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Living psychology: animal minds
Living psychology: animal minds

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3 The evolution of brains and minds

Before you go any further with this course, you need to explore some basic points about how evolutionary theory is used in psychology (Box 1).

Box 1 The use of evolutionary theory in psychology

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Figure 1 Charles Darwin’s statue, Natural History Museum, London

Evolutionary theory, most closely associated with the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882; Figure 1), states that species change over time. Changes that help an organism to survive and reproduce are called ‘adaptations’, and are passed on to subsequent generations. For example, if being tall and furry is helpful in a particular environment, then taller, furrier organisms will survive better than shorter, less furry ones, and will breed more successfully. Their offspring will tend to be tall and furry, and the taller and furrier of these offspring will be more likely to survive and reproduce than the shorter and less furry offspring. Over time, the entire species may become tall and furry, and may change enough from the original organisms to be considered a new species.

Evolutionary theory arose as part of biology and therefore focuses primarily on the physical characteristics of organisms, including the development of the brain. It is used in two ways in psychology:

  • Evolutionary psychology considers human characteristics and asks how they may have evolved. For example, an evolutionary psychology approach to Theory of Mind (ToM) in humans would be to ask what advantage ToM would have given early human ancestors – why would ToM be adaptive? An explanation might be that early humans who had ToM were better able to predict others’ behaviour than those who did not, which helped them when cooperating and competing with each other to survive and reproduce (Baron-Cohen, 1999).

  • Comparative psychology considers both human and non-human characteristics and can be seen as ‘animal psychology’ in the broad sense, with humans being just one of the species under consideration. Indeed, some comparative psychologists exclude humans and focus only on animals (Dewsbury (2013) refers to this approach as ‘zoological psychology’). As the term suggests, comparative psychology often (but not always) involves making comparisons between the abilities of different species. For example, comparing the problem-solving abilities of chimpanzees, humans, elephants and crows would be an example of comparative psychology in its most literal sense. Comparative psychology makes use of both artificial situations, such as observing animal behaviour in a laboratory, and real-world situations, observing animals in their natural habitats (known as ethology).

It is widely accepted in psychology that the brain is the part of the body where the functions that involve the ‘mind’ take place. Everything you experience, feel, think, dream, remember, imagine and decide happens in your brain (although certain philosophers have questioned this supposition). A detailed discussion of where in the brain the mind is located is beyond the scope of this course (and, in fact, is still something of an open question in psychology). However, it is important to understand how the structure of the brain can enable the processes of the mind, and what this means for the minds of animals.

You will explore this more in the next section, using the specific example of emotion.