Evolutionary psychology is the name given to the discipline which used to be called sociobiology. In short, it asserts that all of our basic behaviors and drives are programmed by our genes which have evolved these characteristics in order to increase the likelihood that they would be perpetuated into future generations.
Richard Dawkins first gained fame for his book on this theory called The Selfish Gene. At any rate, Evo-Psych has led to an outpouring of explanations for human behavior, some of them interesting, some of them ridiculous, and most of them impossible to subject to empirical test. The only limit to Evo-Psych explanations is the imagination of the person doing the explaining.
A good example of this is an article by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa in Psychology Today magazine. The authors make a number of claims, some of which are simply wrong and many of which are ludicrous. An example of the former is the claim that:
Judeo-Christian traditions hold that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage.
This is not true. There's nothing in the Judeo-Christian tradition that suggests that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage. Monogamy is not enjoined upon Jews and Christians because it's natural or normal but rather because it is just. Polygynous societies tend to treat women as property, monogamous societies tend to treat them as equals. In polygynous societies a few men monopolize the majority of women, in monogamous societies each man and each woman have a chance to marry.
Despite its flaws, however, the article is an interesting read. Even more interesting, and certainly more amusing, is Fred Reed's blistering critique of it. Reed's essay can be found here and the link to the article is at the bottom of his post.
RLC
