ABSTRACT
Evolutionary psychology holds that major selective pressures on human brain development occurred over many thousands of years in our ancestral environment, principally during the nearly two million years that spanned the Pleistocene period. The competing view against evolutionary psychology is that our brains are blank slates at birth—the empiricist position. Ancient footprints are everywhere. A variety of human behaviors, posited to be hardwired, have been described in the evolutionary psychology literature. Decision making in ancient times, what the evolutionary psychologists refer to as the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), has been characterized as a form of evolutionary probability gambling. In evolutionary psychology, error management theory (EMT) proposes that such "thinking failures" evident in modern environments are the result of evolved, naturally selected patterns of behavior that served well in the evolutionary past. Historically, the approach toward education in the medical sciences has followed the traditional conceptual framework of the standard social science model (SSSM) developed in the twentieth century.
