Towards an integration of evolutionary psychology and developmental science. New insights from evolutionary developmental biology
Year: 2008
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Evolutionary psychology has been proposed as a metatheoretical framework for psychology. We argue that evolutionary psychology should be expanded if it is to offer new insights regarding the major issues in psychology. Evolutionary developmental biology can provide valuable new insights into issues such as the domain-specificity of the human mind, the nature-nurture debate, stages in development, and the origin of individual differences. Evolutionary developmental biology provides evidence for the hypotheses that domain-general and domainspecific abilities co-occur, that nature and nurture interact in a dynamic and nonadditive way, that stages occur in development, and that individual differences are the result of pleiotropic effects during development. Evolutionary psychology has been advanced as a metatheory for psychology, that is, as a unifying theory that can accommodate a diversity of facts and findings from all fields within psychology (Cosmides, Tooby, & Barkow, 1992; Buss, 1995). The general idea is that psychological characteristics (e.g., sex specific mate preferences), like biological characteristics, have evolved over a 2 This chapter is published as: PLOEGER, A., VAN DER MAAS, H.L.J., & RAIJMAKERS, M.E.J. (2008). Is evolutionary psychology a metatheory for psychology? A discussion of four major issues in psychology from an evolutionary developmental perspective. Psychological Inquiry, 19, 1-18.
Author: Annemie Ploeger
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2153817132