The adapted mind pdf

A compatibility principle is so taken for granted in the natural sciences that it is rarely articulated, although generally applied; the natural sciences are understood to be continuous. Such is not the case in the behavioral and social sciences. Evolutionary biology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, history, and economics largely live in inglorious isolation from one another: Unlike the natural sciences, training in one of these fields does not regularly entail a shared understanding ofthe fundamentals of the others.

In these fields, paying attention to conceptual integration and multidisciplinary compatibility, while not entirely unknown, is unusual Campbell, ; Hinde, ; Symons, As a result, one finds evolutionary biologists positing cognitive processes that could not possibly solve the adaptive problem under consideration, psychologists proposing psychological mechanisms that could never have evolved, and anthropologists making implicit assumptions about the human mind that are known to be false.

Yet to propose a psychological concept that is incompatible with evolutionary biology is as problematic as proposing a chemical reaction that violates the laws of physics. A social science theory that is incompatible with known psychology is as dubious as a neurophysiological theory that requires an impossible biochemistry. Nevertheless, theories in the behavioral and social sciences are rarely evaluated on the grounds ofconceptual integration and multidisciplinary, multilevel compatibility.

Contributors were asked to link evolutionary biology to psychology and psychology to culture-a process that naturally entails consistency across fields. The central premise of The Adapted Mind is that there is a universal human nature, but that this universality exists primarily at the level of evolved psychological mechanisms, not of expressed cultural behaviors.

On this view, cultural variability is not a challenge to claims of universality, but rather data that can give one insight into the structure ofthe psychological mechanisms that helped generate it. A second premise is that these evolved psychological mechanisms are adaptations, constructed by natural selection over evolutionary time. A third assumption made by most ofthe contributors is that the evolved structure of the human mind is adapted to the way oflife of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and not necessarily to our modem circumstances.

What we think of as all of human history-from, say, the rise of the Shang, Minoan, Egyptian, Indian, and Sumerian civilizations-and everything we take for granted as normal parts of life-agriculture, pastoralism, governments, police, sanitation, medical care, education, armies, transportation, and so on-are all the novel products ofthe last few thousand years.

In contrast to this, our ancestors spent the last two million years as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and, ofcourse, several hundred million years before that as one kind offorager or another. These relative spans are important because they establish which set of environments and conditions defined the adaptive problems the mind was shaped to cope with: Pleistocene conditions, rather than modern conditions.

This conclusion stems from the fact that the evolution of complex design is a slow process when contrasted with historical time. Complex, functionally integrated designs like the vertebrate eye are built up slowly, change by change, subject to the constraint that each new design feature must solve a problem that affects reproduction better than the previous design. Therefore, it is improbable that our species evolved complex adaptations even to agriculture, let alone to postindustrial society.

Moreover, the available evidence strongly supports this view ofa single, universal panhuman design, stemming from our long-enduring existence as hunter-gatherers. If selection had constructed complex new adaptations rapidly over historical time, then populations that have been agricultural for several thousand years would differ sharply in their evolved architecture from populations that until recently practiced hunting and gathering.

They do not Barkow, a, a, Accordingly, the most reasonable default assumption is that the interesting, complex functional design features ofthe human mind evolved in response to the demands of a hunting and gathering way of life.

Specifically, this means that in relating the design of mechanisms of the mind to the task demands posed by the world, "the world" means the Pleistocene world of hunter-gatherers. That is, in considering issues of functionality, behavioral scientists need to be familiar with how foraging people lived. We cannot rely on intuitions honed by our everyday experiences in the modern world.

Thus, our concern in this volume is with adaptations-mechanisms that evolved by natural selection-and not with modem day adaptiveness Symons, this volume; see also Barkow, a, b. Aside from the two opening, orienting chapters and the concluding one, each chapter of The Adapted Mind focuses on an adaptive problem that our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have faced: a problem that affected reproduction, however distally, such as finding mates, parenting, choosing an appropriate habitat, cooperating, communicating, foraging, or recovering information through vision.

We asked each contributor to consider three questions: I What selection pressures are most relevant to understanding the adaptive problem under consideration? We chose these three questions because there are interesting causal relationships between selection pressures and psychological mechanisms on the one hand, and between psychological mechanisms and cultural forms on the other. There is now a rich literature in evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology that allows one to develop useful models of selection pressures, and there have been for many decades in anthropology, sociology and other social sciences rich descriptions ofsocial and cultural phenomena.

Using the above three questions, The AdaptedMind is intended to supply the missing middle: the psychological mechanisms that come between theories ofselection pressures on the one hand and fully realized sociocultural behavior on the other. By concentrating on evolved mechanisms, this collection represents a departure from both traditional anthropology and various evolutionarily inspired theories of culture and behavior. Our goal in this collection is to focus on these mechanisms in order to see where a more precise understanding oftheir structure will lead.

Because an evolutionary perspective suggests that there will be a close functional mesh between adaptive problems and the design features of the mechanisms that evolved to solve them, each chapter of The AdaptedMind focuses on an adaptive problem, and each discusses what kind ofpsychological mechanisms one might expect natural selection to have produced to solve that problem.

Evidence from the literatures of psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology was brought to bear on these hypotheses whenever possible.

Many of the authors also addressed a few ofthe implications that the psychological mechanisms they studied might have for culture. The relationship between psychology and culture can be complex, and in some cases the psychological mechanisms are not yet sufficiently well-understood to make any meaningful statement.

Nevertheless, in the interests of conceptual integration, the contributors to The Adapted Mind have tried, insofar as it has been possible, to bring data from cross-cultural studies to bear on their psychological hypotheses, to point out when the psychological mechanisms discussed can be expected to cause variation or uniformity in practices, preferences, or modes of reasoning across cultures, or to discuss what implications the psychological mechanisms concerned might have for various theories of cultural change.

The decision to do so was theoretically motivated. But because this volume is aimed at a broad social science audience, each discipline of which is familiar with different concepts and terms, it may prove helpful to begin with a brieforientation to what the contributors to this volume mean when they use terms such as mind, selection, adaptive problem, and evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology is psychology informed by the fact that the inherited architecture ofthe human mind is the product of the evolutionary process. It is a conceptually integrated approach in which theories ofselection pressures are used to generate hypotheses about the design features of the human mind, and in which our knowledge of psychological and behavioral phenomena can be organized and augmented by placing them in their functional context.

Evolutionary psychologists expect to find a functional mesh between adaptive problems and the structure of the mechanisms that evolved to solve them. Moreover, every psychological theory-even the most doctrinairely "anti-nativist"-carries with it implicit or explicit evolutionary hypotheses. By making these hypotheses explicit, one can evaluate whether psychological theories are consistent with evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology and, if not, investigate which field needs to make changes.

There are various languages within psychology for describing the structure ofa psychological mechanism, and many evolutionary psychologists take advantage of the new descriptive precision made possible by cognitive science. Any system that processes information can be described in at least two different, mutually compatible and complementary ways. If asked to describe the behavior of a computer, for example, one could characterize the ways in which its physical components interact-how electrons flow through circuits on chips.

Alternatively, one could characterize the programs that the system runs-what kind of information the computer takes as input, what rules or algorithms it uses to transform that information, what kinds of data structures representations those rules operate on, what kinds of output it generates. Naturally, programs run by virtue of the physical machine in which they are embodied, but an information-processing description neither reduces to nor can replace a physical description, and vice versa.

Consider the text-editing program "Wordstar. It processes information in the same way no matter what kind of hardware it is running on. Without an information-processing description of Wordstar, you Will not know how to use it or what it does, even if you are intimately acquainted with the hardware in which it is embodied.

A physical description cannot tell one what the computer was designed to do; an information-processing description cannot tell one the physical processes by virtue of which the programs are run. The brain takes sensorily derived information from the environment as input, performs complex transformations on that information, and produces either data structures representations or behavior as output.

Consequently, it, too, can be described in two mutually compatible and complementary ways. A neuroscience description characterizes the ways in which its physical components interact; a cognitive, or information-processing, description characterizes the "programs" that govern its operation. In cognitive psychology, the term mind is used to refer to an information-processing description of the functioning of the brain, and not in any colloquial sense. Behavioral descriptions can be illuminating, but manifest behavior is so variable that descriptions that capture and explain this variability inevitably require an explication of the psychological mechanisms and environmental conditions that generate it see Symons, this volume.

An account of the evolution of the mind is an account of how and why the information-processing organization of the nervous system came to have the functional properties that it does. Information-processing language-the language of cognitive psychology-is simply a way of getting specific about what, exactly, a psychological mechanism does. In this volume, most psychological mechanisms are described in information-processing terms, either explicity or implicity. Research in some areas of psychology is so new that it is too early to develop hypotheses about the exact nature ofthe rules and representations involved.

Nevertheless, the contributors have focused on the kinds of questions that will allow such hypotheses to be developed, questions such as: What kinds of information are available in the environment for a psychological mechanism designed for habitat selection, or mate selection, or parenting to use?

Is there evidence that this information is used? If so, how is it evaluated? What kinds ofaffective reactions does it generate? How do people reason about this information? What information do they find memorable? What kinds of information are easy to learn? What kinds of decision rules guide human behavior? What kinds ofcross-cultural patterns will these mechanisms produce?

What kinds of information will they cause to be socially transmitted? One doesn't have to look far to find minds that are profoundly different from our own: The information-processing mechanisms that collectively comprise the human mind differ in many ways from those that comprise the mind of an alligator or a bee or a sparrow or a wolf. The minds of these different species have different design features: different perceptual processes, different ways ofcategorizing the world, different preferences, different rules of inference, different memory systems, different learning mechanisms, and so on.

These differences in psychological design cause differences in behavior: Upon perceiving a rattlesnake, a coyote might run from it, but another rattlesnake might try to mate with it. Darwin provided a naturalistic explanation for the design features of organisms, including the properties of the minds of animals, not excepting humans. He wanted to explain how complex functional design could emerge in species spontaneously, without the intervention of an intelligent artificer, such as a divine creator.

Darwin's explanation-natural selection-provides an elegant causal account of the relationship between adaptive problems and the design features of organisms. An adaptive problem is a problem whose solution can affect reproduction, however distally.

The logic of his argument seems inescapable. Imagine that a new design feature arises in one or a few members of a species, entirely by chance mutation. It could be anything-a more sensitive retina, a new digestive enzyme, a new learning mechanism. Let's say that this new design feature solves an adaptive problem better than designs that already exist in that species: The more sensitive retina allows one to see predators faster, the new digestive enzyme allows one to extract more nutrients from one's food, the new learning mechanism allows one to find food more efficiently.

By so doing, the new design feature causes individuals who have it to produce more offspring, on average, than individuals who have alternative designs. If offspring can inherit the new design feature from their parents, then it will increase in frequency in the population. Individuals who have the new design will tend to have more offspring than those who lack it, those of their offspring who inherit the new design will have more offspring, and so on, until, after enough generations, every member ofthe species will have the new design feature.

Eventually, the more sensitive retina, the betterdigestive enzyme, the more reliable learning mechanism will become universal in that species, typically found in every member of it.

Darwin called this process natural selection. The organism's interaction with the environment-with "nature"-sets up a feedback process whereby nature "selects" one design over another, depending on how well it solves an adaptive problem a problem that affects reproduction.

Natural selection can generate complex designs that are functionally organizedorganized so that they can solve an adaptive problem-because the criterion for the selection of each design feature is functional: A design feature will spread only if it solves an adaptive problem better than existing alternatives. Over time, this causal feedback process can create designs that solve adaptive problems well-designs that "fit" the environment in which the species evolved. Random processes, such as mutation and drift, cannot, by themselves, produce complex designs that are functionally organized because the probability that all the right design features will come together simply by chance is vanishingly small.

By definition, random processes contain no mechanism for choosing one design over another based on its functionality. Evolution by natural selection is the only presently validated explanation for the accumulation of functional design features across generations.

The emerging field ofevolutionary psychology attempts to take advantage of Darwin's crucial insight that there should be a functional mesh between the design features of organisms and the adaptive problems that they had to solve in the enviroment in which they evolved. By understanding the selection pressures that our hominid ancestors faced-by understanding what kind ofadaptive problems they had to solve-one should be able to gain some insight into the design of the information-processing mechanisms that evolved to solve these problems.

In doing so, one can begin to understand the processes that underlie cultural phenomena as well. To do this, one must show that it is well designed for solving a specific adaptive problem, and that it is not more parsimoniously explained as a by-product ofa design that evolved to solve some other adaptive problem Williams, ; Symons, this volume. This is a difficult enterprise, but a necessary one: Until one understands a mechanism's adaptive function, one does not have a fully satisfying, conceptually integrated account of why it exists and what it does.

More critically, asking functional questions and placing the phenomenon in a functional context often prompts important new insights about its organization, opening up new lines of investigation and bringing to light previously unobserved aspects and dimensions of the phenomenon. A number of contributions to The Adapted Mind take this approach e. Going from a known psychological phenomenon to a theory of adaptive function is the most common form ofconceptual integration between evolutionary biology and psychology.

With equal validity, however, one can take the analysis in the opposite direction as well see Figure 1. One can use theories ofadaptive function to help one discover psychological mechanisms that were previously unknown. When one is trying to discover the structure of an information-processing system as complex as the human brain, knowing what its components were "designed" to do is like being given an aerial map ofa territory one is about to explore by foot.

Ifone knows what adaptive functions the human mind was designed to accomplish, one can make many educated guesses about what design features it should have, and can then design experiments to test for them. This can allow one to discover new, previously unsuspected, psychological mechanisms. The two most direct paths are schematized here. First, knowledge of the adaptive problems and ancestral conditions that human hunter-gatherers faced can lead to new hypotheses about the design of psychological mechanisms that evolved to solve them.

Such heuristic analyses can supply crucial guidance in the design of experiments to discover previously unknown psychological mechanisms-investigations that researchers who neglect functional analysis would not have thought to conduct. Secondly, researchers can start with a known psychological phenomenon, and begin to investigate its adaptive function, if any, by placing it in the context of hunter-gatherer life and known selection pressures.

The discovery of the functional significance of a psychological phenomenon is not only worthwhile in its own right, but clarifies the organization of the phenomenon, and prompts the discovery of new associated phenomena. The answer is that understanding function makes an important and sometimes pivotal contribution to understanding design in systems that are otherwise bewildering in their complexity.

This point is illustrated by a story from the engineering community about the utility of knowing something's function. Reportedly, at a conference, an engineering professor carried a relatively simple circuit around to the various participants, asking them each to guess what its function was.

Despite many guesses, none ofthe assembled engineers was able to figure it out. Finally, on the last day of the conference, the professor went up to the podium and asked the audience members to sketch the design of a circuit that would be able to perform a function that he then named.

Everyone was able to do this rapidly, and when they were finished they were surprised to see that they had just drawn a picture ofthe same circuit that he had been showing them, the circuit whose function they had been unable to guess. Guidance as to function vastly simplifies the problem of organizing the data in a way that illuminates the structure of the mind. Our hominid ancestors had to be able to solve a large number ofcomplex adaptive problems, and do so with special efficiency.

By combining data from paleontology and hunter-gatherer studies with principles drawn from evolutionary biology, one can develop a task analysis that defines the nature of the adaptive information-processing problem to be solved. David Marr called this kind of task analysis a computational theory.

Once one understands the nature ofthe problem, one can then generate very specific, empirically testable hypotheses about the structure of the informationprocessing mechanisms that evolved to solve it. A number of contributors to The Adapted Mind adopted this research strategy e.

One virtue of this approach is that it is immune to the usual but often vacuous accusation of post hoc storytelling: The researcher has predicted in advance the properties of the mechanism. Using an eVOlutionarily derived task analysis to generate hypotheses about the structure of our cognitive processes can lead one to look for mechanisms that would otherwise have been overlooked. Silverman and Eals's chapter on spatial cognition is a good example.

Research on spatial cognition has been proceeding for 1 years without the benefit of an evolutionary perspective, and the only kinds of mechanisms discovered were ones that produced a male performance advantage. Psychologists should be interested in evolutionary biology for the same reason that hikers should be interested in an aerial map of an unfamiliar territory that they plan to explore on foot.

Ifthey look at the map, they are much less likely to lose their way. For example, the atomic theory allowed chemists to see thermodynamics in a new way: The atomic theory was connected to Newtonian mechanics through the kinetic theory of heat, and thermodynamics was recast as statistical mechanics.

When quantum theory was subsequently developed in physics, statistical mechanics was modified in such a way that it could explain not only the thermal and mechanical properties of matter, but its magnetic and electrical properties as well Holton, The emergence ofMendelian genetics at the tum ofthe century solved a major puzzle in Darwinian theory.

By showing that pre-Mendelian theories ofblending inheritance were false-i. Subsequently, the combination of Mendelian genetics, Darwinian theory, and newly developed approaches to statistics led to the Modem Synthesis, which in tum made possible a family of new sciences, from population genetics to behavioral ecology.

Conceptual integration generates this powerful growth in knowledge because it allows investigators to use knowledge developed in other disciplines to solve problems in their own. The causal links between fields create anchor points that allow one to bridge theoretical or methodological gaps that one's own field may not be able to span.

This can happen in the behavioral and social sciences, just as it has happened in the natural sciences. Evidence about cultural variation can help cognitive scientists decide between competing models of universal cognitive processes; evidence about the structure ofmemory and attention can help cultural anthropologists understand why some myths and ideas spread quickly and easily while others do not e.

At present, crossing such boundaries is often met with xenophobia, packaged in the form ofsuch familiar accusations as "intellectual imperialism" or "reductionism. Theories of selection pressures are not theories of psychology; they are theories about some of the causal forces that produced our psychology.

In fact, not only do the principles of one field not reduce to those of another, but by tracing the relationships between fields, additional principles often appear. Instead, conceptual integration simply involves learning to accept with grace the irreplaceable intellectual gifts offered by other fields.

To do this, one must accept the tenet of mutual consistency amortg disciplines, with its allied recognition that there are causal links between them. Compatibility is a misleadingly modest requirement, however, for it is an absolute one. But fortunately errors can be avoided in the future by scrutinizing hypotheses in each field in the light of what is known in other fields. Investigators planning to apply such an approach will need to develop simultaneous expertise in at least two "adjacent" fields.

Toward this end we hope that training in the behavioral and social sciences will move away from its present fragmented and insular form and that students will be actively encouraged to gain a basic familiarity with relevant findings in allied disciplines. In the final analysis, it is not unaided empiricism that has made the natural sciences so powerful, but empiricism wedded to the power of inference.

Every field has holes and gaps. But when there are causal links that join fields, the holes that exist in one discipline can sometimes be filled by knowledge developed in another.

What the natural sciences have discovered is that this is a process with positive feedback: The more that is known-the more that can be simultaneously brought to bear on a questionthe more that can be deduced, explained, and even observed. Ifwe, as behavioral and social scientists, change our customs and accept what mutual enrichment we can offer one another, we can be illuminated by the same engine ofdiscovery that has made the natural sciences such a signal human achievement.

The idea that two statements cannot contradict each other and both be true was old when Aristotle formalized it, and it is only a small step from that to the commonplace idea that claims from different scientific disciplines should not contradict each other either, without at least one ofthem being suspected ofbeing in error. Such a notion would seem too obvious to discuss were it not for the bold claims of autonomy made for the social sciences, accompanied by the institutionalized neglect of neighboring disciplines Barkow, c.

In any case, the central idea is simply one of consistency or compatibility across sciences, and conceptual integration and vertical integration are simply different names for this principle.

The adjective vertical in vertical integration Barkow, b, , a emphasizes, alongside the notion of mutual compatibility, the notion that certain disciplines exist in a structured relationship with each other, such as physics to chemistry, and chemistry to biology.

Each field "lower" in such a structure deals with principles thatgovem more inclusive sets ofphenomena. For example, the laws of physics apply to chemical phenomena, and the principles ofphysics and chemistry apply to biological phenomena, but not the reverse. By the same token, however, each field "higher" up in the structure requires additional principles special to its more restricted domain e.

We will generally use the term "conceptual integration" to avoid the connotation that vertical relationships between disciplines imply some epistemological or status hierarchy among sciences.

For example, Lord Kelvin's criticism of Darwinism was based on Kelvin's erroneous calculation ofthe age ofthe earth. This case demonstrates that when physics and biology conflict, it is certainly possible that physics is in error. Sciences should learn from and strive for consistency with every other field, from those existing in a clearly vertical relationship, such as chemistry is to physics, to those standing in more complex relationships, such as paleontology to psychology.

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Become a Member Log In. Learn K-6 Math and Reading Real learning can be really fun. Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. Parental care and children Pregnancy sickness as adaptation: A deterrent to maternal ingestion of teratogens.

Margie Profet. Nurturance or negligence: Maternal psychology and behavioral preference among preterm twins. Janet Mann. Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals: An evolutionary perspective. Anne Fernald. The social nature of play fighting and play chasing: Mechanisms and strategies underlying cooperation and compromise. Michael J. Boulton and Peter K. Perception and language as adaptations Natural language and natural selection. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom.

The perceptual organization of colors: An adaptation to regularities of the terrestrial world? Roger N. Sex differences in spatial abilities: Evolutionary theory and data. Irwin Silverman and Marion Eals. Environmental aesthetics Evolved responses to landscapes. Gordon H. Orians and Judith H. Environmental preference in a knowledge-seeking, knowledge-using organism.

Stephen Kaplan. Intrapsychic processes The evolution of psychodynamic mechanisms. Randolph M.