Describe the biological foundations of psychology.

Introduction:

Evolutionary psychology has done much of its work and has generated much debate among both psychologists and philosophers. So, evolutionary psychology should be evaluated in detail. When it is evaluated in detail one is forced to examine its forerunner, sociobiology, and it may question the concept of a good theory.  A good theory should be simple, accurate, fruitful, consistent, etc. as said by metatheory. Sociobiology is highly criticized and as well as difficult to falsify, but it is very strong in its Darwinian foundations. 

THEORY OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY:

One of the theory by Buss(1995) explains,” Because all behavior depends on complex psychological mechanisms and all psychological mechanisms at some basic level of description are the result of evolution by selection, then all psychological theories are implicitly evolutionary psychological theories”.

BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS:

Some of the biological phenomena arise through other than natural selection processes. The best examples would be genetic drift, pleiotropy, or chance.

Genetic drift takes place within the large populations’ of organisms when the changes occur randomly. On the other hand pleiotropy involves multiple phenotypic traits expression as the result of one gene. For example, albino organisms, which lack pigment, are light in coloring and pink eyed. Buss (1991) clearly specifies that other mutations may be neutral with respect to natural selection, and thus endure without being adaptive. The best examples to the concept of Buss are, some physical characteristics in human such as height or hair color are currently neutrally adaptive. These kinds of characteristics do not increase the fitness or reproduction and do not improve our chance of survival. This says that natural selection cannot account for all biological phenomena and differentiating among such phenomena is extremely difficult for evolutionary psychologists.

Buss (1991) determines,” while general evolutionary theory broadly outlines what is unlikely to have evolved, it can rarely specify what must have evolved”. But evolutionary psychologists are, however successful at accounting the differences of the individual. They argue that individuals differ in the adaptive strategies that they employ. These differences can be incidental by-products of such strategies or can results from noise within the system, for example mutations. Like in groups of creatures, it is extremely difficult when studying individuals to differentiate between strategies that manifest randomly and those that are selected for.

http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/seltin.html