Evolutionary Psychology

Evolution-ary Psychology is an evolutionary approach to Human Nature... One author summed up the basic idea of evolutionary psychology this way: "A person is only a gene's way of making another gene" (Konner, 1985, p. 48). Sociobiology (of which evolutionary psychology is a subfield that particularly concerns humans) can be thought of as having, like any research program, a "hard core" of problem solving strategies that provide possible answers to vexing research questions, and a "protective belt" of promising research questions to be addressed by providing actual answers to these questions. The protective belt structures our ignorance by identifying research questions that must be addressed if the research program is to advance. Whereas the actual answers that arise from the protective belt may be wrong, the hard core (by methodological fiat) is never wrong--any potential negative evidence is to be blamed on faulty auxiliary assumptions rather than on the theory itself. http://www.personalityresearch.org/evolutionary.html

aka EvoPsych

book list http://www.mftsource.com/theory.evpsych.htm

Robert Wright's Moral Animal covers this.