Evolutionary Psychology: Article Analysis

Evolution is consider to be the process in how organisms, like ourselves have grown and changed from other organisms before us. Psychology is the study of the human mind and the functions that would come with it. Since the theory of evolution came about in the biology world, a lot of psychologists believe that evolution has to do a great deal with how we can explain psychological and social behavior. Evolutionary psychology has been a theoretical approach to psychology that tries to point out the traits, like memory, perception, and language as changes to natural selection. Throughout history psychologist all ask the same question to whether or not evolution is a good explanation for the concepts of psychology and even today it is still considered

Gantt, and Brent S. Melling, the three authors of these articles, all agreed that evolutionary psychology was not evil, they didn’t agree on whether or not evolution was a good explanation for the concepts of psychology. Geher believes that evolutionary psychology is an outline for the understanding of all human psychology. Geher first talks about how evolutionary psychology is in fact evil but, from a different variety of people. In Geher’s article it talks about how the people smeared evolutionary psychology as being racist, sexist, or even holding a doctrine with a political agenda attached to it. The Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), which is a model for understanding human behavior, considers that human psychology as extensively different from all others. The SSSM also believes there is no basic human nature. He begins to go into how evolutionary psychology isn’t evil, and how people see it as evil and how it seems to be centered in a naturalistic fallacy. According to Geher there are many different types of evolutionary psychology, but for him he thinks it is simply an understanding of behavior that is led by evolutionary

As I continued to read through Geher’s article though I found myself being able to understand what he had to say, rather than Gantt and Melling’s article. Geher talks about our ancestral humans and how some were more likely to survive than others through EP. I found myself agreeing with him when he talks about how EP is a framework for understanding all psychological phenomena. I liked how he talks about how it forms an idea that makes humans products of natural selection. In history we see how humans kept evolving to survive, we used are minds and bodies to survive the environment in which we lived. Geher though talked about how when someone murders someone, they are most likely to pass it on to their children through the genes that they give them. I disagreed with Geher, because I believe that we make our own choices in life. We don’t have the mind of someone else’s, we get our hair color, eye color, and our weight, but not our thought process. Moreover, Melling and Gantt bring up somewhat the same topic. They talk about the Cinderella effect and how step parents are more likely to be more abusive to their step children then to their own children. Reading about the Cinderella effect, I could see how much different and harder it could be for one of them. They would have a way harder time getting to know them and connecting with them to whereas the step parent