Evolutionary Psychology

Passage A Evolutionary psychology has taught us to examine human behavior from the standpoint of the theory of evolution—to explain a given type of human behavior by examining how it contributes to the reproductive success of individuals exhibiting the behavior, and thereby to the proliferation of the genetic material responsible for causing an individual expends energy or other valuable resources promoting the welfare of another individual?

The answer probably lies in the psychological experiences of identification and empathy. Such experiences could have initially arisen in response to cues (like physical resemblance) that indicated the presence of shared genetic material in human ancestors. The psychological states provoked by these cues could have increased the chances of related individuals’ receiving child; genes promoting their own self-propagation may thus operate through instinctive actions that appear unselfish.

Since human ancestors lived in small, kin-based groups, the application of altruistic mechanisms to the entire group would have promoted the propagation of the genes responsible for those mechanisms. Later, these mechanisms may have come to apply to humans who are not kin when mechanisms may have arisen within a genetically “selfish” system.

Passage B Evolutionary psychology is a kind of conspiracy theory; that is, it explains behavior by imputing an interest (the proliferation of genes) that the agent of the behavior does not openly acknowledge, or indeed, is not even aware of. Thus, what seemed to be out to be your genes’ conspiracy to propagate themselves.

Such arguments can appear persuasive on the face of it. According to some evolutionary psychologists, an interest in the proliferation of genes explains monogamous families in animals whose offspring mature slowly. Human offspring mature slowly; and, at least in numerical terms, our species favors monogamous families. Evolutionary psychologists take of our interest in propagating our genes. Are they right?

Maybe yes, maybe no; this kind of inference needs to be handled with great care. There are, most often, all sorts of interests that would explain any given behavior. What is needed to make it decisive that a particular interest explains a particular behavior is that the behavior would be reasonable only after all; there must be some things that one cares for just for their own sakes.