Handout On Evolutionary Psychology

SSSM Argument that culture is the dominant organizing force:

SSSM1. A normal human can belong to any culture (the psychic unity of humankind) (25).

SSSM2. Adults "differ profoundly in their behavioral and mental organization" (25).

SSSM3. This "behavioral and mental organization" is absent from infants. (26)

SSSM4. The source of adult's complex organization is the complex organization of the social environment (which is itself more-or-less autonomous). (26)

In contrast, Evolutionary Psychologists hold that:

EP1. Capacities can be innate without being present at birth (33).

EP2. The "poverty of the stimulus" argument shows that normal learning cannot be responsible for adult capacities:

The Standard Social Science Model requires an impossible psychology. Results out of cognitive psychology, linguistic, and philosophy cnverge on the same conclusion: A psychological architecture that consisted of nothing but equipotential, general-purpose, content-independent, or content-free mechanisms could not successfully perform the tasks the human mind is known to perform or solve the adaptive problems humans evolved to solve – from seeing, to learning a language, to recognizing an emotional expression, to selecting a mate, to the many disparate activities aggregated under the term 'learning culture.' It cannot account for the behavior observed, and it is not a type of design that could have evolved. (34)

EP3. Human social life is shaped by our highly specialized, modular nature:

human psychological architecture contains many evolved mechanisms that are specialized for solving evolutionarily long-enduring adaptive problems and that these mechanisms have content-specialized representational formats, procedures, cues, and so on. (34)

"Because of their design, [the] operation of [content-specific mechanisms] continually imparts evolutionarily patterned content to modern human life." (50)

EP. "Beneath Variable Behavior Lie Universal Mechanisms" (see p. 45 ff).

• Innate Plus (e.g. linguistics)
• Developmental Program

Theoretical Claim:

Specialized Mechanisms Do A Better Job:

"General mechanisms turn out to be very weak and cannot unassisted perform at least most and perhaps all of the task humans routinely perform and need to perform" (39).

Gray's Anatomy Claim:

Methodological Claims for EP

1. We can understand the mind only when we understand the function - a nontrivial task.

If the psychological architectures of organisms are infused with complex functional organization, this is not always easy to see. Precisely because functional organization may be very complex, and embedded in an even more bewildering array of variable and intricate by-products, it may appear to the unaided intellect to be indistinguishable from chaos or poor design. Unless one knows what to look for – unless, at the very least, one knows what counts as functional – one cannot recognize complex functionality even when one sees its operation. (63).