The more you learn about evolutionary psychology – the idea of human behavior being best understood as a product of evolutionary forces – the more you come to see how broadly applicable this perspective on human behavior is. In fact, as I’ve argued in several of my past works (e.g., Geher, 2014), evolutionary psychology may well be the most powerful explanatory framework for understanding who we are and what we do that our kind has ever seen.
One of the most exciting features of evolutionary psychology is its broad applicability to important issues of the human condition. Armed with the powerful toolkit that is evolutionary psychology, there are great scholars out there right now shedding light on such important human issues as physical health, mental health, politics, education, and more. This field is, in fact, so hot, that there is a large-and-growing intellectual society dedicated to it – the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society (AEPS). The work of this society is fully motivated to utilize the evolutionary approach to help address significant issues of the human condition.
This series of blogs, broadly titled Evolutionary Psychology and Improvements in the Human Condition, is my attempt to provide snapshots of this exciting field of applied evolutionary psychology. Part One of this series, focused on the nature of physical health, is found here.
My hope for this blog series is that readers will do the following:
- Gain new and useful insights into important social issues;
- See how powerful the evolutionary approach is to understanding the human condition;
- Develop their own ideas on issues of humanity that are inspired by the evolutionary perspective;
and, of course,
- Enjoy it.
References and Further Reading
Geher, G. (2014). Evolutionary Psychology 101. New York: Springer.