Why do humans walk upright on two legs? Why do we have two eyes and stereoscopic vision, opposable thumbs, and vocal cords? Scientists believe there is one answer to all these disparate questions - natural selection. Natural selection describes the way in which organisms evolve; those with the most advantageous adaptations live long enough to pass those adaptations on to the next generation through their genes. Most of us would point to the human brain, and the resulting human mind, as our most significant adaptation. But there’s at least one more critical tool in our arsenal of adaptions, one that we rarely consider or appreciate as a survival mechanism - our emotions.

In the 12 fascinating lectures of Understanding Human Emotions, Professor Lawrence Ian Reed helps us consider our emotions from an evolutionary point of view, exploring why we have these consistent feelings and physical responses to specific stimuli in our lives, and how they benefit us. Averaged over the course of evolutionary history, our emotions motivate us to act in ways that best promote our survival and reproduction. Without the full range of our emotions, we simply would not be here.

We all know what emotions are, and yet we find them so difficult to define. It’s not an easy question, and one that philosophers and scientists have been wrestling with for millennia. In this course, you’ll learn about many of the earliest written musings on the subject, including those of Aristotle, Darwin, William James, and more. Today, we recognize that emotions can be thought of as superordinate programs that coordinate subprograms in order to motivate adaptive behaviors. In this way, emotions function from an evolutionary perspective as solutions to recurrent problems faced by our ancestors over the course of history.