Cosmides L. In: The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

Anthropology, Harvard University, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. 2 2 Intellectual origins of evolutionary psychology The theory of evolution by natural selection has implications for understanding the design of the human mind, and Darwin himself was the first to see this. During the 20th century, many thinkers tried to work out exactly how Darwin’s fundamental insights could be used as a foundation on which to build a more systematic approach to psychology. This resulted in many valuable approaches: the instinct psychology of William James and William McDougall; human ethology, which applied the framework for studying how animals behave in their natural environment, developed by Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen; Skinnerian psychology, which looked for phylogenetic continuities in the laws of learning that would apply across species; and sociobiology, which tried to understand patterns of social behavior— differences as well as universals—in humans and other primates in light of a set of exciting and rigorous new theories then emerging about how natural selection works. Our own early trainin