The goal of research in evolutionary psychology, according to John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. They define the discipline as “an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind… It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it …the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”