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Human beings, like other organisms, are the products of evolution. Like other
organisms, we exhibit traits that are the product of natural selection. Our
psychological capacities are evolved traits as much as are our gait and posture.
This much few would dispute. Evolutionary psychology goes further than this,
claiming that our psychological traits-including a wide variety of traits, from
mate preference and jealousy to language and reason-can be understood as specific
adaptations to ancestral Pleistocene conditions. In Evolutionary Psychology as
Maladapted Psychology, Robert Richardson takes a critical look at evolutionary
psychology by subjecting its ambitious and controversial claims to the same sorts
of methodological and evidential constraints that are broadly accepted within
evolutionary biology.
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