Psych Overview: U3 Ch. 6 Flashcards
Held that the earth’s major features have resulted from gradual processes occurring over vast stretches of time and which continue in the present much as they have in the past. This theory required an immensely longer period of time for gradual processes to have built mountains and worked their other cumulative effects.
Uniformitarianism
geological features arose because of a few relatively sudden and massive cataclysms or catastrophes on the earth’s surface. This theory accorded well with the the accepted estimate of the earth’s age as only about 6,000 years.
Catastrophism
Darwin’s two general lines of thought (the function of characteristics and geographical distributions of species)
- possible usefulness of the animal characteristics.
2. Animals living in different areas had different traits (types of finch beaks)
What was “one of the most puzzling and controversial questions in all of biology” called?
How the millions of different species that inhabit the earth originally came into being? This was called “the mystery of mysteries.”
A French zoologist who had proposed that species evolve and change owing to the inheritance of bodily changes produced by the voluntary exercise or disuse of particular organs.
Lamarck
Different environments inevitably and constantly impose a _________ on their inhabitants, disproportionately favoring certain kinds of individuals to survive and propagate their kind.
natural selection
A British naturalist who independently conceived a theory of evolution by natural selection, which prompted Charles Darwin to publish his similar work on the theory.
Alfred Russell Wallace
Darwin’s Famous Book
On the origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
What Darwin did in The Descent of Man.
Darwin argued explicitly and publicly that human beings have descended from animal ancestors.
Political systems and societies, like all human and animal species, evolve because of natural selection and that therefore the current systems represent the survival of the fittest.
Social Darwinism
Who was the biggest supporter of Social Darwinism
Herbert Spencer
A recently developed theoretical approach that hypothesizes that the unit of evolution is the individual gene, rather than the group of entire organism.
Sociobiology
A sub-discipline of psychology that studies the similarities and differences among various animals’ psychological functions to shed light on these processes in human beings.
Comparative Psychology
