Human Body and Mind: Evolutionary Psychology, Essay Example

Kin and Family Relations: This chapter covered the importance and uniqueness of human family relationships everywhere. There are characteristics specific to the human family that are unique: these include the long period of childhood that is part of the human experience, being the only species that live in multi-male and multi-female groups that are characterized by complicated alliances, as well as intensive care by parents. Human infants exhibit a longer period of maturation then other species, elevating the horns of the family. Another important element of the human family is also that most babies are exposed to multi-generational caregivers, who play an important part in the development of children. A unique characteristic of the human family is also the fact that both parents provide extensive care, unlike other primate communities in which the only focus of the males is on mating, rather than on child rearing.

The connection between kinship and altruism has also been studied in an effort to understand why an organism would engage in behavior that is selfless when the traditional views of natural selection support selfish behavior. Research has determined that genes that reinforce altruistic behavior are more likely to be passed on when there are relationship benefits that are higher than the costs. Some of the most important beliefs about family relationships include: families tend to support the success of infant development, conflict will increase and cooperation will decrease with decreasing relatedness, promoting altruism between people who are more closely related, family members will help each other in proportion to their genetic relatedness, and deceit, manipulation, and exploitation are more likely to occur between people who are least closely related. The conclusions are that genetic relatedness is extremely important in determining positive and negative aspects of relationships.

The categorizing of family relationships is determined by three principles which have deep evolutionary roots: genealogical distance, which defines who is related to us and what this either allows us to or forbids us from doing with these people; social rank, which instructs us about hierarchies, when they are relevant and when they can be ignored; and group membership which defines what group’s we can be part of and who else belongs to those groups. Another important variable in the nature of family relationships is parental investment, a factor which varies considerably among species. The vast majority of mammals, however, are characterized by female raising the young while the male is relatively uninvolved.

The chapter covers different theories pertaining to the needs of human infants, from the cooperative breeding model, which postulates that in human infant needs a number of individuals to care for him or her in order to survive, and the specific caregivers model, which focuses on the specific roles of mothers and fathers either individually or in combination to provide babies with what they need. In addition, the grandmother theory suggests that menopause evolved as a way of increasing the survival odds of children being able to relate to an older woman, so that if the grandmother helps to care for her grandchildren, their survival odds would increase. In addition, conflict and violence within the family potentially plays a tremendous role in the health of the offspring as well as the parents.

The material covered in this chapter is extremely pertinent to the field of psychology, because understanding the structure and operations of family systems contributes to the knowledge about how and why individuals behave the way they do. The human family is at the center of all human relationships, and serves to clarify why people develop in certain ways, and how those early family relationships impact that they become. Certainly, in order to fully understand individuals and their role in the society, knowledge of family relationships goes a long way towards explaining how people evolve emotionally and behaviorally.

Making Social Decisions: This chapter studies social exchange, or cooperation for mutual benefit. Essentially, this means that if one person does something, then the other provides an advantage, or the opposite: if a person extends a benefit, then the other will perform some task. The interactions are based on reciprocity, so that if one person in the interaction does not fulfill his or her part, that person is regarded as a cheater. Such a person violates the rules of social interaction. The chapter cited several experiments that were designed to support the idea of socially sensitive logical operations in humans that is more accurate than classic Aristotelian logic in it. By conducting such research, there is evidence that the human brain is comprised of a highly sophisticated system that is designed to formulate reasoning regarding social exchange. Since social exchange involves a social contract between parties, when one violates those terms some researchers have presumed that an individual has a mechanism that is able to detect cheating.

There is continuing debate about whether or not there is actually a part of the brain that is designed to pinpoint cheating behavior. A series of experiments were conducted to determine how and whether the damaged and undamaged brain was able to process logical versus social tasks. All of the respondents did worse on the logical descriptive tasks, as opposed to the social ones; when it came to the social tasks, individuals with no brain damage did as well as people with brain damage did on the social exchange tasks  and on the social protection tasks. The suggestion is that certain areas of the brain are specifically important in the detection of people who break social rules.

There are two principles underlying the logic of cooperation: that our evolutionary social history is the result of interaction with a specific number of individuals with whom we connect on a range of bases; secondly, over time we can become sensitized on several levels to pinpointing people who would be cooperative with us or others who might cheat us. The natural result of this would be the ability to have distinct preferences about the people we would like to be connected with. Such ability would have impact on many areas of social habits as well as the ability to survive and a person’s sexuality as well as the way that children are nurtured.

The relevance of evolutionary psychology to people’s lives regards the decision-making processes that people engage in on a daily basis, relating to financial matters, choices about what people eat, and with whom they want to become involved emotionally or physically. These decisions can be made based on rationality or psychology; this is switched our balance between those two areas are called bounded rationality. This causes people who have limited time and resources to rely on the environment for help with making decisions, a process called heuristics, or a set of rules that help understand the ways in which people make decisions. Essentially, heuristics are useful to people because it helps them perform tasks using minimal effort, such as who to save in a burning building. Heuristics can be an entirely unconscious process, and can be used to explain how people tend to view themselves and the others in their circle in an overly positive way while seeing others outside their group in a more negative way. The mechanism of heuristics contains five methods: looking at fewer cues, minimizing the difficulty needed for retrieving and storing cues, simplifying the weighting standards for cues, internalizing less information and considering fewer choices. In addition, humans tend to use framing as another strategy to solve problems. In order to solve a logical problem, moral judgments apply different standards to arriving at solutions. Finally, this chapter discusses the importance of violence as an impact on human behavior.

This chapter is important to the field of psychology because it examines the ways in which people make a host of choices: economic, moral, and social. By understanding that using pure logic to address problems in decision-making is unrealistic for human beings, it becomes more possible to identify an attempt to make sense of aberrant behaviors like cheating or other ways of breaking the social contract that is so essential to society. The area of heuristics is useful in helping people accomplish deeds without exerting undue effort, and understanding that concept can be invaluable in evaluating people generally, in the workplace, and in relationships. In addition, the impact of violence on human behavior is important in the field of psychology in order to explain and present deviant and criminal behavior.

Health: This chapter explores the relationship between the environment and physical health. Although in the past improved health has been attributed to medical interventions, the greatest improvements have been caused by reforms and sanitation and food supplies. Clean water, sanitary conditions surrounding food preparation and improved hygiene are the actual factors that have extended the average lifespan in the United States. In addition, the development of vaccines, workplace safety changes, and the establishment of wellness and prevention programs have played crucial roles in improving the health of Americans. The question about why disease exists at all is explored in this chapter. It is known that if genes are connected to an advantageous trait for an organism, the gene is more likely to be passed on, and genes that are maladaptive are less likely to survive over time, so that from an evolutionary standpoint, one would expect that all diseases would eventually disappear. Unfortunately, human beings inhabit the planet along with other organisms that are evolving so that certain pathogens that cause diseases are also changing and adapting.

The relationship between health and disease must include the following considerations: mismatch between the body and the environment; the evolution of humans complicated by the speed with which bacteria are also adapting; trade-offs, in which the very process that protects our immune system is also problematic; the fact that are physiological structures have evolved over a long period, so that new structures are added to the old ones but are constrained by what existed previously; the relationship between sexual attractiveness and health, wherein reproductive success is the more influential factor in evolutionary terms; and defenses, as well as suffering, which actually allow the body to protect itself by removing or killing pathogens, but are at times overzealous. Often what people experience as disease, such as a fever, are the body’s way of fighting off the disease, therefore making it essential to distinguish between a defect and a defense.

This chapter discusses Predictive Adaptive Responses (PARS), whereby environmental conditions cause changes in an organism’s development that assist the organism to accommodate future environmental factors. These responses are brought on by environmental factors early in life, resulting in permanent changes in physiology. Such changes can be achieved by different pathways at different points of development, and occur over the full range of fetal environments. In addition, they bring a survival advantage in the reproductive environment, and create an environmental range in which the organism can thrive until and throughout the reproductive phase of life outside the womb. If the predicted environmental outcomes do not occur, PARS may lead to disease.

Central to the topic of health and disease is “homeostasis,” the balance that the physiological system strives to maintain in the face of stress, which threatens to upset that that once. This is contrasted with “allostasis”, the body’s ability to achieve stability by changing. It has become evident that the autonomic nervous system, the endocrine system in the immune system communicate with each other, and can all be influenced by stress, which is viewed as the body’s response to danger. The stress response necessitates two tasks: to turn on the allostatic response, such as the fight or flight response, and once the danger has passed, to turn off this response since a lengthy exposure to a stressful situation may not permit these two tasks to operate adequately. An obvious example of the relationship between psychological factors and health is heart disease.

The material in this chapter is relevant to the field of psychology because it clarifies the strong connection between disease and the environment. Although there are many physical factors involved in becoming ill, many psychological and emotional factors come into play as well so that they cannot be separated out from the etiology of an illness. Understanding the ways that the stress response can be mistaken for dysfunction rather than the body’s adaptive mechanism for coping with uncontrollable forces is vital in helping people to cope with their responses to stress. Psychologists are in an ideal position to help patients understand the ways in which stress is actually adaptive and can be turned into positive growth.

Culture: The ways in which societies value certain aspects of human existence is known as culture. It is often symbolically portrayed through music, art, and literature because they give meaning to the collective human experience. During the first two years of life, an infant must develop the basic cognitive skills that are necessary for the development of culture; the ability to understand another individual who has goals and who wishes to engage in autonomous activities, in addition to the drive to share emotions and experiences, promote cultural development in people. A significant question regarding culture is whether genetic variation is an influence in the manner in which cultural structures make official social interactions so that not only does the environment influence genetics but genetics can go on to impact culture.

Cultural differences have been documented for thousands of years. There are differences in the degrees to which cultures regulate social behavior and punish deviant behavior; cultures that have strong social norms have been referred to as “tight cultures” and those which have been more relaxed have been known as “loose” cultures. Tight cultures tend to be those groups that had actual threats caused by territorial tensions, lack of resources, or exposure to high levels of disease; they tended to be cultures that regulated social behaviors and punished deviants more strictly. These cultures were essentially institutions that formally set standards for social norms, with individuals tending to self monitor behaviors and exhibit less tolerance for those in other cultures. The looser cultures exhibited behavior that was exactly the opposite.

Variations in culture are demonstrated by diversity and cultural beliefs, knowledge, and artifacts, such as language: there are approximately 6800 different languages around the globe. Cultural selection occurs because of human beings’ limited attention, memory, and expressive abilities. These variations lead to certain cultural principles surviving and being passed on. Hence, the study of culture through the evolutionary lens can possibly expose these basic processes in other species because humans are not the only species that learn and transmit information in this manner: Jane Goodall’s work with chimpanzees demonstrated that their ability to learn to use tools was exhibited by future generations, indicating that learning had taken place.

The main characteristics of culture include: the transmission by cognitive information transfer rather than genetic material; cultural traits exist outside the body of the organism; human culture includes mental activities such as conscious thought; human culture utilizes arbitrary symbols to create mental images and to communicate; culture exhibits shared values and beliefs at a group level that form political and religious institutions; culture includes historical processes and can change more quickly than genetic evolution; and finally, complex culture is specific to humans. Culture is defined by different theorists in different ways: one framework developed by Richerson and Boyd describes culture as information that people receive from others by teaching, imitating, and establishing other forms of social learning; cultural change should be based as the Darwinian process of evolution; human biology includes culture; human evolution is very distinct from that of other organisms because of cultural factors; and genes and culture are connected in a co-evolutionary manner. Broader definitions defined culture as “all mental construct and behaviors those quote. Finally, a significant aspect of culture since human beings have evolved has been the role of religion; other parts of human life such as recreational activities and love of pets are also shaped by culture.

The relevance of this chapter to the field of psychology is in further clarifying the way that different groups are differentiated from each other through cultural norms and values. Culture is not genetically determined, but rather evolves from sets of beliefs, values, and traditions so that in order to have a meaningful understanding of human behavior, individuals must be placed in the context of their cultural origins. Since almost every aspect of human life can be linked to some part of their cultural existence, it is extremely useful to understand the culture from which people originate. This allows psychology to move forward with a more comprehensive understanding of the individual and society.