[lbo-talk] Questions on Ev Psych

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Fri Dec 3 14:02:40 PST 2004


One general question: traits like mothers sacrificing themselves to save children would have been adaptive to the species out of which humans evolved. So, why look for their origin in human hunters and gatherers ? Most of the traits I have seen given as examples in Ev Psych discussions would have arisen before humans because they would have been adaptive for the pre-human species just as much for the human species.

So when Tooby and Cosmides

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html <http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html>

say

"Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history"

CB:The general question arises, "why weren't the neural circuits evolved earlier for all hominids, hominoids , primates, and mammals.....?

Or when they say the following below, "cognitive designs that can detect and understand social conditionals reliably, precisely, and economcally", these cognitive designs would have been adaptive for hominids, hominoids, primates, mammals... dinosaurs...etc. Ev Psychologists have to explain why this only arose as an adaptation with the rise of the species homo sapiens, when they would have been adaptive for monkeys, lemurs and tariers too.

(Block q)Reasoning instincts: An example

In some of our own research, we have been exploring the hypothesis that the human cognitive architecture contains circuits specialized for reasoning about adaptive problems posed by the social world of our ancestors. In categorizing social interactions, there are two basic consequences humans can have on each other: helping or hurting, bestowing benefits or inflicting costs. Some social behavior is unconditional: one nurses an infant without asking it for a favor in return, for example. But most social acts are conditionally delivered. This creates a selection pressure for cognitive designs that can detect and understand social conditionals reliably, precisely, and economcally (Cosmides, 1985, 1989; Cosmides & Tooby, 1989, 1992). Two major categories of social conditionals are social exchange and threat -- conditional helping and conditional hurting -- carried out by individuals or groups on individuals or groups. We initially focused on social exchange (for review, see Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). (End quote)

CB:More generally, culture is a LaMarckian-like adaptive mechanism, which is to say it is more rapid than Darwinian adaptive mechanisms. A LaMarckian mechanism allows for inheritance of acquired characteristics. Culture is not a somatic adaptive mechanism, but it is an extrasomatic adaptive mechanism, and it creates inheritance of acquired characteristics, behaviors that directly , not randomly, adapt to an environment and are passed to the immediately following generation. Thus culture or custom or tradition or socio-history is the generalized " adaptive problem solving" mechanism that Ev Psych cannot find in the brain structure. With culture, an adaptive problem solved in the life of one generation can be passed on, without going through the genes or creating a body part, to the next immediate generation by way of culture.

Charles Brown



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