Summary Of Chapter 3 Of The Fuentes

Although there are five approaches mentioned, there are three approaches in Chapter 3 of the Fuentes textbook that can be seen as being the most viable and useful approaches to studying the evolution of human behavior. These three approached include evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, and dual inheritance. Evolutionary psychology as it suggests applies evolutionary reasoning to psychological phenomena. The goal of this approach, as told by Symons (1992:137), is to uncover the “the psychological mechanisms that underpin human…behavior, and…the selective forces that shaped these mechanisms”. EP embraces several key concepts including modularity, historicity, adaptive specificity, and environmental novelty. Modularity suggests that human behavior is guided by cognitive mechanisms performing specialized tasks rather than “general purpose” mechanisms that work across multiple behavioral domains. Historicity refers to the assumption that natural selection shaped these modular

The key assumptions of HBE include ecological selections logic, a piecemeal analytical approach, a reliance on modeling, a focus on decision rules, and the phenotypic gambit. Ecological sectionalism consist of analyzing any behavioral phenomenon by asking what ecological forces affect a certain behavior. The piecemeal approach holds that complex socioecological phenomenon are fruitfully studies piece by piece. HBE usually frames the study of adaptive design in terms of conditional strategies. These are abstract and somewhat metaphorical ways of convincing the covariation of behavior and socioecological environment. HBE tends to focus on explaining behavioral variation as adaptive responses to environmental variation: they assume that this adaptive variation is governed by evolved mechanisms that instantiate the relevant conditional