My name is Vincent M. Bates, and I recently graduated from Florida Atlantic University with a Master of Arts in psychology. I conducted research and completed my master’s thesis in Dr. Todd K. Shackelford’s evolutionary psychology lab at . My research has focused upon various aspects of human sexual psychology and behavior.

What is Evolutionary Psychology?

Evolutionary psychology is a hybrid discipline that draws insights from modern evolutionary theory, biology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, economics, computer science, and paleoarchaeology. The discipline rests on a foundation of core premises:

1. 1.Manifest behavior depends on underlying psychological mechanisms, information processing devices housed in the brain, in conjunction with the external and internal inputs that trigger their activation
   

2. 2. Evolution by selection is the only known causal process capable of creating such complex organic mechanisms.
   

3. 3. Evolved psychological mechanisms are functionally specialized to solve adaptive problems that recurred for humans over deep evolutionary time.
   

4. 4. Selection designed the information processing of many evolved psychological mechanisms to be adaptively influenced by specific classes of information from the environment.
   

5. 5. Human psychology consists of a large number of functionally specialized evolved mechanisms, each sensitive to particular forms of contextual input, that get combined, coordinated, and integrated with each other to produce manifest behavior.
   

Courtesy David M. Buss, www.davidbuss.com

For further reading please see Evolutionary Psychology