Abstract
Evolutionary psychology is too rarely characterized in ways that fully identify its fundamental commitments while avoiding the inclusion of inessential claims, inessentially strong emphases, or merely derivative tenets. This chapter characterizes evolutionary psychology as experimental psychology in a broadly computational framework, organized, unified, and heuristically guided by adaptationist nativism based on modern evolutionary theory. After identifying and rebutting some types of claims to the effect that evolutionary psychology is an inherently narrow research enterprise, the proposed characterization of evolutionary psychology is unpacked. First, the computational approach is explained and several inappropriately narrow conceptions of it are forestalled. Next, with the modern theory of natural selection in place, two kinds of adaptationism are claimed to be essential to evolutionary psychology: a core hypothesis about the extent to which natural selection has differentiated and shaped the human mind (ontological adaptationism), and an additional, multipronged claim about how psychology ought to be practiced, given the endorsement of this hypothesis (disciplinary adaptationism). The commitments involved in these claims are detailed, with particular attention paid to the nature of the computational adaptions posited. Evolutionary psychology as adaptationist-computational psychology is not a banal approach. Yet researchers who self-identify as evolutionary psychologists are far less narrowly doctrinally committed than is appreciated outside the field. The chapter points out various respects in which this is the case.
This chapter is dedicated to the memory of my mother.
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Notes
- 1.
If, as seems sensible enough, we choose to identify a first wave of major works in evolutionary psychology that were published by 1990, these would also include Daly and Wilson (1988), Buss (1989), Cosmides (1989), Pinker and Bloom (1990), Tooby and Cosmides (1989, 1990a, b), Buss and Barnes (1986), and Crawford et al. (1987). Evolutionary psychology was foreshadowed in the areas of human sexuality by the books of Symons (1979) and Daly and Wilson (1983/1978, Chaps. 11–12). The famous edited collection The Adapted Mind (Barkow et al. 1992), and the book-length treatise by Tooby and Cosmides (1992) it contains, are sometimes viewed by external observers as founding documents of the field. But evolutionary psychology was already well underway before this volume was published and considerable portions of the more significant material in it had already been published elsewhere.
- 2.
- 3.
It is interesting to note in this context that, while philosophers of special sciences generally try to be closely in touch with the activities of the sciences they specialize in, this norm does not seem to be widely observed when it comes to the human evolutionary behavioural sciences. There is a relative dearth of interaction between philosophers and the research communities in this broad field.
- 4.
The order of names in this descriptor is arbitrary with regard to the authors’ contributions; it is chosen purely for rhythm and rhyme.
- 5.
This is not to lay the entire blame for the present type of misconception on Cosmides, Tooby, and other evolutionary psychologists. Philosophers of science who publish on evolutionary psychology, for example, can fairly be expected to dig deep enough to know better—but as far as I can discern, they frequently have not.
- 6.
I am trying to be charitable here in suggesting how ‘evolutionary psychology’ might plausibly by understood by those without prior knowledge or expectations.
- 7.
See also the editors’ note in D.S. Wilson (2003, n. 1), who is described as having independently arrived at the same terminology—apparently also with no intention of insinuating narrow-mindedness.
- 8.
I have omitted from the Dawkins quote the added remark, ‘or even common politeness’, because I wish to focus on content here. Moreover, matters of politeness are hardly the problem in this context independently of content. Those openly hostile towards evolutionary psychology believe that their sometimes extraordinary reactions are justified by crass and pernicious ideas promoted by evolutionary psychologists. If I were to address any ethical issues here, it would be the lack of epistemic humility that is evidenced by critics commenting snidely or offensively on an entire field they often know remarkably little about.
- 9.
In several respects, the genre to which the works cited here respond could be extended back at least into the 1980s, that is, into the so-called sociobiology controversy (see Segerstråle 2000; Dawkins 1985). Indeed, some of the above-cited works address attacks on human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology alike, and there is very considerable overlap between the charges these two have had to face (just-so storytelling, genetic determinism, political misgivings, etc.). However, I am assuming that, for the familiar reasons first advanced in early evolutionary psychology, much of human sociobiology was fundamentally flawed in a way that evolutionary psychology was not (Cosmides and Tooby 1987, pp. 277–283; Symons 1987, 1989; cf. Laland and Brown 2011/2002, Chap. 3). Accordingly, the responses referenced above were chosen specifically with evolutionary psychology in mind.
- 10.
See D.S. Wilson’s (1999) review of the textbook’s first edition—a highly differentiated and competent critique published in the leading journal of the human evolutionary behavioural sciences. Wilson’s remarks on topical partiality reflect the same impression which I had upon first encountering the textbook.
- 11.
- 12.
Buss sometimes does this in statements of what evolutionary psychology is. Cosmides and Tooby, in contrast, have always been significantly more outspoken about the centrality of computationalism to evolutionary psychology. It is no coincidence that contributions by former students of theirs address computational–representational questions more directly than many other researchers in the field do.
- 13.
Remarkably, some leading contributors to evolutionary psychology who are committed computationalists and experts in computational modelling have themselves described the computationalist approach as though it were tantamount to a mere ‘computer metaphor’ (Miller 2000, p. 42; Gigerenzer and Goldstein 1996).
- 14.
Neural networks are so called despite being only loosely inspired and quite unconstrained by properties of real neurons. This machinery involves nodes (visible or hidden), activation levels, weighted connections (excitatory or inhibitory), learning rules, and other ingredients.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
The locus classicus for Oliver Selfridge’s pandemonium model is his (1959), a remarkably early contribution to cognitive science of lasting influence.
- 19.
‘If we add to this list such relatively more sophisticated complaints as that “computers don’t exhibit graceful degradation” or “computers are too sensitive to physical damage”, this list will begin to look much like the arguments put forward by connectionists’ (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988, p. 146). See also all of Sects. 4 and 5 in the same paper.
- 20.
At the present stage, many evolutionary psychologists do not yet do so. I take this to be a sign of the relative youth of the discipline.
- 21.
An effectively synonymous term is ‘selectionism’. I will understand this to describe the same position as ‘adaptationism’, only connoting a different perspective on it—that of the population-genetic dynamics of natural selection, rather than its phenotypic results. Daly and Wilson (1995, 1999) or Tooby and Cosmides (2005) use both terms, apparently with something like this distinction in mind.
- 22.
- 23.
This is also the gist of various remarks in deep but difficult foundational works by Barrett (2006) and Boyer and Barrett (2005), which are, besides, at least consistent with the subsequent remarks I make in the present paragraph. See also Barrett and Kurzban (2006). I must admit, however, that carefully re-reading Barrett (2006) has made me feel less clear than I previously recalled about how some of the arguments in it exactly run.
- 24.
The developmental canalization metaphor is due to Waddington (1957).
- 25.
The central treatment of domain specificity in Barrett and Kurzban (2006, p. 630) alone contains several quite confusing infelicities or errors which I pass over above. For example, the authors (B&K) introduce domain specificity and justify its formal nature thus: ‘As a direct and inseparable aspect of this evolutionary process of specialization, modules [defined in the same paragraph as “functionally specialized mechanisms with formally definable informational inputs”] will become domain-specific: Because they handle information in specialized ways, they will have specific input criteria. Only information of certain types or formats will be processable by a specialized system’ (emph. B&K’s). It is unclear what B&K mean by saying that modules, in the ‘evolutionary process of specialization’, ‘become’ something they are claimed to be by definition. Moreover, while B&K stress domain specificity qua formal input specificity to be a necessary consequence of increased specialization in evolution, it is simply a necessary consequence of being a computational mechanism, whatever its origins. Also, the mechanism’s formal input specificity need not increase in tandem with the specialization of its operations. Another oddity is the fact that the first passage I quote above follows on the heels of the following assurance: ‘We wish to stress that we intend the broadest construal of the term domain to include, in principle, any possible means of individuating inputs’—which is precisely what they do not intend. This statement is most charitably reinterpreted as meaning, in marked difference, ‘any possible [formal] means’. But this in turn is just an entirely inadequate individuation scheme, as I explain in the text.
- 26.
I have omitted from this quote, firstly, literature references and, secondly, uses of the precarious term ‘module’ which I do not believe add relevant content.
- 27.
Typically, though not necessarily, ‘the world’ will be the external environment.
- 28.
It is easy to be misled about this fact by Barrett’s definitions of actual versus proper domains in terms of different classes of ‘inputs processed’. This sounds as if it referred to different classes of proximal stimuli. In fact, it refers to proximal stimuli of the same class that come from different classes of distal stimuli.
- 29.
Strictly speaking, insofar as we speak about computational acquisition mechanisms, rather than mature computational mechanisms, the input domain itself would have to be described as changing over developmental time, especially at critical junctures. I allow myself to simplify here, given that this aspect is not presently the focus of attention (quite apart from the fact that it tends not to be observed by other authors anyway).
- 30.
The outputs need not necessarily be representations, they can also be physiological responses; hence the qualification.
- 31.
Never mind different senses of ‘adaptationist’ in this connection—Chomsky was not an adaptationist in any sense of the term.
- 32.
- 33.
- 34.
- 35.
Also called ‘spandrels’, after Gould and Lewontin (1979). While I do list simple adaptations here separately from complex adaptations, I am adding no further category to the usual triad of adaptations, by-products, and noise. Buss et al. (1998) provide a more in-depth treatment, including discussion of the putatively separate category of adaptations co-opted for other purposes (widely called ‘exaptations’, since Gould and Vrba 1982).
- 36.
I am deliberately dropping Pinker’s descriptions of these on pp. 419–421 as ‘modules’. This term is inappropriate to Pinker’s own treatment (apart from other problematic aspects that attach to it anyhow). For apart from a few examples which might be described as corresponding to single modules, he is talking about entire domains of reality for which large bundles of such adaptations would be expected to have evolved. Of course, perception in toto is not a single mental ‘module’.
- 37.
One must not be misled by the suggestive words ‘cohesive chunk of the mind’ into thinking of domain-dedicated spatial sectors of the brain, such as those familiar from nineteenth-century phrenology and its fantasy-based brain maps. See, by comparison, Pinker (1997 p. 30 f.) for some often-cited comments on the non-necessity of spatial contiguity for mental adaptations.
- 38.
See also Silverman (2003, p. 2).
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Acknowledgments
Supported by grant DA 1282/1-1 from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the author’s project Philosophy of evolutionary psychology. I thank Steve Pinker for email correspondence on computationalism.
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Dahlgrün, M. (2015). The Broad Foundations of Adaptationist-Computational Evolutionary Psychology. In: Breyer, T. (eds) Epistemological Dimensions of Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1387-9_2
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