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Despite widespread acceptance of natural selection in biology and the life sciences, social and developmental scientists have resisted incorporating evolutionary frameworks into research and teaching curricula. Charlesworth (1992) has argued that developmentalists avoid evolution because they perceive it as running contrary to meliorist attitudes that are predominate in the field. Other scholars have suggested that evolution is ignored by social scientists because of a lack of knowledge about the theory. In this study, we suggest that resistance among developmentalists toward evolution may occur due to individual differences in life history and personality traits. We examine the meliorist attitudes, life history and personality traits of faculty, graduate and undergraduates in family studies in human development and the effect these variables have on the acceptance and usage of evolutionary theory in academia. Results reveal that life history may contribute to more meliorism, increasing disuse of evolutionary theory due to affective reasons.

The field of evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) seeks to integrate the basic tenets of evolutionary psychology (EP) and developmental systems theory. EDP can potentially broaden the horizons of mainstream EP by combining the principles of Darwinian evolution by natural selection with the study of human development, focusing on the epigenetic processes that occur between humans and their environment in a way that attempts to explain how evolved psychological mechanisms become expressed in the phenotypes of children and adults. This article provides an overview of the newly emerging field of EDP, focusing both on species-typical patterns of human development and their applications, as well as identifying individual differences among humans as a result of adaptively structured phenotypic plasticity and genetic variation. EDP represents an emerging synthesis between explanatory models of species-universal traits and individual differences resulting from adaptive developmental plasticity and genetic diversity. This newly emerging field provides the most complete picture of adaptive human behavior and cognition, taking into consideration our species' rich evolutionary history in conjunction with ontogenetic differences among humans.