Darwin’s influence on psychology, in 5 points

In many aspects, psychology is based on biology. That is why Charles Darwin has influenced it.

Some people insist on believing that psychology and philosophy are practically the same thing. That both work fundamentally with ideas, and that they serve to know how to develop one's own perspective from which to live one's life.

But this is false: psychology is not based on ideas, but on matter; not on how we should behave, but on how we really behave, and how we could behave if certain objective conditions were given. In other words, psychology has always been a science closely related to biology. After all, behavior does not exist without a body that performs actions.

In view of the above, it is not surprising to find that the fact that Charles Darwin has had and still has a great influence on psychology .. Ultimately, biology is based on a mixture of genetics and the developments that have come from the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Below we will see some of the aspects in which this researcher influences the development of behavioral science.

What is Darwin's theory of evolution?

Everything that is currently done in biology is based on the idea that Charles Darwin was fundamentally correct when he explained the mechanism by which the different forms of life appear. Any other proposal that claims to be a unifying theory of biology such as the modern synthesis (a mixture of evolutionary theory and genetics) must provide a huge amount of evidence, and that is not something that seems likely to happen any time soon.

Before proceeding further, it is important to know the main basic ideas about what Darwin proposed about biology. According to biologist Ernst Mayr, the ideas by which Darwin explained the appearance of species are as follows:

1. Evolution

The different lineages of living beings show how, through the generations, there are constant changes in the there are constant changes in the traits of individuals and in their way of organizing and in their way of organizing themselves or of inhabiting ecosystems.

2. Common ancestry

Although all "family lines" tend to change over time, they all have common ancestors. For example, humans and chimpanzees have common ancestors. come from lineages that could not be differentiated millions of years ago..

Gradualism

According to Darwin, the changes that occurred through the generations appeared very slowly and gradually, so that it is not possible to identify a specific moment at which a turning point in the process of developing a certain trait occurs. Today, however, it is known that the emergence of traits need not always occur in this way.

4. Speciation

One species can give rise to other speciesThus, different evolutionary branches appear from the one that gives rise to them.

5. Natural selection

The changes that appear in the lineages of life forms are driven by natural selection, a process by means of which some traits are more likely to be passed on to succeeding generations, depending on the conditions of the environment in which they are found.depending on the conditions of the environment to which they have to adapt.

The importance of genetics

It is clear that Darwin left many questions unanswered, among other things because in the middle of the 19th century the limitations when it came to researching such complex topics were a major obstacle. One of these questions was, for example: how do traits appear that will or will not be spread through the population depending on whether they offer advantages in terms of adaptation to the environment? It was into this type of question that the genetic studies driven by Gregor Mendel came into play. At the basis of the construction of living beings there is a genotype, made up of genes, which, from the moment they are introduced into the population, are then spread through the population.The effects of Darwin's influence on Darwin's ideas about the genetic makeup of living organisms are not only in the genotype, but also in the genotype of each living being.

The effects of Darwin's influence on Psychology

From what we have seen so far, it is already possible to intuit that Darwin's ideas have implications for psychology. Indeed, the fact that behind every living being there is a history of interactions between some traits and the environment in which they appear, makes the behavioral style, which can also be understood as a trait even though it is not exactly something physical but psychological. can be understood as a trait even though it is not exactly physical but psychological, can be analyzed in another way.can be analyzed in another way.

In this sense, several of the topics treated from psychology that come into contact with Darwin's ideas are the following.

1. Concern for the differences between the sexes

In Western societies, until before Darwin wrote about evolution, the differences that exist between men and women were something that was normally interpreted from an essentialist perspective: masculinity is expressed through men, and femininity is expressed through women, because "it cannot be otherwise".

However, Darwin clearly shows that essentialism is totally useless when it comes to understanding these differences between men and women.. His ideas gave way to a new perspective: both sexes are different because in each of them the ways of having offspring (and, as a consequence, of having others inherit our traits and genes) are different. The bottom line here is that, as a general rule, females have to pay a higher reproductive cost than males to have offspring, since they are the ones who gestate.

But what about psychological traits? Do the psychological differences between men and women also respond to the consequences of Biological evolution, or are there other alternative explanations? This is currently an area of research in which there is a lot of activity and which tends to generate a lot of interest. Not surprisingly, accepting one answer or the other can lead to very different public policies.

2. The myth of the all-understanding mind

There was a time when it was thought that rationality was the essence of human mental activity. With effort, patience and the development of the right tools, we could perfectly understand practically everything that surrounds us, thanks to the use of reason..

Charles Darwin's contributions to science, however, challenged these ideas: if everything we are exists simply because it helped our ancestors to survive, why would it be any different with the ability to think rationally?

Thus, reason is not there because it is predestined to put an end to ignorance, but rather because it it allows us to know the world well enough to stay alive and, hopefully, reproduce. and, hopefully, reproduce. The tree of life does not have at its highest point a place to be occupied by the most reasonable species; we are just another branch.

3. The key is to adapt

The concept of adaptation is fundamental in psychology. In fact, in the clinical setting it is often said that one of the main criteria for determining whether something is a mental disorder or not is to look at whether the behaviors manifested are adaptive or not. That is to say, if in the context in which the person lives, that pattern of behavior generates discomfort.

Since in order to express behaviors it is necessary that there is someone who performs actions and an environment in which these actions are received, the key to understanding behavior lies in the key to understanding behavior is to look at the relationship between these two components, and not just at the individual..

Just as Darwin pointed out that there are no good or bad traits per se, since one can be useful in one environment and detrimental in another, something similar can happen with behaviors: a predilection for repetitive tasks may be a problem in a public-facing job, but not in a construction-oriented one.

4. Intelligence breaks paradigms

Another of the influences on psychology that Darwin's work has had on psychology has to do with highlighting the uniqueness of the set of mental abilities we call intelligence.. This naturalist showed that although in the animal world there are many species capable of behaving in amazing ways to survive, in most cases these actions are the result of evolution, and have been inherited from one generation to another without learning. For example, ants can coordinate in incredible ways to reach a goal, but this happens because they are "programmed" to do so.

On the other hand, there are a number of animal species that are not subject to so many biological constraints on their behavior, and we are one of them. Intelligence is a process of selecting the right answers as part of a process of selecting the right traits. Genes do run us on rails in some things (for example, most people experience sexual urges), but beyond that we have a relative freedom to do what we want. This, however, does not go against evolutionary theory: being smart is useful in certain contexts, and in our case it has allowed a relatively puny hominid species to spread across the planet. It is a characteristic that allows us to avoid having to specialize in a single environment, assuming the risk of becoming extinct risk becoming extinct if that environment disappears or changes too much.

5. Being happy is not the same as persisting

Finally, another aspect in which Darwin has influenced psychology is that he helps us to give relative importance to the fact of being successful from an evolutionary point of view. Being part of a species that has many offspring capable of surviving to adulthood does not mean success, it is simply the consequence of a natural process in which, whatever we do, we do not have the last word and in which, moreover, our happiness is not important. At the end of the day, the fact that there are many individuals of the same species, ethnicity or family means that for some reason the sons and daughters are being able to leave offspring, perhaps in abundance.What sacrifices have been made to reach this point? That's the important thing.