Ewolucja polityki zagranicznej II RP - notatka (UW), HISTORIA, 11. Czasy najnowsze, Polityka zagraniczna II RP
Ewolucja strategii militarnej NATO, NATO
Ewolucja operacji pokojowych ONZ, Bezpieczenstwo, Bezpieczeństwo(1)
Ewolucja pedagogiki od sztuki wychowania do nauki o wychowaniu człowieka Kujawiński Jerzy PEŁNA WERSJA, N jak Nauka
Ewolucjonizm a Prawo by Załuski, PRAWO UJ, TEORIA PRAWA
Ewolucja techniki sekcyjnej – od Virchowa do Virtopsy®, Nauka, MEDYCYNA WETERYNARYJNA, weterynaria sądowa
Ewolucja koncepcji wykorzystania zbóż w gospodarce i żywieniu człowieka, Dietetyka Zdrowie, Ksiazki, Rozne
Ewolucja myślenia systemowego w terapii rodzin PEŁNA WERSJA, Podręczniki, lektury
Ewolucja epistemologii w XX wieku, Filozofia, Prof. dr hab. Stanisław Judycki
ewolucjonizm antropologii kulturowej-[ www.potrzebujegotowki.pl ], Ściągi i wypracowania
Evol integrat, psychologia, psychologia ewolucyjna
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]In: "The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology
and the Generation of Culturetf,Jerome Barkow,
Leda Cosmides,
&
John Tooby (eds.),
1992, New York: Oxford University Press
Introduction: Evolutionary Psychology and
Conceptual Integration
LEDA COSMIDES, JOHNTOOBY, AND JEROME H. BARKOW
TheAdapted Mind
is an edited volume of original, commissioned papers centered on
the complex, evolved psychological mechanisms that generate human behavior and
culture. It has two goals: The first is to introduce the newly crystallizing field of evo-
lutionarypsychology to a wider scientificaudience. Evolutionarypsychology is simply
psychology that is informed by the additionalknowledgethat evolutionarybiology has
to offer, in the expectation that understanding the process that designed the human
mind will advancethe discovery ofitsarchitecture. It unites modem evolutionarybiol-
ogy with the cognitive revolution in a way that has the potential to draw together all
of the disparate branches of psychology into a single organized system of knowledge.
The chaptersthat follow, for example, span topics from perception, language,and rea-
soningto sex, pregnancy sickness, and play. The second goal of this volume is to clarify
how this new field, by focusing on the evolved information-processingmechanisms
that comprisethe human mind, suppliesthe necessaryconnectionbetween evolution-
ary biology and the complex, irreducible social and cultural phenomena studied by
anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians.
Culture is not causeless and disembodied. It is generated in rich and intricate ways
by information-processingmechanismssituatedin human minds. These mechanisms
are, in turn, the elaborately sculpted product of the evolutionary process. Therefore,
to understand the relationshipbetween biology and culture one must first understand
the architecture of our evolved psychology (Barkow, 1973, 1980a, 1989a; Tooby
&
Cosmides, 1989). Past attempts to leapfrog the psychological-to apply evolutionary
biology directly to human social life-have for this reason not always been successful.
Evolutionary psychology constitutesthe inissingcausal link needed to reconcile these
oRen warring perspectives (Cosmides
&
Tooby, 1987).
With evolutionarypsychology in place, cross-connecting biology to the social sci-
ences, it is now possible to provide conceptually integrated analyses of specificques-
tions: analyses that move step by step, integrating evolutionary biology with psychol-
ogy, and psychology with social and cultural phenomena (Barkow, 1989a; Tooby
&
Cosmides, 1989). Each chapter in this volume is a
case
study of the difficult task of
integrating across these disciplinaryboundaries. Although it has been said that the first
expressions of new and better approaches often look worse than the latest and most
elaborated expressions of older and more deficient ones, we think these chapters are
4
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY ANDCONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY ANDCONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
illuminating contributions to the human sciences that stand up well against prevailing
approaches. Nevertheless, readers should bear in mind that none of these chapters are
meant tobe the last word "from biology" or"from psychology"; they are not intended
to definitively settle issues. They are better thought of as "first words," intended to
open new lines of investigation and toillustrate the potential inherent in this new out-
look.
ceptually integrated approach to the behavioral and social sciences might look like.
Contributors were asked tolink 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 toclaims of universality, but rather data that can give one insight into
the structure ofthe psychological mechanisms that helped generate it. A second prem-
ise is that these evolved psychological mechanisms are adaptations, constructed by
natural selection overevolutionary time. A third assumption made by most of the con-
tributors is that the evolved structure of the human mind is adapted to the way of life
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, sani-
tation, medical care, education, armies, transportation, and so on-are all the novel
products of the last few thousand years. In contrast to this, our ancestors spent the last
two million years as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and, of course, several hundred mil-
lion years before that as one kind of fomger oranother. These relative spansare impor-
tant 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, func-
tionally integrated designs like the vertebrate eye arebuilt upslowly,change by change,
subject tothe constraint that each new design feature must solve a problem that affects
reproduction better than the previous design. The few thousand years since the scat-
tered appearance of agriculture is only a small stretch in evolutionary terms, less than
1% of the two million years our ancestors spent as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. For
this reason, it is unlikely that new complex designs-ones requiring the coordinated
assembly of many novel, functionally integrated features-could evolve in sofew gen-
erations (Tooby
&
Cosmides, 1990a, 1990b). Therefore, it is improbable that our spe-
cies evolved complex adaptations even to agriculture, let alone to postindustrial soci-
ety. Moreover, the available evidence strongly supports this view of a 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, 1980a, 1989a, 1990).
Accordingly, the most reasonable default assumption is that the interesting, com-
plex functionaldesign features of the human mind evolved in response to thedemands
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. Finally, it is important to recognize that behavior generated by mechanisms
that are adaptations to an ancient way of life will not necessarily be adaptive in the
CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION INTHE BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL
SCIENCES
Conceptual integration-also known as vertical integration1-refers to the principle
that the various disciplines within the behavioral and social sciences should make
themselves mutually consistent, and consistent with what is known in the natural sci-
ences as well (Barkow, 1980b, 1982, 1989a; Tooby
&
Cosmides, this volume). The
natural sciences arealready mutually consistent: the laws of chemistry are compatible
with the laws of physics, even though they are not reducible to them. Similarly, the
theory of natural selection cannot, even in principle, be expressed solely in terms of
the laws of physics and chemistry, yet it is compatible with those laws.
A
conceptually
integrated theory is one framed so that it is compatible with data and theory from other
relevant fields. Chemists do not propose theories that violate the elementary physics
principle of the conservation of energy: Instead, they use the principle to make sound
inferences about chemical processes. A compatibility principle is so taken for granted
in the natural sciences that it is rarely articulated, although generally applied; the nat-
ural 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 of the fundamentals of
the others. In these fields, paying attention to conceptual integration and multidisci-
plinary compatibility, while not entirely unknown, is unusual (Campbell, 1975;
Hinde, 1987; Symons, 1979). As a result, one finds evolutionary biologists positing
cognitive processes that could not possibly solve the adaptive problem under consid-
eration, psychologists proposing psychological mechanisms that could never have
evolved, and anthropologists making implicit assumptions about the human mind
that are known to be false. The behavioral and social sciences borrowed the idea of
hypothesis testing and quantitative methodology from the natural sciences, but unfor-
tunately not the idea of conceptual integration (Barkow, ,1989a; Tooby
&
Cosmides,
this volume).
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 asdubi-
ous as a neurophysiological theory that requires an impossible biochemistry. Never-
theless, theories in the behavioral and social sciences are rarely evaluated on the
grounds of conceptual integration and multidisciplinary, multilevel compatibility.
With
The
Adapted Mind, we hope to provide a preliminary sketch of what a con-
6
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY ANDCONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
modern world. Thus, our concern in this volume is with adaptations-mechanisms
that evolved by natural selection-and not with modern day adaptiveness (Symons,
this volume; see also Barkow, 1989a, 1989b).
Aside from the two opening, orientingchapters and the concludingone, each chap
ter 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, com-
municating, foraging, or recovering information through vision. We asked each con-
tributor to consider three questions:
(
I) What selection pressures are most relevant to
understanding the adaptive problem under consideration?;
(2)
What psychological
mechanisms have evolved to solve that adaptive problem?; and (3) What is the rela-
tionshipbetween the structure of these psychological mechanisms and human culture?
We chose these three questions because there are interesting causal relationships
between selection pressures and psychological mechanisms on the one hand, and
between psychological mechanismsand cultural forms on the other.
There is now a rich literature in evolutionarybiology 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
ofsocialand cultural phenomena. Using the above threequestions,
TheAdaptedMind
is intended to supply the missing middle: the psychological mechanisms that come
between theoriesof selection pressureson the one hand and fully realized sociocultural
behavior on the other. By concentrating on evolved mechanisms, this collection rep
resents a departure from both traditional anthropology and various evolutionarily
inspired theoriesof culture and behavior. Although both of these fieldsrecognize that
culture and cultural change depend critically upon the transmission and generation of
information, they have frequently ignored what should be the causal core of their field:
the study of the evolved information-processing mechanisms that allow humans to
absorb, generate, modify, and transmit culture-the psychological mechanisms that
take cultural information as input and generate behavior as output (Barkow, 1978,
1989a;Tooby
&
Cosmides, 1989).Our goal in thiscollection is to focuson these mech-
anisms in order to see where a more precise understandingof their 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 tosolve them, each chapter of
TheAdaptedMindfocuses
on an adaptiveprob-
lem, and each discusses what kind of psychological mechanisms one might expect nat-
ural 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 of the impli-
cations 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 sufficientlywell-understoodto make any mean-
ingful statement. Nevertheless, in the interests of conceptual integration,the contrib-
utors 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 dis-
cuss what implicationsthe psychological mechanisms concerned might have for var-
ious theories of cultural change.
BASIC CONCEPTS INEVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND BIOLOGY
The organization of
The Adapted Mind
is unusual: Few works in psychology or the
social sciences are organized around adaptive problems. The decision to do so was
theoretically motivated. The first two chapters, "The Psychological Foundations of
Culture," by Tooby and Cosmides, and "On the Use and Misuse of Darwinism in the
Study of Human Behavior," by Symons, as well as the last chapter, "Beneath New
Culture Is Old Psychology," by Barkow, present the theoretical program that animates
this volume
(see
also Barkow, 1989a, 1990; Brown, 199
1
;
Cosmides
&
Tooby, 1987;
Daly
&
Wilson, 1988; Sperber, 1985; Symons, 1979; Tooby
&
Cosmides, 1989,
1990b).But because this volume is aimed at a broad social science audience, each dis-
cipline of which is familiar with different conceptsand 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, adaptiveproblem,
and
evolutionarypsycfiology.
Evolutionary psychology is psychology informed by the fact that the inherited
architecture of the human mind is the product of the evolutionaryprocess. It is a con-
ceptually integrated approach in which theoriesof selection pressures are used to gen-
erate hypotheses about the design features of the human mind, and in which our
knowledge of psychological and behavioral phenomena can be organized and aug-
mented by placing them in their functionalcontext. Evolutionary psychologistsexpect
to find a functional mesh between adaptive problems and the structure of the mech-
anisms 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 psycho-
logical theories are consistent with evolutionary biology and paleoanthropology and,
if not, investigate which field needs to make changes.
There are various languageswithin psychology for describingthe structure of a psy-
chological mechanism, and many evolutionary psychologists take advantage of the
new descriptive precision made possible by cognitive science. Any system that pro-
cesses 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 characterizethe ways in which its physical components interact-how elec-
trons flow through circuits on chips. Alternatively, one could characterize the pro-
grams 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 embod-
ied, but an information-processingdescription neither reduces to nor can replace a
physical description, and vice versa. Consider the text-editing program "Wordstar."
Even though it can run on a variety of different hardware architectures, it always has
the same functional design-the same key strokes will delete a line, move a block of
text, or print out your file. 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-processingdescription
cannot tell one the physical processes by virtue of which the programs are run.
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
9
In psychology, it has become common to describe a brain as a system that pro-
cesses information-a computer made out of organic compounds rather than silicon
chips. 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 characterizesthe ways in which its physical components interact; a cog-
nitive, or information-processing,descriptioncharacterizesthe "programs" that gov-
em its operation. In cognitive psychology, the term mind is used to refer to an infor-
mation-processing description of the functioning of the brain, and not in any
co1loquial 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 condi-
tions that generate it (see Symons, this volume).
An account of the evolution of the mind is an account of how and why the infor-
mation-processing organization of the nervous system came to have the functional
properties that it does. Information-processinglanguage-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-processingterms, 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
of the 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 psycholog-
ical 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
of affective 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 of cross-cul-
tural 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-processingmechanismsthat 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 designfia-
lures: different perceptual processes, different ways of categorizingthe world, different
preferences, different rules of inference, different memory systems, different learning
mechanisms, and so on. These differencesin psychological design cause differencesin
behavior: Upon perceiving a rattlesnake, a coyote might run from it, but another rat-
tlesnake 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 relation-
ship between adaptive problems and the design features of organisms. An adaptive
problem is a problem whose solution can affect reproduction,however distally. Avoid-
ing predation, choosing nutritious foods, finding a mate, and communicating with
others are examples of adaptive problems that our hominid ancestors would have
faced.
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 mecha-
nism. 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 individualswho have it to produce more off-
spring, 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. Individualswho have the new design will tend to have more offspring
than those who lack it, those of their offspringwho inherit the new design will have
more offspring, and so on, until, after enough generations, every member of the species
will have the new design feature. Eventually, the more sensitiveretina, the better diges-
tive enzyme, the more reliable learning mechanism will become universal in that spe-
cies, typically found in every member of it.
Darwin called this process natural seleclion. The organism's interaction with the
environment-with "nature"--sets up a feedback process whereby nature "selects"
one design over another, dependingon how well it solves an adaptiveproblem (a prob-
lem that affects reproduction).
Natural selection can generate complex designs that arefuncfionally organized-
organized 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 muta-
tion 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 of evolutionarypsychology attempts to take advantage of Dar-
win's crucial insight that there shouldbe a functionalmesh between the design features
of organisms and the adaptive problems that they had to solve in the enviroment in
which they evolved. By understandingthe selection pressuresthat our hominid ances-
tors faced-by understanding what kind of adaptiveproblems they had to solve-one
should
be
able to gain some insight into the design of the information-processing
mechanismsthat evolvedto solve these problems. In doing so, onecan begin to under-
stand the processes that underlie cultural phenomena as well.
COMPLEMENTARY APPROACHES TO FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS
The most common approach that evolutionarily oriented behavioral scientists have
taken is to start with a known phenotypic phenomenon, such as pregnancy sickness,
10
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
11
language, or color vision, and to try to understand what its adaptive function was-
why that design was selected for rather than alternative ones. To do this, one must
show that it is well designed for solving a specific adaptive problem, and that it is not
more parsimoniouslyexplained as a by-product of a design that evolved to solve some
other adaptive problem (Williams, 1966; Symons, this volume). This is a difficult
enterprise, but a necessary one: Until one understands a mechanism's adaptive func-
tion, 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
TheAdapted Mind
take this approach (e.g., Boulton
&
Smith, Nesse
&
Lloyd, Pro-
fet, Pinker
&
Bloom, and Shepard). Going from a known psychological phenomenon
to a theory of adaptive function is the most common form of conceptual integration
between evolutionary biology and psychology.
With equal validity, however, one can take the analysis in the opposite direction
as well (see Figure
I.
I). One can use theories of adaptive function to help one discover
psychological mechanismsthat were previously unknown. When one is trying to dis-
cover the structure of an information-processing system as complex as the human
brain, knowing what its components were "designed" to dois like being given anaerial
map of a territory one is about toexplore by foot. If oneknows what adaptivefunctions
the human mind was designed to accomplish, one can make many educated guesses
about what design featuresit should have, and can then design experimentsto test for
them. This can allow one to discover new, previously unsuspected, psychological
mechanisms.
Empirically minded researchers,distrustfulof "theory" (by which they often mean
facts or principles drawn from unfamiliar fields), frequently ask why they should
bother thinking about evolutionary biology: Why not just investigate the mind and
behavior, and simply report what is found?Theanswer is that understanding function
makes an important and sometimes pivotal contribution to understanding design in
systems that are otherwise bewilderingin 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 assembledengineerswas 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
of the same circuit that he had been showingthem, the circuit whose function they had
been unable to guess2 Behavioral scientists have been nearly defeated by the com-
plexity of the behavior they confront. Guidance as to function vastly simplifies the
problem of organizing the data in a way that illuminatesthe structure of the mind.
Our hominid ancestorshad to be able to solve a large number of complex adaptive
problems, and doso with specialefficiency. By combiningdata from paleontology and
hunter-gatherer studies with principles drawn from evolutionary biology, one can
developa task analysis that defines the nature of the adaptive information-processing
problem to be solved. David Marr (1982) called this kind of task analysis a
computa-
tional theory.
Once one understands the nature of the problem, one can then generate
very specific, empirically testable hypotheses about the structure of the information-
processing mechanisms that evolved to solve it.
A
number of contributors to
The
Adapted Mind
adopted this research strategy (e.g., Buss, Cosmides
&
Tooby, Mann,
Silverman
&
~als).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
otheMrise have been overlooked. Silverman and Eals's chapter on spatial cognition is
agood example. Research on spatialcognition has been proceeding for 100years with-
out the benefit of an evolutionary perspective, and the only kinds of mechanisms dis-
covered were ones that produced a male performance advantage. But by asking what
kind of spatialcognitiona Pleistocenewoman would have needed to be good at solving
the adaptive problem of foraging for plant foods, Silverman and Eals were able to dis-
cover a new class of mechanismsinvolved in spatial cognition, which produce a 60%
female advantage.
Psychologists should be interested in evolutionarybiology for the same reason that
hikers should be interested in an aerial map of an unfamiliar territory that they plan
to explore on foot. If they look at the map, they are much less likely to lose their way.
Adaptive Problem
hypotheses about the
deslgn of psycholo@cal
mechamsms
Psychological Mechanism
Figure
1.1
The consideration of adaptive function can inform research into human
behavior and psychological architecture in a variety of ways. The two most direct paths
are schematized here. First, knowledge of the adaptive problems and ancestral condi-
tions 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 HARVEST OF CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION
Conceptual integration has been such a powerful force in the natural sciences not only
because it allows scientists to winnow out improbablehypothesesor build aesthetically
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
