evolutionary explanations for human behaviour

• o   Based on natural selection, which is the survival of the fittest. Organisms better adapted to their environment live longer and survive to reproduce and pass those favourable characteristics down to their offspring’s.

  o   Aggression was an adaptive behaviour for our ancestors and us in modern society as it would’ve been needed to hunt for food, ward of predators and same sex rivals allowing them to pass on their genes and could be seen as a solution to adaptive problems such as prevention of infidelity and maintaining a high status.
• o   The MAOA gene also known as the ‘warrior gene’ is also linked to aggression so people today who have that gene may be more aggressive than those who don’t due to inheriting this gene from their ancestors.

  o   Sexual selection is a specific form of natural selection where individuals who successfully find a mate, out-reproduce the same-sex rivals.
• Aggression may be beneficial for sexual selection as more aggressive behaviours may scare off potential competitors and threat of violence may prevent the female partner from ‘straying’ this would ensure that the males’ genes are passed on and not the rivals’ genes.
• A strength of this theory is that it can explain gender differences in aggression. This is evident in modern society as males tend to be more stressed by sexual infidelity and females by emotional infidelity. Harris suggested that males normally describe themselves by money, career, and status however females present themselves by the way they look and dress. Showing that people today still are attracted by males who seem to come off as more dominant as it helps with sexual selection because it suggests the adaptive aggression in males makes them strong enough to protect their offspring’s.
• [strength justification] However, differences in gender and aggression can be better explained by social learning theory which suggests that males are more aggressive because they are exposed to more aggressive role models.
• A weakness is it ignores the influence of culture. Studies have found that people from America have very low levels of aggression as that behaviour was discouraged from childhood. Whereas the people from Venezuela are more aggressive as it was used to gain status in their society. This shows that differences between the aggression levels of different cultures demonstrates that aggression levels are not universal and may change due to environmental factors. However, we could use epigenetics which considers the influence of both nature and nurture.