Editing Evolutionary psychology (section)

===Survival and individual-level psychological adaptations===
Problems of survival are clear targets for the evolution of physical and psychological adaptations. Major problems the ancestors of present-day humans faced included food selection and acquisition; territory selection and physical shelter; and avoiding predators and other environmental threats.<ref name=Buss-D-M-2011b>Buss, D.M. (2011). Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind</ref>

====Consciousness====
{{See also|Consciousness|Animal consciousness}}

Consciousness meets [[George C. Williams (biologist)|George Williams]]' criteria of species universality, complexity,<ref>* {{cite journal |jstor=188711 |pages=648–70 |last1=Nichols |first1=S. |last2=Grantham |first2=T. |title=Adaptive Complexity and Phenomenal Consciousness |volume=67 |issue=4 |journal=Philosophy of Science |year=2000 |doi=10.1086/392859 |url=http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/Papers/evolcons(final).pdf |access-date=28 October 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170813055023/http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~snichols/Papers/evolcons(final).pdf |archive-date=13 August 2017 |url-status=dead |df=dmy-all |citeseerx=10.1.1.515.9722 |s2cid=16484193 }}</ref> and functionality, and it is a [[Phenotypic trait|trait]] that apparently increases fitness.<ref>Freeman and Herron. ''Evolutionary Analysis.'' 2007. Pearson Education, NJ.</ref>

In his paper "Evolution of consciousness," [[John Eccles (neurophysiologist)|John Eccles]] argues that special anatomical and physical adaptations of the mammalian [[cerebral cortex]] gave rise to consciousness.<ref>{{cite journal |jstor=2360081 |pages=7320–24 |last1=Eccles |first1=J. C. |title=Evolution of consciousness |volume=89 |issue=16 |journal=Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |year=1992 |pmid=1502142 |pmc=49701 |doi=10.1073/pnas.89.16.7320|bibcode=1992PNAS...89.7320E |doi-access=free }}</ref> In contrast, others have argued that the recursive circuitry underwriting consciousness is much more primitive, having evolved initially in pre-mammalian species because it improves the capacity for interaction with both social ''and'' natural environments by providing an energy-saving "neutral" gear in an otherwise energy-expensive motor output machine.<ref>Peters, Frederic [http://precedings.nature.com/documents/2444/version/1 "Consciousness as Recursive, Spatiotemporal Self-Location"]</ref> Once in place, this recursive circuitry may well have provided a basis for the subsequent development of many of the functions that consciousness facilitates in higher organisms, as outlined by [[Bernard J. Baars]].<ref>Baars, Bernard J. ''A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness.'' 1993. Cambridge University Press.</ref> [[Richard Dawkins]] suggested that humans evolved consciousness in order to make themselves the subjects of thought.<ref name=Gaulin-5/> Daniel Povinelli suggests that large, tree-climbing [[ape]]s evolved consciousness to take into account one's own mass when moving safely among tree branches.<ref name=Gaulin-5/> Consistent with this hypothesis, [[Gordon Gallup]] found that [[chimpanzee]]s and [[orangutan]]s, but not little monkeys or terrestrial [[gorilla]]s, demonstrated self-awareness in mirror tests.<ref name=Gaulin-5/>

The concept of consciousness can refer to voluntary action, awareness, or wakefulness. However, even voluntary behavior involves unconscious mechanisms. Many cognitive processes take place in the cognitive unconscious, unavailable to conscious awareness. Some behaviors are conscious when learned but then become unconscious, seemingly automatic. Learning, especially implicitly learning a skill, can take place seemingly outside of consciousness. For example, plenty of people know how to turn right when they ride a bike, but very few can accurately explain how they actually do so.<ref name=Gaulin-5/>

Evolutionary psychology approaches self-deception as an adaptation that can improve one's results in social exchanges.<ref name=Gaulin-5/>

Sleep may have evolved to conserve energy when activity would be less fruitful or more dangerous, such as at night, and especially during the winter season.<ref name=Gaulin-5>Gaulin and McBurney 2003 p. 101–21.</ref>

====Sensation and perception====
{{See also|Sensation (psychology)|perception}}

Many experts, such as [[Jerry Fodor]], write that the purpose of perception is knowledge, but evolutionary psychologists hold that its primary purpose is to guide action.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> For example, they say, [[depth perception]] seems to have evolved not to help us know the distances to other objects but rather to help us move around in space.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Evolutionary psychologists say that animals from fiddler crabs to humans use eyesight for collision avoidance, suggesting that vision is basically for directing action, not providing knowledge.<ref name=Gaulin-4>Gaulin and McBurney 2003 pp. 81–101.</ref>

Building and maintaining sense organs is metabolically expensive, so these organs evolve only when they improve an organism's fitness.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> More than half the brain is devoted to processing sensory information, and the brain itself consumes roughly one-fourth of one's metabolic resources, so the senses must provide exceptional benefits to fitness.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Perception accurately mirrors the world; animals get useful, accurate information through their senses.<ref name=Gaulin-4/>

Scientists who study perception and sensation have long understood the human senses as adaptations to their surrounding worlds.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Depth perception consists of processing over half a dozen visual cues, each of which is based on a regularity of the physical world.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Vision evolved to respond to the narrow range of electromagnetic energy that is plentiful and that does not pass through objects.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Sound waves go around corners and interact with obstacles, creating a complex pattern that includes useful information about the sources of and distances to objects.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Larger animals naturally make lower-pitched sounds as a consequence of their size.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> The range over which an animal hears, on the other hand, is determined by adaptation. Homing pigeons, for example, can hear the very low-pitched sound (infrasound) that carries great distances, even though most smaller animals detect higher-pitched sounds.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Taste and smell respond to chemicals in the environment that are thought to have been significant for fitness in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> For example, salt and sugar were apparently both valuable to the human or pre-human inhabitants of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, so present-day humans have an intrinsic hunger for salty and sweet tastes.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> The sense of touch is actually many senses, including pressure, heat, cold, tickle, and pain.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Pain, while unpleasant, is adaptive.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> An important adaptation for senses is range shifting, by which the organism becomes temporarily more or less sensitive to sensation.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> For example, one's eyes automatically adjust to dim or bright ambient light.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Sensory abilities of different organisms often coevolve, as is the case with the hearing of echolocating bats and that of the moths that have evolved to respond to the sounds that the bats make.<ref name=Gaulin-4/>

Evolutionary psychologists contend that perception demonstrates the principle of modularity, with specialized mechanisms handling particular perception tasks.<ref name=Gaulin-4/> For example, people with damage to a particular part of the brain have the specific defect of not being able to recognize faces (prosopagnosia).<ref name=Gaulin-4/> Evolutionary psychology suggests that this indicates a so-called face-reading module.<ref name=Gaulin-4/>

====Learning and facultative adaptations====
In evolutionary psychology, learning is said to be accomplished through evolved capacities, specifically facultative adaptations.<ref name=LearningG8>Gaulin and McBurney 2003 Chapter 8.</ref> Facultative adaptations express themselves differently depending on input from the environment.<ref name=LearningG8/> Sometimes the input comes during development and helps shape that development.<ref name=LearningG8/> For example, migrating birds learn to orient themselves by the stars during a [[critical period]] in their maturation.<ref name=LearningG8/> Evolutionary psychologists believe that humans also learn language along an evolved program, also with critical periods.<ref name=LearningG8/> The input can also come during daily tasks, helping the organism cope with changing environmental conditions.<ref name=LearningG8/> For example, animals evolved [[Pavlovian conditioning]] in order to solve problems about causal relationships.<ref name=LearningG8/> Animals accomplish learning tasks most easily when those tasks resemble problems that they faced in their evolutionary past, such as a rat learning where to find food or water.<ref name=LearningG8/> Learning capacities sometimes demonstrate differences between the sexes.<ref name=LearningG8/> In many animal species, for example, males can solve spatial problems faster and more accurately than females, due to the effects of male hormones during development.<ref name=LearningG8/> The same might be true of humans.<ref name=LearningG8/>

====Emotion and motivation====
{{Main|Evolution of emotion}}
Motivations direct and energize behavior, while emotions provide the affective component to motivation, positive or negative.<ref name=Gaulin-6>Gaulin and McBurney 2003 pp. 121–42.</ref> In the early 1970s, [[Paul Ekman]] and colleagues began a line of research which suggests that many emotions are universal.<ref name=Gaulin-6/> He found evidence that humans share at least five basic emotions: fear, sadness, happiness, anger, and disgust.<ref name=Gaulin-6/> Social emotions evidently evolved to motivate social behaviors that were adaptive in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.<ref name=Gaulin-6/> For example, spite seems to work against the individual but it can establish an individual's reputation as someone to be feared.<ref name=Gaulin-6/> Shame and pride can motivate behaviors that help one maintain one's standing in a community, and self-esteem is one's estimate of one's status.<ref name=moralanimal/><ref name=Gaulin-6/>
Motivation has a neurobiological basis in the [[reward system]] of the brain. Recently, it has been suggested that reward systems may evolve in such a way that there may be an [[inherent]] or unavoidable [[trade-off]] in the motivational system for activities of short versus long duration.<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Belke | first1 = T. W. | last2 = Garland | first2 = T. Jr. | year = 2007 | title = A brief opportunity to run does not function as a reinforcer for mice selected for high daily wheel-running rates | journal = [[Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior]] | volume = 88 | issue = 2| pages = 199–213 | doi=10.1901/jeab.2007.62-06| pmc = 1986434 | pmid=17970415}}</ref>

====Cognition====
Cognition refers to internal representations of the world and internal information processing. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, cognition is not "general purpose". Cognition uses heuristics, or strategies, that generally increase the likelihood of solving problems that the ancestors of present-day humans routinely faced in their lives. For example, present-day humans are far more likely to solve logic problems that involve detecting cheating (a common problem given humans' social nature) than the same logic problem put in purely abstract terms.<ref name=Gaulin-7>Gaulin and McBurney 2003 Chapter 7.</ref> Since the ancestors of present-day humans did not encounter truly random events and lived under simpler life terms, present-day humans may be cognitively predisposed to incorrectly identify patterns in random sequences. "Gamblers' Fallacy" is one example of this. Gamblers may falsely believe that they have hit a "lucky streak" even when each outcome is actually random and independent of previous trials. Most people believe that if a fair coin has been flipped 9 times and Heads appears each time, that on the tenth flip, there is a greater than 50% chance of getting Tails.<ref name=Gaulin-6/> Humans find it far easier to make diagnoses or predictions using frequency data than when the same information is presented as probabilities or percentages. This could be due to the ancestors of present-day humans living in relatively small tribes (usually with fewer than 150 people) where frequency information was more readily available and experienced less random occurrences in their lives.<ref name=Gaulin-6/>

====Personality====
Evolutionary psychology is primarily interested in finding commonalities between people, or basic human psychological nature. From an evolutionary perspective, the fact that people have fundamental differences in personality traits initially presents something of a puzzle.<ref name=Gaulin-9>Gaulin and McBurney 2003 Chapter 9.</ref> (Note: The field of behavioral genetics is concerned with statistically partitioning differences between people into genetic and environmental sources of variance. However, understanding the concept of [[heritability]] can be tricky – heritability refers only to the differences between people, never the degree to which the traits of an individual are due to environmental or genetic factors, since traits are always a complex interweaving of both.)

Personality traits are conceptualized by evolutionary psychologists as due to normal variation around an optimum, due to frequency-dependent selection (behavioral [[polymorphism (biology)|polymorphisms]]), or as facultative adaptations. Like variability in height, some personality traits may simply reflect inter-individual variability around a general optimum.<ref name=Gaulin-9/> Or, personality traits may represent different genetically predisposed "behavioral morphs" – alternate behavioral strategies that depend on the frequency of competing behavioral strategies in the population. For example, if most of the population is generally trusting and gullible, the behavioral morph of being a "cheater" (or, in the extreme case, a sociopath) may be advantageous.<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.1017/S0140525X00039595 |title=The sociobiology of sociopathy: An integrated evolutionary model |year=2010 |last1=Mealey |first1=Linda |journal=[[Behavioral and Brain Sciences]] |volume=18 |issue=3 |pages=523–41|s2cid=53956461 }}
</ref> Finally, like many other psychological adaptations, personality traits may be facultative – sensitive to typical variations in the social environment, especially during early development. For example, later-born children are more likely than firstborns to be rebellious, less conscientious and more open to new experiences, which may be advantageous to them given their particular niche in family structure.<ref>{{cite book |last=Sulloway |first=F. |year=1996 |title=Born to rebel. |url=https://archive.org/details/borntorebelbirth00sull |url-access=registration |location=NY |publisher=Pantheon|isbn=9780679442325 }}</ref>

Shared environmental influences do play a role in personality and are not always of less importance than genetic factors. However, shared environmental influences often decrease to near zero after adolescence but do not completely disappear.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Bouchard |first=T. J. |year=2004 |title=Genetic influence on human psychological traits. A survey. |journal=Current Directions in Psychological Science |volume=13 |number=4 |pages=148–51 |access-date=14 September 2014 |url=http://www.psy.miami.edu/faculty/dmessinger/c_c/rsrcs/rdgs/temperament/bouchard.04.curdir.pdf |doi=10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00295.x |s2cid=17398272 }}</ref>

====Language====
{{See also|Evolutionary linguistics|Evolutionary psychology of language}}

According to [[Steven Pinker]], who builds on the work by [[Noam Chomsky]], the universal human ability to learn to talk between the ages of 1 – 4, basically without training, suggests that language acquisition is a distinctly human psychological adaptation (see, in particular, Pinker's ''[[The Language Instinct]]''). Pinker and [[Paul Bloom (psychologist)|Bloom]] (1990) argue that language as a mental faculty shares many likenesses with the complex organs of the body which suggests that, like these organs, language has evolved as an adaptation, since this is the only known mechanism by which such complex organs can develop.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Pinker |first1=S. |last2=Bloom |first2=P. |year=1990 |title=Natural language and natural selection |journal=[[Behavioral and Brain Sciences]] |volume=13 |issue=4 |pages=707–27 |doi=10.1017/S0140525X00081061 |citeseerx=10.1.1.116.4044 |s2cid=6167614 }}</ref>

Pinker follows Chomsky in arguing that the fact that children can learn any human language with no explicit instruction suggests that language, including most of grammar, is basically innate and that it only needs to be activated by interaction. Chomsky himself does not believe language to have evolved as an adaptation, but suggests that it likely evolved as a byproduct of some other adaptation, a so-called [[Spandrel (biology)|spandrel]]. But Pinker and Bloom argue that the organic nature of language strongly suggests that it has an adaptational origin.<ref>Workman, Lance and Will Reader (2004) Evolutionary psychology: an introduction. Cambridge University Press p. 259</ref>

Evolutionary psychologists hold that the [[FOXP2]] gene may well be associated with the evolution of human language.<ref name=10WR>Workman, Lance and Will Reader (2008). Evolutionary psychology: an introduction. 2nd Ed. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 10.</ref> In the 1980s, psycholinguist [[Myrna Gopnik]] identified a dominant gene that causes language impairment in the [[KE family]] of Britain.<ref name=10WR/> This gene turned out to be a mutation of the FOXP2 gene.<ref name=10WR/> Humans have a unique allele of this gene, which has otherwise been closely conserved through most of mammalian evolutionary history.<ref name=10WR/> This unique allele seems to have first appeared between 100 and 200 thousand years ago, and it is now all but universal in humans.<ref name=10WR/> However, the once-popular idea that FOXP2 is a 'grammar gene' or that it triggered the emergence of language in ''[[Homo sapiens]]'' is now widely discredited.<ref>Diller, K. C. and R. L. Cann 2009. Evidence against a genetic-based revolution in language 50,000 years ago. In R. Botha and C. Knight (eds), ''The Cradle of Language.'' Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–49.</ref>

Currently, several competing theories about the evolutionary origin of language coexist, none of them having achieved a general consensus.<ref name=W&R-2008:277>Workman & Reader 2008:277 "There are a number of hypotheses suggesting that language evolved to fulfill a social function such as social grooming (to bind large groups together), the making of social contracts (to enable monogamy and male provisioning) and the use of language to impress potential mates. While each of these hypotheses has its merits, each is still highly speculative and requires more evidence from different areas of research (such as linguistics and anthropology)."</ref> Researchers of language acquisition in primates and humans such as [[Michael Tomasello]] and [[Talmy Givón]], argue that the innatist framework has understated the role of imitation in learning and that it is not at all necessary to posit the existence of an innate grammar module to explain human language acquisition. Tomasello argues that studies of how children and primates actually acquire communicative skills suggest that humans learn complex behavior through experience, so that instead of a module specifically dedicated to language acquisition, language is acquired by the same cognitive mechanisms that are used to acquire all other kinds of socially transmitted behavior.<ref>Workman, Lance and Will Reader (2004) Evolutionary psychology: an introduction. Cambridge University Press p. 267</ref>

On the issue of whether language is best seen as having evolved as an adaptation or as a spandrel, evolutionary biologist [[W. Tecumseh Fitch]], following [[Stephen J. Gould]], argues that it is unwarranted to assume that every aspect of language is an adaptation, or that language as a whole is an adaptation. He criticizes some strands of evolutionary psychology for suggesting a pan-adaptionist view of evolution, and dismisses Pinker and Bloom's question of whether "Language has evolved as an adaptation" as being misleading. He argues instead that from a biological viewpoint the evolutionary origins of language is best conceptualized as being the probable result of a convergence of many separate adaptations into a complex system.<ref>W. Tecumseh Fitch (2010) The Evolution of Language. Cambridge University Press pp. 65–66</ref> A similar argument is made by [[Terrence Deacon]] who in ''[[The Symbolic Species]]'' argues that the different features of language have co-evolved with the evolution of the mind and that the ability to use symbolic communication is integrated in all other cognitive processes.<ref>Deacon, Terrence W. (1997) The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. W.W. Norton & Co</ref>

If the theory that language could have evolved as a single adaptation is accepted, the question becomes which of its many functions has been the basis of adaptation. Several evolutionary hypotheses have been posited: that language evolved for the purpose of social grooming, that it evolved as a way to show mating potential or that it evolved to form social contracts. Evolutionary psychologists recognize that these theories are all speculative and that much more evidence is required to understand how language might have been selectively adapted.<ref>Workman, Lance and Will Reader (2004) Evolutionary psychology: an introduction. Cambridge University Press p. 277</ref>