Toward a Developmental Evolutionary Psychology

After a century of intermittent dialogue between psychology and evolutionary biology, the outline of a synthesis between the two disciplines now appears to be emerging. The current form of this synthesis, referred to here as narrow evolutionary psychology 1 ( Barkow et al., 1992 ; Buss, 1999 ), is the union of two specific frameworks from evolutionary biology and psychology. Specifically, narrow evolutionary psychology brings together the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology, which views evolutionary change primarily in terms of changes in gene frequency, with a nativist cognitive psychology, which views the mind as a collection of relatively autonomous, specialized processors, or modules ( Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994 ). As I outline in more detail below, both strands of evolutionary psychology are largely adevelopmental. There is accumulating evidence, however, that both evolutionary and psychological theory must incorporate a developmental perspective in order to construct successful theory. For example, it is now well established that a major route to evolutionary change is via alterations in developmental programs. If this is indeed the case, then evolutionary change must act in accordance with the range of possible changes to these programs, which in the case of behavior and cognition involves alterations to the development of the brain. From a psychological perspective, it is increasingly clear that ontogeny plays a far more central role in shaping behavior and cognition than its marginalization in nativist cognitive psychology allows ( Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997 ). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.