It is not your mother's Psychology class

Students entering college today do so at a time when Charles Darwin’s prediction, recorded in the last chapter of The Origin of Species has come true. Darwin predicted:

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important research. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."

That is bold. He saw a distant future in which everything about human psychology was understood in terms of evolution. Darwin left nothing in doubt – “each mental power and capacity” means every topic in every Psychology textbook. According to Darwin, all mental activity, even that which Christians think of as our God-likeness, is ultimately nothing more than a “mental power” or “capacity” that we acquired, bit by bit, over a very long time, through variation and natural selection. Darwinian evolution, when applied to human psychology and taken to its logical and necessary conclusion, explains our consciousness, our morality, our capacity to make decisions and judgments, religious experience, love, empathy, altruism, hate, greed, dreams, and everything else that makes us human, in terms of evolved problem solving mechanisms. Darwin’s future is today. Students taking Psychology in college today do so at a time when Evolution is seen as the unifying explanation for all of Psychology.