Right. You want the history of evolutionary psychology. Don't expect me to be thrilled about it. It’s a story, I suppose, like any other. Full of ambition, blind spots, and the usual human tendency to complicate things.
19th Century: The Seed of an Idea
It all started, as these things often do, with a man who saw further than most. Charles Darwin, naturally. He didn't just stop at finches and fossils; he looked at us, at our peculiar human traits – our intellect, our messy emotions, our baffling sense of morality, our very capacity for language and culture – and he posited that these weren't just random gifts. No, he argued they had roots, evolutionary roots, shaped by the very forces that sculpted the rest of the natural world. He was particularly interested in how natural selection, that relentless engine, operated in social creatures like ourselves, hinting at mechanisms like group selection, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism. It’s almost quaint, in a way, that he was looking at the why behind our social fabric, long before it became a fashionable academic pursuit.
Darwin’s ideas, as you might imagine, rippled. They nudged minds like Wilhelm Wundt, James Mark Baldwin, William James, Sigmund Freud, George Herbert Mead, Konrad Lorenz, and Niko Tinbergen. A rather illustrious, if somewhat disparate, group. But then, as often happens, the prevailing winds shifted. By the early 1900s, American psychology had taken a sharp turn, favoring the sterile precision of laboratory experimentation over Darwin's more naturalistic observations. It was a regrettable, if predictable, move. The focus narrowed, drifting towards behaviorism and seeking immediate, proximate explanations for our actions, largely sidestepping the grander evolutionary narrative.
Darwin himself, bless his persistent soul, didn't let it go. In the twilight of his career, he delved into the evolutionary underpinnings of what he considered our most defining characteristics: our aesthetic tastes, our moral compass, our linguistic abilities, our intellect, and our culture. He produced two significant works, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871 and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, which tackled these very themes. He even delved into the minutiae of insect behavior and, in a rather touching display, meticulously observed his own infant son, William, noting things like infant-adult communication, emotional displays, early reasoning, jealousy, and the nascent stirrings of self-awareness. Observations that, remarkably, still hold water today.
He also introduced the concept of sexual selection, a rather clever way to explain traits that seemed to defy mere survival – like a peacock's ostentatious tail or, more relevantly, our own relative lack of body hair. He explored parental investment to dissect the differing roles of males and females in reproduction. And to account for acts of self-sacrifice, he theorized about group selection, reciprocal altruism, and kin selection. It’s fascinating, in a morbid sort of way, how he wrestled with the paradox of altruism. Why would an individual sacrifice for the group, seemingly defying the very principle of individual fitness? Darwin’s answer, that group competition could favor altruistic tendencies within a group, leading to the group's overall survival, is a cornerstone that still resonates. He even presciently wrote in The Origin of Species:
"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation."
It’s as if he knew what was coming, a quiet prophecy etched in ink.
20th Century: A Detour and a Re-emergence
Darwin's intellectual lineage continued, notably influencing William James and his functionalist approach. James, with his focus on the "why" of mental processes, posited a system of "instincts" in humans, even more numerous than in other animals, though he wisely noted these could be shaped and overridden by experience.
Tooby and Cosmides, in their Evolutionary Psychology Primer, rightly highlight James's insight into what they call "instinct blindness"—our tendency to overlook the evolutionary basis of our most "natural" behaviors. James urged us to "make the natural seem strange," a mental contortion necessary to truly understand our innate predispositions. He illustrated this with a rather amusing passage:
"It takes…a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made for all eternity to be loved! And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in the presence of particular objects. ... To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be loved; to the bear, the she-bear. To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her. Thus we may be sure that, however mysterious some animals' instincts may appear to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them."
Tooby and Cosmides then add their own, typically dry, assessment: "Many psychologists avoid the study of natural competences, thinking that there is nothing there to be explained." Precisely.
There’s a case to be made for the anarchist Peter Kropotkin as an early proponent, with his 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution , arguing that our instinct for cooperation was an evolutionary adaptation. And William McDougall, in his 1919 An Introduction to Social Psychology, explicitly used the term "evolutionary psychology," stating that only such a comparative and evolutionary approach could truly form the basis for psychology, building on Darwin's work.
After the Second World War, the study of animal behavior, particularly ethology, experienced a resurgence. Pioneers like Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen laid crucial theoretical groundwork, earning them a Nobel Prize. Even Desmond Morris, with his popular book The Naked Ape , attempted to frame human behavior through an evolutionary lens, though his explanations often fell into teleological traps – implying evolution had a predetermined goal.
Then came E. O. Wilson in 1975. His monumental book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis , attempted to unify studies of animal behavior, social dynamics, and evolutionary theory, crucially including a chapter on humans. This, as you can imagine, ignited a firestorm of debate. Wilson’s application of evolutionary analysis to human behavior was, to put it mildly, controversial.
Despite the uproar, Sociobiology marked a turning point. Evolutionary thinking finally had a distinct foothold in psychology. Wilson himself saw human sociobiology and what would become evolutionary psychology as fundamentally the same endeavor. Edward H. Hagen, in The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, acknowledges the controversy but rightly calls sociobiology a "scientific triumph," now integral to biology departments. The term behavioral ecology often serves as a less charged substitute.
Modern Use of the Term "Evolutionary Psychology"
The specific term "evolutionary psychology" itself gained traction later. Michael Ghiselin used it in a 1973 article in Science. However, it was Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby who truly popularized it with their 1992 book, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and The Generation of Culture . You might see it abbreviated as "EvoPsych" or similar.
A key distinction evolutionary psychology makes, setting it apart from earlier sociobiology, is the concept of organisms as "adaptation executors" rather than "fitness maximizers." This subtle but important point acknowledges that our evolved psychological mechanisms—our emotions, motivations, and cognitive processes—were shaped by ancestral environments and may not always serve our current "fitness" optimally. This explains phenomena like our innate craving for fats and sugars, which was adaptive when such resources were scarce but contributes to health issues today. It's a "fitness lag," if you will.
Furthermore, while sociobiology and behavioral ecology often focus on overt behavior, evolutionary psychology digs deeper, seeking to identify the underlying psychological adaptations and how they interact with developmental and environmental factors to produce behavior. It’s about the mechanisms, not just the output.
Before 1990, Darwin was a whisper in introductory psychology textbooks. By the 90s, evolutionary psychology was often dismissed as a fringe theory, with its proponents portraying themselves as an embattled minority. Textbook coverage was frequently hostile. Now, according to those in the field, the coverage is more neutral, even balanced. The presence of evolutionary theory in psychology has steadily grown, proponents claim it now occupies a central role. It’s a slow burn, this acceptance. Much like everything else that’s actually worth understanding.