Evolutionary behavioral genetics

- We describe a research paradigm at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics.
- Genetically informative designs can answer evolutionary psychological questions.
- Evolutionary theory can inform questions about the maintenance of behavioral genetic variation.
- This area of research is nascent and many questions of central importance remain unanswered or unasked.

We describe the scientific enterprise at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics - a field that could be termed Evolutionary Behavioral Genetics - and how modern genetic data is revolutionizing our ability to test questions in this field. We first explain how genetically informative data and designs can be used to investigate questions about the evolution of human behavior, and describe some of the findings arising from these approaches. Second, we explain how evolutionary theory can be applied to the investigation of behavioral genetic variation. We give examples of how new data and methods provide insight into the genetic architecture of behavioral variation and what this tells us about the evolutionary processes that acted on the underlying causal genetic variants.