Introduction:
Evolutionary psychology suggests that human nature has been
shaped in part by the forces of natural selection. In this section we will
consider how natural selection may have shaped aspects of personality,
focusing particularly on the origin of sex differences. Natural selection is
the process by which some genes increase and others decrease in a
population. Evolutionary psychology suggests that many aspects of
personality functioning—including aggression, cooperation, selfishness, and
selflessness—exist because genes enabling us to act in those ways have
spread through the human population over the millions of years of our
evolutionary history. More provocatively, evolutionary psychology also
suggests that because some qualities were repeatedly more adaptive in one
gender than the other gender, males and females are predisposed to behave
differently, especially in the domains of romance and parenting. We will
carefully examine the theoretical basis, and a little bit of the empirical
evidence, for this position.
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