Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework,psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.
Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic phenomenon that causes genes to be expressed or not,depending on whether they are inherited from the female or male parent. Genes can also be partially imprinted. Partial imprinting occurs when alleles from both parents are differently expressed rather than complete expression and complete suppression of one parent's allele. Forms of genomic imprinting have been demonstrated in fungi,plants and animals. In 2014,there were about 150 imprinted genes known in mice and about half that in humans. As of 2019,260 imprinted genes have been reported in mice and 228 in humans.
Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to explain social behavior in terms of evolution. It draws from disciplines including psychology,ethology,anthropology,evolution,zoology,archaeology,and population genetics. Within the study of human societies,sociobiology is closely allied to evolutionary anthropology,human behavioral ecology,evolutionary psychology,and sociology.
Biological determinism,also known as genetic determinism,is the belief that human behaviour is directly controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiology,generally at the expense of the role of the environment,whether in embryonic development or in learning. Genetic reductionism is a similar concept,but it is distinct from genetic determinism in that the former refers to the level of understanding,while the latter refers to the supposedly causal role of genes. Biological determinism has been associated with movements in science and society including eugenics,scientific racism,and the debates around the heritability of IQ,the basis of sexual orientation,and sociobiology.
Group selection is a proposed mechanism of evolution in which natural selection acts at the level of the group,instead of at the level of the individual or gene.
Comparative genomics is a field of biological research in which the genomic features of different organisms are compared. The genomic features may include the DNA sequence,genes,gene order,regulatory sequences,and other genomic structural landmarks. In this branch of genomics,whole or large parts of genomes resulting from genome projects are compared to study basic biological similarities and differences as well as evolutionary relationships between organisms. The major principle of comparative genomics is that common features of two organisms will often be encoded within the DNA that is evolutionarily conserved between them. Therefore,comparative genomic approaches start with making some form of alignment of genome sequences and looking for orthologous sequences in the aligned genomes and checking to what extent those sequences are conserved. Based on these,genome and molecular evolution are inferred and this may in turn be put in the context of,for example,phenotypic evolution or population genetics.
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British biological anthropologist,evolutionary psychologist,and specialist in primate behaviour. Dunbar is professor emeritus of evolutionary psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number,a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".
W. Ford Doolittle is an evolutionary and molecular biologist. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is also the winner of the 2013 Herzberg Medal of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the 2017 Killam Prize.
Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection,to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies,as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.
David Addison Haig is an Australian evolutionary biologist,geneticist,and professor in Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. He is interested in intragenomic conflict,genomic imprinting and parent–offspring conflict,and wrote the book Genomic Imprinting and Kinship. His major contribution to the field of evolutionary theory is the kinship theory of genomic imprinting.
Takashi Gojobori is a Japanese molecular biologist,Vice-Director of the National Institute of Genetics (NIG) and the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) at NIG,in Mishima,Japan. Gojobori is a Distinguished Professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal,Saudi Arabia. He is a Professor of Bioscience and Acting Director at the Computational Bioscience Research Center at KAUST.
There is much to be discovered about the evolution of the brain and the principles that govern it. While much has been discovered,not everything currently known is well understood. The evolution of the brain has appeared to exhibit diverging adaptations within taxonomic classes such as Mammalia and more vastly diverse adaptations across other taxonomic classes. Brain to body size scales allometrically. This means as body size changes,so do other physiological,anatomical,and biochemical constructs connecting the brain to the body. Small bodied mammals have relatively large brains compared to their bodies whereas large mammals have a smaller brain to body ratios. If brain weight is plotted against body weight for primates,the regression line of the sample points can indicate the brain power of a primate species. Lemurs for example fall below this line which means that for a primate of equivalent size,we would expect a larger brain size. Humans lie well above the line indicating that humans are more encephalized than lemurs. In fact,humans are more encephalized compared to all other primates. This means that human brains have exhibited a larger evolutionary increase in its complexity relative to its size. Some of these evolutionary changes have been found to be linked to multiple genetic factors,such as proteins and other organelles.
Sarah Perin "Sally" Otto is a theoretical biologist,Canada Research Chair in Theoretical and Experimental Evolution,and is currently a Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. From 2008-2016,she was the director of the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Otto was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. In 2015 the American Society of Naturalists gave her the Sewall Wright Award for fundamental contributions to the unification of biology. In 2021,she was awarded the Darwin–Wallace Medal for contributing major advances to the mathematical theory of evolution.
The imprinted brain hypothesis is an unsubstantiated hypothesis in evolutionary psychology regarding the causes of autism spectrum and schizophrenia spectrum disorders,first presented by Bernard Crespi and Christopher Badcock in 2008. It claims that certain autistic and schizotypal traits are opposites,and that this implies the etiology of the two conditions must be at odds.
Cognitive genomics is the sub-field of genomics pertaining to cognitive function in which the genes and non-coding sequences of an organism's genome related to the health and activity of the brain are studied. By applying comparative genomics,the genomes of multiple species are compared in order to identify genetic and phenotypical differences between species. Observed phenotypical characteristics related to the neurological function include behavior,personality,neuroanatomy,and neuropathology. The theory behind cognitive genomics is based on elements of genetics,evolutionary biology,molecular biology,cognitive psychology,behavioral psychology,and neurophysiology.
The evolution of schizophrenia refers to the theory of natural selection working in favor of selecting traits that are characteristic of the disorder. Positive symptoms are features that are not present in healthy individuals but appear as a result of the disease process. These include visual and/or auditory hallucinations,delusions,paranoia,and major thought disorders. Negative symptoms refer to features that are normally present but are reduced or absent as a result of the disease process,including social withdrawal,apathy,anhedonia,alogia,and behavioral perseveration. Cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia involve disturbances in executive functions,working memory impairment,and inability to sustain attention.
Evolutionary psychiatry,also known as Darwinian psychiatry,is a theoretical approach to psychiatry that aims to explain psychiatric disorders in evolutionary terms. As a branch of the field of evolutionary medicine,it is distinct from the medical practice of psychiatry in its emphasis on providing scientific explanations rather than treatments for mental disorder. This often concerns questions of ultimate causation. For example,psychiatric genetics may discover genes associated with mental disorders,but evolutionary psychiatry asks why those genes persist in the population. Other core questions in evolutionary psychiatry are why heritable mental disorders are so common how to distinguish mental function and dysfunction,and whether certain forms of suffering conveyed an adaptive advantage. Disorders commonly considered are depression,anxiety,schizophrenia,autism,eating disorders,and others. Key explanatory concepts are of evolutionary mismatch and the fact that evolution is guided by reproductive success rather than health or wellbeing. Rather than providing an alternative account of the cause of mental disorder,evolutionary psychiatry seeks to integrate findings from traditional schools of psychology and psychiatry such as social psychology,behaviourism,biological psychiatry and psychoanalysis into a holistic account related to evolutionary biology. In this sense,it aims to meet the criteria of a Kuhnian paradigm shift.
Human evolutionary developmental biology or informally human evo-devo is the human-specific subset of evolutionary developmental biology. Evolutionary developmental biology is the study of the evolution of developmental processes across different organisms. It is utilized within multiple disciplines,primarily evolutionary biology and anthropology. Groundwork for the theory that "evolutionary modifications in primate development might have led to …modern humans" was laid by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,Ernst Haeckel,Louis Bolk,and Adolph Schultz. Evolutionary developmental biology is primarily concerned with the ways in which evolution affects development,and seeks to unravel the causes of evolutionary innovations.
Arthur J. Robson is a New Zealand economist whose research interests include game theory and the biological evolution of economic behaviour. In the period between 2003 and 2017,Robson held a Canada Research Chair in Economic Theory and Evolution at Simon Fraser University,where he has been a University Professor since 2017.
Tanja Schwander is a Swiss evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Lausanne. She is known for her work on the Evolution of sexual reproduction.
