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What is Evolutionary Psychology?

Evolutionary psychology is a discipline that integrates insights from a variety of sources, which include modern evolutionary theory, biology, psychology, anthropology, economics, computer science, and paleoarchaeology. The discipline rests on a foundation of core premises: (1) Behavior depends on underlying psychological mechanisms — information processing devices housed in the brain in conjunction with the external and internal inputs that trigger their activation; (2) Evolution by selection is the only known causal process capable of creating such complex adaptive mechanisms; (3) Evolved psychological mechanisms are functionally specialized to solve adaptive problems that recurred for humans over deep evolutionary time; (4) Selection shaped information processing to be adaptively influenced by specific classes of information from the environment; (5) Human psychology consists of a large number of functionally specialized evolved mechanisms, each sensitive to particular forms of contextual input, which are combined, coordinated, and integrated to produce manifest behavior.