Following Charles Darwin (1871), evolutionary psychology has analyzed the origins and functions of complex psychological adaptations. Following Egon Brunswik (1956) and J. J. Gibson (1979), ecological psychology has analyzed the adaptive fit between organisms and environments with regard to perception, judgment, and action. Despite their common bio-functional orientation, these fields have deve...

The emerging discipline of evolutionary developmental biology has opened up many new lines of investigation into morphological evolution. Here I explore how two of the core theoretical concepts in ‘evo-devo’ – modularity and homology – apply to evolutionary psychology. I distinguish three sorts of module developmental, functional and mental modules and argue that mental modules need only be ‘vi...

An evolutionary perspective offers many new insights in the study of group dynamics. First, groups are an inevitable aspect of human evolution, suggesting that humans have evolved a range of psychological mechanisms to deal with specific challenges of group living. Second, an evolutionary perspective combines and integrates knowledge from different social science disciplines such as psychology,...

In the present article, a reinterpretation of the concept of social capital is forwarded that incorporates the principles of evolutionary psychology. The authors propose that social capital, from the evolutionary psychological perspective, is any social relationship that, directly or indirectly, helps an individual maximize reproductive success through promoting survival, the acquisition of res...

Evolutionary psychology is an emerging paradigm for the social sciences that offers a powerful metatheoretical framework for personality psychology and, as I attempt to demonstrate in this article, for the psychology of religion as well. I argue that religion is not an evolved adaptation; rather, the diverse range of beliefs, behavior, and experience that we collectively refer to as religion em...

In this paper, based on recent scientific findings in the fields of neurology, evolutionary psychology and cognitive psychology we propose a software architecture and technology supported learning activities model.

1) British Academy Centenary Research Project, School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Crown St, Liverpool L69 7ZB, UK 2) new address: Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK 3) Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig D-0...

An evolutionary psychological perspective has much to offer the study of Internet behavior. However, cyber-psychologists have hitherto neglected this rich theoretical tradition and evolutionary psychologists have been slow to apply their perspective to computer-mediated behavior. This paper applies an evolutionary perspective to the study of Internet behavior in four relevant domains: (1) matin...