The course deals with the framing of mental and behavioural mechanisms in the light of the critical and methodological paradigm of the modern evolutionary synthesis.
- Starting from the basic concepts grounding the study of evolution of biological species, the course will deal with the adaptations of mental life associated to individual survival, to sexual selection and the mating strategies based on parental investment, to parenthood and sociality (cooperation, aggression, between-sexes conflicts).
- This knowledge will be applied to examples of everyday life and to the choices that the individual must face every day, in order to allow the student to achieve the critical ability to extend the concepts covered during the course to different possible situations.
- These reflections on specific examples of choices made by humans will allow the student to achieve a certain autonomy of analysis on the different behaviors of the humans and the other animal species.
- The course also aims to train the student on the way of understanding and communicating the evolutionary bases of human behavior.
- Finally, it provides the basis for autonomously developing new ideas on the evolutionary reasons for the most disparate human behaviors.
