PSYC 2600 Chapter 8: Personality Psychology Chapter 8 .docx
Document Summary
Evolutionary psychology is a new and rapidly growing scientific perspective, and it offers important insights into human personality. We carry with us the genes for the adaptive mechanisms that led for their success. From this perspective, our human nature the collection of mechanisms that defines us as human is the product of the evolutionary process. Nonetheless, humans are rarely aware of these mechanisms. ***natural selection a. k. a survival selection: darwin"s contribution was not in observing change over time, nor in noticing the adaptive design of mechanisms. Rather, darwin proposed a theory of the process by which adaptations are created and a change takes place over time. He called it the theory of natural selection. Darwin noticed that species seemed to produce many more offspring than could possibly survive and reproduce. He reasoned that changes, or variants, that better enabled an organism to survive and reproduce will lead to more descendants.