PSYCH 1XX3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Socalled, Phenotype, Advanced Maternal Age
1 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Organisms evolved to maximize fitness & reproductive success. Can think of many examples in humans & social animals where individuals appear to behave altruistically helping others at cost to themselves there is predator in area giving everyone chance to flee & hide. Consider humans, why spend so much time cooperating & helping family, friends, Instead of reproducing themselves, spend lives in service of colony helping raise eggs laid by queen & many bees often die defending colony from predators. Ex: all honey bees in colony don"t ever reproduce, don"t have reproductive organs. Evolutionary perspective, shouldn"t only be selfishly concerned with own. Evolution acts at level of genes & those genes that contribute to individual"s fitness. Sometimes this concept referred to as (cid:498)selfish gene(cid:499) will consequently get replicated more often, increasing in frequency in successive generations. Means natural selection will favour genes & gene complexes that best serve own survival & reproduction? interest, namely replication.
