Title: Evolutionary Psychology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Headings: Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary Psychology
1. Evolutionary Psychology: One research tradition among the various biological approaches to explaining human behavior
2. Evolutionary Psychology’s Theory and Methods
3. The Massive Modularity Hypothesis
4. Philosophy of biology vs. Evolutionary Psychology
5. Moral Psychology and Evolutionary Psychology
6. Human Nature
7. Applications of Evolutionary Psychology and Prospects for Further Debate
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Acknowledgments

Content: but see Bateson and Martin 1999; Bjorklund and Hernandez Blasi 2005 for examples of developmentalist work in an adaptationist vein.) These theorists believe that much of our behavior can be explained without appealing to a suite of specific psychological adaptations for that behavior. Instead they emphasize the role of development in the production of various human behavioral traits. From here on, “evolutionary psychology” refers to a specific research tradition among the many biological approaches to the study of human behavior. Paul Griffiths argues that evolutionary psychology owes theoretical debt to both sociobiology and ethology (Griffiths 2006; Griffiths 2008). Evolutionary psychologists acknowledge their debt to sociobiology but point out that they add a dimension to sociobiology: psychological mechanisms. Human behaviors are not a direct product of natural selection but rather the product of psychological mechanisms that were selected for.