Charles Darwin was never entirely satisfied with the evolutionary role he originally gave to natural selection in On the Origin of Species. He later expressed reservations about attributing too much of evolution to the action of natural selection and survival of the fittest because he became convinced that nonfunctional structures evolving without natural selection could
Evolutionary humanism is a philosophical point of view centered on human interests and values in the context of natural selection and additional forces of evolution. Evolutionary humanists have called attention to the unity of the body and the mind, human continuity across populations and with other life forms, and natural instead of supernatural explanations. Evolutionary
Evolutionary epistemology considers the scientific processes and bounds of knowledge, with an emphasis on natural selection as the crucial source of sensate cognition by which organisms adapt to their environments. This mode of naturalistic epistemology contrasts significantly with the traditional transcendant formulation, which presupposes no particular format of knowledge. The traditional approach traces to Plato
The obvious as well as the ideal place from which to begin a consideration both of social Darwinism and of evolutionary ethics is the work of Charles Darwin and the ideas he developed and presented in On the Origin of Species (1859), which advocates both of social Darwinism and of evolutionary ethics have tried to
Ontology is that branch of philosophy that asks what exists. Traditionally, this has been understood to mean what kinds of things exist in general, but in recent times, it has also been applied to mean what objects a scientific theory requires to actually exist if it is to explain the phenomena. We must therefore ask
In a famous manifesto, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) claimed in 1973 that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” One could also wonder if anything in anthropology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Indeed, there is a part of anthropology that does not deal with evolutionary issues. This
While social sciences of the twentieth century could be characterized by endeavors to “debiologize” human nature, evolutionary thinking has become increasingly presentable in scientific rationale. The most influential approach utilizing evolutionary theory to answer questions in respect of communication is evolutionary psychology (EP). EP (or Darwinian psychology) is focused on how evolution has shaped human
Evolutionary personality psychology suggests that human personality variation is a meaningful and relevant source of human diversity, and that different combinations of heritable personality traits biologically prepare individuals to exploit the different social niches they inhabit. Human personality variation relates to numerous important life outcomes, including life history traits such as sexuality, sociality, fertility, morbidity
This article explores the evolutionary perspectives on the tend-and-befriend stress response within the framework of health psychology. Beginning with an introduction to health psychology and the evolutionary basis of stress responses, the article explores the roots of tend-and-befriend, presenting it as a complementary adaptive mechanism alongside the well-known fight-or-flight response. The discussion covers the evolutionary