Evolutionary Psychology: Article Analysis

Evolution is consider to be the process in how organisms, like ourselves have grown and changed from other organisms before us. Psychology is the study of the human mind and the functions that would come with it. Since the theory of evolution came about in the biology world, a lot of psychologists believe that evolution has to do a great deal with how we can explain psychological and social behavior. Evolutionary psychology has been a theoretical approach to psychology that tries to point out the traits, like memory, perception, and language as changes to natural selection. Throughout history psychologist all ask the same question to whether or not evolution is a good explanation for the concepts of psychology and even today it is still considered

a going debate.
Summary:
Although Glenn Geher, Edwin E.

Gantt, and Brent S. Melling, the three authors of these articles, all agreed that evolutionary psychology was not evil, they didn’t agree on whether or not evolution was a good explanation for the concepts of psychology. Geher believes that evolutionary psychology is an outline for the understanding of all human psychology. Geher first talks about how evolutionary psychology is in fact evil but, from a different variety of people. In Geher’s article it talks about how the people smeared evolutionary psychology as being racist, sexist, or even holding a doctrine with a political agenda attached to it. The Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), which is a model for understanding human behavior, considers that human psychology as extensively different from all others. The SSSM also believes there is no basic human nature. He begins to go into how evolutionary psychology isn’t evil, and how people see it as evil and how it seems to be centered in a naturalistic fallacy. According to Geher there are many different types of evolutionary psychology, but for him he thinks it is simply an understanding of behavior that is led by evolutionary

theory.
For Gantt and Melling they see evolutionary psychology as nothing more as an account for human behavior. Gantt and Melling’s article’s main purpose was like they stated in the beginning is to do critical thinking about assumptions and claims of evolutionary psychology. During a lot of their article you see that they quote Geher most of the time and bring up what he has to say and whether they agree with him or not. Gantt and Melling bring up how evolutionary psychologist use; rhetoric, values, and ideology. They use rhetoric to talk about objectivism, in which they define it as to refer to the assumptions of one’s methods as value-neutral. As said early in this section you see a lot of parts in where they quote Geher and how he went about doing something. As they keep citing Geher, they use the people Daly and Wilson’s research on how domestic violence has grown and is known as the Cinderella Effect. The Cinderella effect is research on how step kids are getting abused by their step parents more than their regular parents. One of the most troubling things for the evolutionary approach is that it is fundamentally destructive. Gantt and Melling state that the notion of life without it at its root, without the meaning and purpose, the morals of good and bad cannot then be defended. One thing that you see in reading the articles is that Gantt agrees with Geher on how evolutionary psychology isn’t evil, that there is no such thing as good or bad or right or wrong or even no truth. Just that in these articles you see that evolutionary psychology is not good also.
Analysis and Response:
In reading these articles you see that they both mention that evolutionary psychology is not evil but, also that is it is not good as well. As for not being evil you see in the article that both authors give different reasons on how they are different. One reason Geher states that evolutionary psychology is not evil, is that the problem is the naturalistic fallacy. He also explains that corresponding to naturalistic fallacy is a mixing phenomenon. That an evolutionary psychologist is trying to understand the process of human psychology and then while recording data someone comes and mistakes their findings and they spread it as if it was evil when it is not even close to being that. Gantt and Melling talk about how psychology is the truth, that it is nothing more than the results of scientist and the evolutionary psychologists that make it complex between arrangements and have no mirror of the truth on things. Evolutionary psychology as stated in the article “is the basic intellectual framework for understanding all psychological phenomena”.
In these two articles, I found it to be hard to understand the true meaning behind what is evolutionary psychology.

As I continued to read through Geher’s article though I found myself being able to understand what he had to say, rather than Gantt and Melling’s article. Geher talks about our ancestral humans and how some were more likely to survive than others through EP. I found myself agreeing with him when he talks about how EP is a framework for understanding all psychological phenomena. I liked how he talks about how it forms an idea that makes humans products of natural selection. In history we see how humans kept evolving to survive, we used are minds and bodies to survive the environment in which we lived. Geher though talked about how when someone murders someone, they are most likely to pass it on to their children through the genes that they give them. I disagreed with Geher, because I believe that we make our own choices in life. We don’t have the mind of someone else’s, we get our hair color, eye color, and our weight, but not our thought process. Moreover, Melling and Gantt bring up somewhat the same topic. They talk about the Cinderella effect and how step parents are more likely to be more abusive to their step children then to their own children. Reading about the Cinderella effect, I could see how much different and harder it could be for one of them. They would have a way harder time getting to know them and connecting with them to whereas the step parent

and his real son would be a lot different.
Conclusion:
Psychology is an important topic with everything it can do. Psychology is the study of people’s behaviors, their actions, or metal actions. Psychology allows people to see how the body and mind work together to be one. In these article they talk don’t just talk about evolution, they talk about evolutionary psychology which I would say would be the framework into evolution itself. Finding out about development of the human behavior has helped us achieve so much through our time here. To keep moving forward in evolution we have to keep expanding in the field of psychology.