ABSTRACT
The evolutionary psychologist’s notion of an evolved human nature is that of a species-wide set of genetically specified developmental programs that orchestrate the journey from genotype to phenotype. For the evolutionary psychologist, however, it often seems that evolution simply is Darwinian selection; so the term “evolutionary” in “evolutionary psychology” just means “explained by Darwinian selection.” Enter evolutionary psychology, which shifts the focus of Darwinian selective attention away from behaviours and on to the inner, neurally realized, psychological mechanisms that are the proximal causes of those behaviours. Evolutionary psychology’s second big idea concerns the design of our evolved psychological architecture. From the perspective of a broader evolutionarily-informed approach to psychology, the domain-specific versus domain-general issue has a life beyond the battle over massive modularity. The evolutionary psychologist, like any natural state theorist, needs to privilege one of the possible developmental environments as the “natural” one.
