Evolutionary Psychology — Key Terms (Notes 1-8)

A set of vocabulary-style flashcards covering key terms and concepts from the Evolutionary Psychology notes.

Evolutionary Psychology

The science of psychological adaptations; mental programs that evolved to guide thought and behavior.

Mental hardware

The physical aspects of the brain (neurons, circuits) that underlie psychology.

Mental software

The information and programs fed into the brain hardware to drive cognition and behavior.

Natural selection ingredients

Variation, different survival/reproduction among variation, and inheritance

Variation

Differences among individuals that selection can act upon.

Inheritance

Offspring receive traits from their parents; genetic transmission.

Darwin’s natural selection

The mechanism by which advantageous traits become more common over generations.

Mendel’s Law of Dominance

Dominant alleles mask recessive alleles in heterozygotes.

Mendel’s Law of Segregation

each organism inherits two alleles for each trait, one from each parent. they separate during gamete formation; each gamete carries one allele.

Mendel’s Law of Independent Assortment

Alleles of different genes assort independently, though linked traits can constrain this.

Darwin–Mendel synthesis

Integration of Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics; genes are units of heredity; mutations provide variation; selection changes gene frequencies.

genes (in the Darwin-Mendel synthesis)

units of heredity

Mutations

Random changes that create new genetic variation for selection to act on.

Ethology

Study of animal behavior in natural environments, focusing on adaptive significance and mechanisms.

Tinbergen’s four questions

Four explanations for behavior: proximate vs ultimate (development/mechanisms vs history/adaptive value).

Ontogeny - Tinbergen question

How a trait develops within an individual’s lifetime (proximate)

Phylogeny - Tinbergen question

Evolutionary history of a trait across species (ultimate cause).

Mechanisms - Tinbergen question

Underlying physiological/regulatory processes of a trait (proximate cause).

ultimate function - Tinbergen question

The function or benefit of a trait for survival and reproduction across evolutionary time - adaptive value. (ultimate)

Replicators

Entities (genes) that copy themselves across generations.

Vehicles

Organisms that carry replicators (genes) and expend resources in life.

Unit of selection

Genes (not individuals or groups) are the primary unit where selection acts.

Inclusive fitness

an organism's genetic success is derived not only from producing its own offspring but also from helping relatives reproduce, thereby passing on shared genes

Kin selection

Altruism directed toward relatives to enhance shared genes.

Reciprocal altruism

Mutual exchange of beneficial acts to enhance long-term genetic survival.

Trivers

Proposed reciprocal altruism, sexual selection, and parent-offspring conflict in evolution of social behavior.

Hamilton’s C < rB

Altruistic behavior toward relatives is favored if cost to actor (C) is less than relatedness (r) times benefit to recipient (B).

Chomsky

Linguistic nativism: language is predisposed; critique of strict behaviorism and the idea of mind as a blank slate.

Modern Cognitive Synthesis

Integration of evolutionary thinking with cognitive science to understand the mind as an evolved information-processing system.

anti-teleology in evolution

There is no inherent purpose or foresight in evolution; natural selection acts in the moment.

George William’s criteria for defining adaptation

traits should be efficient, precise, reliable, unlikely to arrive by chance, optimized, and not better explained as a by-product of another adaptation

Noise

difference in the calibrations of people’s adaptations

Franz Boas

Known for fieldwork and cultural relativism; argued against fixed-stage cultural evolution.

Cultural relativism

Beliefs, values, and practices should be understood within their own cultural context.

Ethnography

Fieldwork method to study cultures and test hypotheses about human behavior.

Claude Levi-Strauss

Structuralism: cultures share deep cognitive structures despite surface differences.

Sociobiology

Application of evolutionary theory to social behavior, later evolving into human behavioral ecology.

Sherwood Washburn

believed that fieldwork examining non-human primates and extant hunter-gatherer communities could illuminate human evolution

• Pulled together phylogenetic anthropology and human cultural fieldwork and argued that human behavior, culture, and biology should be studied together through an evolutionary lens

equipotentiality

the principle that any pair of stimuli can be associated with equal ease

Don Symons

anthropologist, founder of evolutionary psychology - argued that evolution crafted psychological adaptations for guiding human sexual behavior