I’m Wang Fang. How are you today? In the last episode we said personality is a function of the brain, and recent cognitive neuroscience has identified brain mechanisms corresponding to many behaviors. This raises a question:why is brain function designed this way?Here we turn to a great milestone in the history of human thought—Darwinand histheory of biological evolution.。

Since evolutionary theory appeared, natural selection has become the fundamental law explaining the ultimate causes of biological mechanisms. In a given environment, organisms with certain biological characteristics survive and reproduce more readily than organisms without them. After many generations, the population consists mainly of individuals possessing those characteristics, and the adaptive biological mechanism has evolved. This is the core of evolutionary theory.

Do psychological functions work the same way? In recent decades, evolutionary psychology has flourished, attracting enormous attention and fierce controversy. Today we will see how it views people and human nature and explains behavior and individual differences.

Let us begin with its fundamental principles. The most central is:all basic psychological mechanisms existing today are products of evolutionary selection.They exist and persist because they helped our ancient ancestors survive and reproduce. Put another way,present human psychology and behavior are solutions our species evolved over millions of years to address problems of survival.

Note a mismatch here:the survival problems in question existed not in today’s environment but in ancient environments.