Explain Darwin's Major Influence on Psychology - Essay Example

Comparatives Psychology evolved under the umbrella of his theories. However, Darwin’s work regarding the philosophy of evolution laid foundation for perhaps the most fundamental approach towards explaining psychological concepts: Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary psychologists believe that Darwin’s much-acclaimed theories of natural selection and sexual selection are, indeed, the doctrine of the biological paradigm for explaining behaviour. His works, On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), unintentionally, carved out the dogma for the biological perspective of psychology whereby behaviour functions are determined by the genetics and the survival adaptations employed the ancestors.

The theory of natural selection proposes that for all organisms, determining the species for survival comes down to the fittest of all, where the bravest, strongest, most adaptive, or creative species survive while others simply perish. It explains how that the diversity of life started with a common descent and extended into divisional patterns of evolution by interacting with environment and situations. This concept is considered vital by researchers when studying memory, learning, language and intelligence through the eyes of evolutionary psychology.

Also, human expression of emotion has more frequently been the topic of research using this approach. Theory of adaptation is placed here to assess how a highly-abstract phenomenon such as emotion, which is less-developed in animals, evolved through natural and sexual selection to result in an efficient and versatile vocabulary of expression in humans. Using this paradigm of psychology, scientists moved from collective human examination for similarities and identifying normalcy to discovering differences and analyzing them to help determine the ‘fittest, bravest and strongest’.

Another field of study that emerged through Darwinism is Comparative Psychology. Evolution psychology’s primary claim is that humans evolved from animals through gradual, non-random mutilation due to factors like environmental changes. If this is kept in consideration, animals and humans share substantial genetic common ground. Here, comparative psychology comes in where aspects of human behaviour are aligned with that of animals’ to study patterns and to identify causations and co-relations.

Pavlov’s dog is one of the most famous experiments in psychology that is considered to be the cornerstone for the emergence of the behavioural module in psychology. The experimenter’s subject was his dog, and this fact links itself to the essence of Comparative Psychology. Today, in the world of science, wherever human physiology is the subject of question, experimentation is most likely to be done on our ‘comparatives’ i.e. mice, rabbits, pigs and monkeys. Of course then, interestingly, this system of experimentation saves humans, the ‘superior’ species, from numerous troubles while the ‘inferior’ species are tested instead.

To think of Darwin’s influence on psychology, this approach of psychological experimentation is arguably the most significant achievement resulting from Darwin’s theories. Apart from evolutionary and comparative psychology, Darwin’s influence gave way to Ecological Psychology as well. Ecological Psychology further, branched into today’s advanced sciences of Zoology, Botany and Marine Biology. The links of Darwinism and Ecological Psycho