Evolutionary Prototyping

Abstract

Evolutionary psychology is an approach to understanding and explaining behavior, especially human behavior. The field is based on the principles of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, and holds that the information-processing structures of the human mind can be understood as computational mechanisms designed by the process of evolution by natural selection. The adaptationist perspective suggests that the mind is likely to consist of a very large number of computational devices, and that these devices are highly specialized, designed to process information and generate behavior in ways that, in ancestral environments, would have led to the solution of the adaptive problems faced by our ancestors.