ABSTRACT
The evolution and the innate algorithms that regulate human behavior are related as cause and consequence: lawful relations are being discovered between the evolutionary process and the innate psychology it has shaped. The immense increase in complexity of human behavior is tractable to evolutionary psychology. Essential to evolutionary modeling is the distinction between proximate means and evolutionary ends. Evolutionary processes select for any behavioral mechanism or procedure, no matter how flexible or how automatic, that correlates with fitness. Evolutionary analysis shows hominid uniqueness to be rule-governed rather than imponderable. Evolutionary psychology employs functional thinking, that is, the modern rigorous understanding of adaptive strategies, to discover, sort out, and map the proximate mechanisms that incarnate these strategies. It appears to offer the best hope for providing a coherent and unified deductive framework for psychology. Sciences make rapid progress when they discover the deductive framework that is appropriate to their phenomena of study.
