What is it called? Evolutionary Psychology or Sociobiology?

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Comment by Steph S. on August 22, 2011 at 5:23pm

Here are the two terms explained in detail.

Sociobiology differs in some ways from evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology studies the animal nervous system from an evolutionary perspective including aspects not necessarily related to social behavior such as vision and navigation. Sociobiology is restricted to the biology of social behavior but also including organisms like plants. Evolutionary psychologists include the neural mechanisms that cause behavior in the research while sociobiologists often only study behavior. Evolutionary psychology emphasize that for humans the neural mechanisms evolved in an ancestral environment that differed from the current environment while animal sociobiologists look at animal adaptions to the current environment.

Comment by Steph S. on August 22, 2011 at 5:14pm

Evolutionary Psychology

Comment by ShashankA on August 22, 2011 at 5:06pm

Hey Steph guess u are into memetics as well... don't u think that is a better explanation? or is it one of the above 2?

Comment by Steph S. on August 22, 2011 at 4:37pm

This is from Wikipedia -- I think Evolutionary Psychology sounds correct.

Evolutionary psychology (EP) examines psychological traits — such as memory, perception, or language — from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychology applies the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the mind has a modular structure similar to that of the body, with different modular adaptations serving different functions. Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.^[1] The influence of adaptationist approaches in psychology has been steadily increasing.^[2]