Editing Evolutionary psychology (section)

==Evolutionary psychology and culture==
{{Main|Evolutionary psychology and culture|}}

Though evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations, considerable work has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture (Tooby and Cosmides, 1989).<ref name="ReferenceB">{{cite journal|last1=Tooby|first1=J.|last2=Cosmides|first2=L.|title=Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, part I. Theoretical considerations.|journal=Ethology and Sociobiology|date=1989|volume=10|issue=1–3|pages=29–49|doi=10.1016/0162-3095(89)90012-5|doi-access=free}}</ref> Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich (but by no means the only) source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect." (Tooby and Cosmides 1989).<ref name="ReferenceB"/>

Biological explanations of human culture also brought criticism to evolutionary psychology: Evolutionary psychologists see the human psyche and physiology as a genetic product and assume that genes contain the information for the development and control of the organism and that this information is transmitted from one generation to the next via genes.<ref name="LH">''Evolutionary Psychology: A Case Study in the Poverty of Genetic Determinism''. In Marc H. V. Van Regenmortel and David L. Hull, ''Promises and Limits of Reductionism in the Biomedical Sciences''. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken (NJ) 2002, ISBN 0-471-49850-5, pp. 233-254.</ref> Evolutionary psychologists thereby see physical and psychological characteristics of humans as genetically programmed. Even then, when evolutionary psychologists acknowledge the influence of the environment on human development, they understand the environment only as an activator or trigger for the programmed developmental instructions encoded in genes.<ref name="LH" /><ref name="Buller134">David J. Buller: ''Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology And The Persistent Quest For Human Nature''. MIT Press, Cambridge MA 2005, ISBN 978-0-262-02579-9, pp. 134-135.</ref> Evolutionary psychologists, for example, believe that the human brain is made up of innate modules, each of which is specialised only for very specific tasks, e.&nbsp;g. an anxiety module. According to evolutionary psychologists, these modules are given before the organism actually develops and are then activated by some environmental event. Critics object that this view is reductionist and that cognitive specialisation only comes about through the interaction of humans with their real environment, rather than the environment of distant ancestors.<ref name="LH" /><ref name="Buller134" /> Interdisciplinary approaches are increasingly striving to mediate between these opposing points of view and to highlight that biological and cultural causes need not be antithetical in explaining human behaviour and even complex cultural achievements.<ref>[[Nils Seethaler]]: ''Discrepant Explanatory Approaches in Anthropology and Evolutionary Psychology to the Phenomenon of Visual Art.'' In: Benjamin P. Lange, Sascha Schwarz: ''The Human Psyche between Nature and Culture''. Berlin 2015, pp. 74-82.</ref>