To begin, I have really never learned about evolution. I went to a Catholic private school for my entire school career before college, so this was something that was not widely accepted in a religious environment. Catholicism does not really resent the idea of evolution, but believes there was a divine intervention at some point. This is not to say that I do not believe evolution is real( because it most definitely is), just that I really need to be more exposed to it. As a bachelor’s of arts in Psychology, I have not gotten a lot of true science exposure in college either. There just are not that many science requirements for an arts major. The last genetics class that I took was my sophomore year of high school, so it was nice to brush up on the subject in these lectures. This week’s readings and videos really opened my eyes to the deeper meaning of genetics, especially the article about the 2% difference. I enjoyed learning about this seemingly tiny, but huge difference between humans and chimpanzees. I never thought that we would be so similar to them genetically.

To answer the question of how my field understands evolution, I will turn to the subfield of Evolutionary Psychology. I have never taken a class on this subject, but it has been brought up many times in my psychology courses at MSU. I had never really considered this in the broader field of Psychology. Evolutionary psychology seeks to explain traits in the psyche, using an evolutionary approach. These traits can include memory, perception, and language (Kenrick, 2014). I think evolutionary psychology is a very insightful way to look at evolution, looking more at behavior and mental processes than just genes and like physical traits (phenotypes) you can see. I would say psychology is less focused on the biological piece of evolution, and more on the effects it has on behavior. Evolutionary psychology is a growing field and I am excited to learn more about it.

I think the psychological perspective of human variability is an important one. Thinking of mental health alone, every single person is on a different scale of emotion and coping skills. Every person reacts to stress and negative situations differently. Human variability is also looked at in a lot of psychological studies. This is what makes psychology so interesting to me, studying differences. We often separate groups for studies into males and females, or into different age groups. There are many famous studies done on children, and on college students (the Stanford prison experiment is probably one of the most famous). Doing a study on just one group can end up leading to bias though, and I know a lot of psychologists worry about this. 

In conclusion, I think psychology considers evolution and human variability as key parts of our field. We would not be able to study anything in the human mind without human variability, and evolution explains how are minds got to this point.