EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary Psychology

Introduction

Evolutionary psychologists are interested in how particular abilities such as theory of mind arose and in particular how they contribute to an individual's fitness. Explain how theory of mind may have evolved in humans and what its adaptive function might be. There are different fields involve in the study of psychology. These fields include Physiological, Developmental, Differential, Educational, Abnormal, Clinical, and Industrial, Social, Vocational, Legal, Human Relation, Mental Hygiene and Engineering psychology.

History before the emergence of writing around 3000BC receives brief treatment, although it constitutes 99.9% of the five million year history of the human species. ..Humans diverged from the apes around seven million years ago. ..13 000 years since the end of the last Ice Age.

Jared Diamond's work spans scientific disciplines including biogeography, ecology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, molecular cell physiology, ornithology, and pre-Columbian pottery. His studies of the mating patterns of New Guinea birds led him to the study of human sexuality, summarized physiologically in his book Why Is Sex Fun?. He also wrote Guns, Germs and Steel, exploring the fallacy of assuming that Eurasians are inherently superior to other peoples, and explaining instead that Europeans and Asians had geographical advantages that allowed them to conquer the rest of the world.

Diamond's best-known book, Collapse, explains the pattern followed historically by societies approaching demise, from the Aztec to the Vikings, and challenges the widespread but uninformed assumption that technology can save the Earth's polluted and endangered environment. Late in Collapse, Diamond presents a map of the world's most environmentally damaged and endangered areas, and contrasts it with a map of the world's most politically violent, unstable, and inequitable areas, showing that the two maps are essentially the same, and bolstering his theory that these are two key factors leading societies to the brink of collapse.

Discussion

Until the end of the last Ice Age, around 11 000 BC, all people on all continents were hunter-gatherers. Different rates of development on different continents, from 11 000BC to 1500AD, were what led to technological and political inequalities of 1500AD. While Aboriginal Australians and many Native Americans remained hunter-gatherers, most of Eurasia and much of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa gradually developed agriculture, herding, metallurgy and complex political organisation. Parts of Eurasia, and one area of the Americas, independently developed writing as well. However, each of these new developments appeared earlier in Eurasia than elsewhere. For instance, the mass production of bronze tools which was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before 1500AD, was already established in Eurasia over 4000 years earlier. The stone technology of the Tasmanians, when first encountered by European explorers in 1642AD, was simpler than that prevalent in parts of the Upper Paleolithic Europe tens of thousands of years earlier.

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled ...