History of evolutionary psychology

The history of evolutionary psychology began with Charles Darwin, who argued that all the most human of human capacities—the human intellect, rationality, human sexual behaviour, emotional expressions, moral behaviour, language, culture, and conscience—had evolutionary foundations, highlighting in particular those which had originated due to the unusual ways natural selection operates in social animals, that is, by different kinds of group selection, including kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Darwin's work inspired many later psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt, James Mark Baldwin, William James, Sigmund Freud, George Herbert Mead, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen but, in the early 1900s, American psychologists widely rejected Darwin's style of naturalistic observation in favour of laboratory experimentation. Henceforth, 20th century psychologists focused more on behaviorism and proximate explanations for human behavior.

Then, in 1975, E. O. Wilson's landmark book, Sociobiology, synthesized recent theoretical advances in evolutionary theory to explain social behavior in animals, including humans. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby popularized the term "evolutionary psychology" in their 1992 book The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and The Generation of Culture. Like sociobiology before it, evolutionary psychology has been embroiled in controversy, but evolutionary psychologists see their field as gaining increased acceptance overall.