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NATURAL SELECTION APPLIED TO HUMAN BEHAVIOR This effort has led to a new approach in psychology, called evolutionary psychology (EP). The 1980s and 1990s saw many social scientists, particularly psychologists, incorporating the theory of natural selection into accounts of human behavior. A major impetus was the writings of twentieth-century evolutionary biologists and sociobiologists such as George Williams, Robert Trivers, Edward O. Theorists and researchers in the social sciences have increasingly applied the concept of natural selection to their explanations of human individual and social behaviors. Evolutionary theory describes how these functional, problem-solving adaptations originate and are maintained. Thus, natural selection is crucial to how a species adapts to its environment. The result is that the species ’ total pool of hereditary traits will gradually change over generations, so long as environmental conditions do not dramatically change. It states that (1) if there is variation among members of a species in their hereditary traits and (2) some of those traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, then (3) the frequency of individuals carrying those traits will gradually increase in the population. Darwin ’s theory of natural selection is really a simple idea. Natural selection is the central process of evolutionary theory, presented by Charles Darwin (1809 –1882) in his 1859 book The Origin of Species. NATURAL SELECTION APPLIED TO HUMAN BEHAVIORĬRITIQUES OF NATURAL SELECTION IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR