Category: Evolutionary Psychology

When Your Brain Doesn’t Recognize Faces

The science behind ‘face blindness’ Much of human engagement relies upon the ability to recognize familiar faces. And yet this seemingly simple, widespread human capacity, which builds and strengthens social bonds, is not a given for everyone. People with “face blindness”— known as prosopagnosia (from the Greek words for “face” and “without knowledge”) — find it difficult,…
Read more

You Have No Idea How Much Your Brain Is Ignoring

The eye-opening science behind ‘inattentional blindness’ In an iconic study from 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, researchers at Harvard University, used a gorilla costume as a prop to explore visual perception. Subjects were asked to watch a video and count the number of times players passed a basketball between a small, continually moving group of students. Partway…
Read more

Why Our Minds and Bodies No Longer Fit the World in Which We Live?

Rise of the mismatch diseases According to evolutionary biologists and psychologists, many physical and mental ailments result from a lack of fit between the environment people evolved for and the one in which they now live — known as ‘mismatch diseases.’ Over millions of years, each species accumulates a large number of evolutionary adaptations to help it survive…
Read more

Adaptations From Our Evolutionary Past Impact Sports Psychology Today

The effect of evolutionary psychology on sport The Theory of Natural Selection is able to unify all species, past and present. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection shook the world when it was first published in 1859. The theory had huge implications and provided answers to the following previously unanswerable questions: How do organisms change over…
Read more

The Body Has Evolved To Run, So Why Not The Brain?

2 million years to run an ultra-marathon Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were, in effect, on a camping trip that lasted a lifetime, and they had to solve many different kinds of problems well to survive and reproduce under those conditions […] — Cosmides and Tooby, 2013 Chris McDougall’s epic book “Born to Run” has been an inspiration…
Read more

“Our Hunter-gatherer Ancestors Were, In Effect, On A Camping Trip That Lasted A Lifetime”

Has the brain evolved to run? Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were, in effect, on a camping trip that lasted a lifetime, and they had to solve many different kinds of problems well to survive and reproduce under those conditions […]— Cosmides and Tooby, 2013 Chris McDougall’s epic book “Born to Run” has been an inspiration to many runners…
Read more

Is our psychology adapted for endurance?

According to evolutionary psychologists, at birth the human mind is neither a blank slate, nor a general-purpose computer, but is instead a set of highly specific, and evolved adaptive programmes (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013). Each mechanism within the brain has been shaped through natural, and sexual, selection, to solve the problems encountered within the environment…
Read more

Darwin and the sports psychologist

In Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Block and Dewitte (2008) discuss sport from an evolutionary perspective. They suggest that participation in sport, underpinned by social learning, has arisen out of signaling attractiveness for the purposes of courtship and that human sports are cultural and therefore learned rather than innate. Using the dual-inheritance theory (for others theories…
Read more

There’s more than one evolutionary psychologist !!

Evolutionary psychologists have at least three views on the evolution of culture: Cultural evolution and biological evolution are analogous and that culture should be studied using Darwinian methods (Blackmore 1999; Cullen 2000; Dawkins 1976) including memetics (suggesting that ideas propagate like a virus). However, it is widely accepted that as an approach, despite its prevalence…
Read more

Challenges for Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology is nothing more than psychology viewed through the lens provided by evolutionary biology, based on the fact that psychological systems are part of the brain and therefore both physical and biological. According to Johnson (2017) adopting an evolutionary approach to understanding human psychology has been extremely fruitful in answering the ‘why’ questions, and…
Read more