Preferences for high-calorie food, rapid fear of snakes, and patterns of mate choice look puzzling until viewed as solutions to ancestral problems. Evolutionary psychology explains psychological traits as adaptations shaped by natural selection.

It asks what recurrent adaptive problems the mind was designed to solve and what computational mechanisms evolved to solve them. Topics include cooperation, aggression, parental investment, language, and cheater detection. The approach generates testable predictions about universality, sex differences, and developmental timing.

Critics caution against speculative just-so stories and underestimation of cultural flexibility. Proponents reply that evolutionary hypotheses can be rigorous when they specify design features and are tested against cross-cultural and experimental data. Evolutionary psychology does not claim that behavior is genetically fixed; it claims that the architecture supporting learning and culture itself has an evolutionary history.

• Explains mind as product of natural selection
• Focuses on adaptive problems and evolved mechanisms
• Generates predictions about universality and variation
• Complements rather than replaces cultural analysis