Page 6 - 2024-bfw-MyersAP4e

®
AP Science Practice Check Your Understanding

Examine the Concept Apply the Concept
▶ ▶Explain contemporary psychology’s position on the nature– ▶ ▶Think of one of your own traits. (For example, are you
nurture issue. a planner or a procrastinator — do you usually complete
assignments on time or late? Are you more of an extravert or an
introvert — do you become energized by social interactions or do
you recharge by spending time alone?) How do you think that
trait was influenced by nature and nurture?
Answers to the Examine the Concept questions can be found in Appendix C at the end of the book.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Not for redistribution.

Evolutionary Psychology: Understanding
®
AP Exam Tip
Human Nature
To assist your active learning of
psychology, Learning Targets are 1.1-1 How do evolutionary psychologists use natural selection to explain behavior
grouped together at the start of
each module and then framed tendencies?
as questions that appear at the
beginning of the pertinent section Evolutionary psychologists focus mostly on what makes us so much alike as humans. They
of reading. It helps to keep the use Charles Darwin’s principle of natural selection to understand the roots of behavior and
question in mind as you read
through a section to make sure mental processes. The idea, simplified, is this:
that you are following the main • Organisms’ varied offspring compete for survival.
point of the discussion. Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
• Certain biological and behavioral variations increase organisms’ reproductive and sur-
vival chances in their particular environment.
• Offspring that survive are more likely to pass their genes to ensuing generations.
• In this way, over time, population characteristics may change.

To see these principles at work, let’s consider a straightforward example in foxes.

Natural Selection and Adaptation
A fox is a wild and wary animal. If you capture a fox and try to befriend it, be careful: If the
timid fox cannot flee, it may snack on your fingers. In the early 1950s, Russian scientist
Dmitry Belyaev wondered how our human ancestors had domesticated dogs from their wild
wolf forebears. Might he, within a comparatively short stretch of time, accomplish a similar
feat by transforming the fearful fox into a friendly fox?
To find out, Belyaev set to work with 100 female and 30 male foxes selected from fox
Courtesy Institute of Cytology and Genetics, SB RAS males. (He measured tameness based on the foxes’ responses to attempts to feed, han-
farms (where some domestication would have already occurred [Gorman, 2019]). From
their offspring he selected and mated the tamest 20 percent of females and 5 percent of

dle, and stroke them.) Over 57 generations of foxes, Belyaev and his successor, Lyudmila
Trut, repeated that simple procedure (Dugatkin & Trut, 2017). After 40 years and 45,000
foxes, they had a new breed of foxes that, in Trut’s (1999) words, were “docile, eager to
please, and unmistakably domesticated . . . Before our eyes, ‘the Beast’ has turned into

So friendly and eager for human contact were these animals, so inclined to whimper
How to tame a fox Over six ‘beauty,’ as the aggressive behavior of our herd’s wild [ancestors] entirely disappeared.”
to attract attention and to lick people like affectionate dogs, that the researchers’ cash-
decades, geneticist Lyudmila Trut has
genetically bred silver foxes to become strapped institute seized on a way to raise funds — by marketing its friendly foxes as
friendly human companions. house pets.

6 Unit 1 Biological Bases of Behavior

03_myersAPpsychology4e_28116_ch01_002_163.indd 6 15/12/23 9:20 AM