Interest is growing in the application of evolutionary and genetic behavioral ecological theory to problems of human lifetimes age specific fertility and mortality, population growth, and emerging population-environment interactions. An understanding of human evolution, particularly the effects of environmental constraints on age-specific fertility and mortality offers insights not only into our past, but into modern problems that are both large scale and urgent. Past theories have helped little to illuminate such issues as the transition to small family size.
             Evolutionary theory has attained the status of new paradigms for personality. Three challenges for the next generation of research are to integrate these disparate approaches to personality (particularly the trait and social-cognitive paradigms), to remedy the imbalance in the person-situation-behavior triad by conceptualizing the basic properties of situations and behaviors, and to add to personality psychology's thin inventory of basic facts concerning the relations between personality and behavior. In the past few years, three new basic paradigms for the study of personality have joined the four classics just considered. Two of these--the social-cognitive and biological approaches--grew out of the behaviorist and trait paradigms, respectively. The third--evolutionary psychology--deserves to be considered a new paradigm in its own right.
             The evolutionary approach to personality, by contrast, focuses on the possibility that behavioral patterns common to all people--human nature itself--has a biological foundation that can be illuminated by considering the evolutionary history of the human species. Evolutionary ideas became an important part of biology beginning. The modern field of evolutionary psychology can be said to have begun with the sociobiology. The key idea that during the environment of evolutionary adaptation humans with certain behavioral propensities was partic...