becoming the unifying paradigm upon which the entire field of psychology can be based. A call for action to continue this process is also discussed.

Evolutionary and differential psychology: conceptual conflicts and the path to integration

“…These attempts ultimately proved conceptually inadequate, as many were highly reminiscent of the genetic-determinist theories then-prevalent in ethology and zoology, or depended intimately on the then-controversial prospect of group-selection (Gould and Lewontin, 1979; Gould, 1981; Vining, 1986). Only in the late 1980s did the adaptationist paradigm of evolutionary psychology fully emerge (Buss, 1984, 1995; Cosmides and Tooby, 1989; Tooby and Cosmides, 1989), requiring another decade of development before the approach became widely acknowledged (Confer et al, 2010; Fitzgerald and Whitaker, 2010). Evolutionary psychologists established a refined adaptationist approach, drawing from contemporary cognitive psychology to strongly emphasize the modularity and domain-specificity of hypothesized psychological adaptations (Cosmides and Tooby, 1987, 1997; Nesse and Lloyd, 1992; Pinker and Bloom, 1992; Pinker, 1997).…”

“…Stated briefly, adaptationism is a paradigm for analyzing the physical and behavioral characteristics of organisms by focusing on functionally complex features which can only arise through natural selective pressures (see Daly and Wilson, 1999 for a brief review of the origins of adaptationism in behavioral science). Despite some enduring camps of resistance (Rose and Rose, 2000; Buller, 2005; Richardson, 2007), the literature shows a trend of increasing acceptance of adaptationism in diverse fields of psychology (Confer et al, 2010; Fitzgerald and Whitaker, 2010). Many recent unification efforts orient around evolutionary theories and approaches (Sternberg and Grigorenko, 2001; Henriques, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2011; Gintis, 2007).…”

The failure to achieve sustainability may be in our genes

“…Darwin's evolutionary framework that revolutionized biology and the medical sciences, and later physical anthropology, helped behavioral scientists reconceptualize human and animal behavior (see Fitzgerald & Whitaker, 2010 for a recent review). It was thus only a matter of time before psychologists and human ecologists began to explore the ultimate causes of overconsumption (Hamilton, 2010;Miller, 2009;Pratarelli, 2003Pratarelli, , 2008Rees, 2006;Saad, 2007;Wackernagel & Rees, 1996).…”

Catalog Learning: Carabid Beetles Learn to Manipulate with Innate Coherent Behavioral Patterns

“…In his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin (1859) theorized that evolutionary theory would change the foundation of psychology. Although many researchers have appreciated Tinbergen's (1963) four fundamental questions concerning the ontogeny and casual mechanisms of cognition, and the phylogeny and functions of cognitive skills, only in recent years have all of the divided sub-disciplines of psychology started to implement evolutionary principles into their literature and research (Fitzgerald and Whitaker, 2010). Comparative psychologists have developed new techniques to probe the cognitive mechanisms underlying animal behavior, and they have become increasingly skillful at adapting methodologies to test diverse species (MacLean et al, 2012; Vonk and Shackelford, 2012).…”