Introducing Evolutionary Psychology E-Book

Dylan Evans

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Introducing...
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 100

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

How did the mind evolve? How does the human mind differ from the minds of our ancestors, and from the minds of our nearest relatives, the apes? What are the universal features of the human mind, and why are they designed the way they are? If our minds are built by selfish genes, why are we so cooperative? Can the differences between male and female psychology be explained in evolutionary terms? These questions are at the centre of a rapidly growing research programme called evolutionary psychology.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP Email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-977-6

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

What is Evolutionary Psychology?

Cognitive Psychology

Actions Are Caused by Mental Processes

Behaviourist Psychology

The Mind is a Computer

Metaphors of the Mind

A Testable Model

Evolutionary Biology

Heredity and Mutation

Genes

Heredity

Mutation

Adaptation and Natural Selection

Useful Design

The Argument from Design

Not by Coincidence...

Natura non facit saltum

Improvement by Accident

The Evolution of the Eye

The Blind Watchmaker

Fitting the Pieces of the Jigsaw Puzzle Together

General-Purpose Problem-Solver?

Learning a Language

Language Acquisition

Vision

Modularity

Massive Modularity

No Central Processes

Modules and Adaptations

Adaptations and Environments

Evolving Modules

Shared and Unique Modules

Out of Africa

The Social Environment

Adaptive Problems

Predator-Avoidance Modules

Detecting Predators

False Alarms

Two Neural Pathways

Food Preference Modules

Fat and Sugar

Environmental Mismatch

Disgust

Alliance-Formation Modules

Living in Groups

Alliances and Coalitions

Increasing the Group

Reciprocal Altruism

The Free-Rider Problem

The Evolution of Cooperation

Tit-for-Tat

Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange

Modules for Helping Children and Other Relatives

Kin Selection

How Related Are You?

Hamilton’s Rule

The Evolution of Nepotism

The Truth About Cinderella

Allocating Resources to Offspring

The Resource-Allocation Module

Parent-Offspring Conflict

How Much For Me?

Weaning

The Benefit of Weaning

Group Size and Social Intelligence

Mind-reading Modules

Enter Machiavelli

Theory of Mind

Folk Psycology

The Sally-Ann Test

Theory of Mind and Autism

Lying and Tactical Deception

Language Modules

The Language Acquisition Device

The Evolution of Language

Reciprocal Altruism Again

Gossip

Indirect Reciprocity

The Importance of Reputation

Mate-Selection Modules

The Mating Game

The Genes are in the Selection

The Importance of Looking Good

Body Symmetry

What’s the Evidence for Symmetry?

The Biology of Beauty

The Fertility Factor

Selecting a Mate for Parental Care

Human Pair Bonds

Parental Care and Human Brain Size

Will You Make a Good Parent?

Sex Differences in Mate Preferences

Dads and Cads

Battle of the Sexes – or Evolutionary Arms Race?

The Myth of the Monogamous Female

Women’s Extra-Pair Mating

What’s the Best Strategy?

Men with Resources

Testing Mate Preferences

Attractiveness and Age

Age and Reproduction

Fidelity: Sexual and Emotional

Male and Female Jealousy

Mapping the Mind

Criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology

Pan-adaptationism

Side-effects and By-products

Not Everything is a Module

Hypotheses and Confirmations

Just-So Stories?

Is Logic a By-product?

The Wason-selection Task

Cheater-Detection

Two Features of Mental Modules

Modularity Again

Reductionism

The Simplest Accurate Theory

Genetic Determinism

Is Too Much Importance Attached to Genes?

Nature vs. Nurture

Behavioural Genetics

Human Variation and Human Nature

Are Human Behaviours Inevitable and Unchangeable?

Does Evolutionary Psychology Justify the Status Quo?

The Naturalistic Fallacy

Mistaken Criticisms and Misunderstandings

The Legacy of History

The Future of Evolutionary Psychology

The Darwinian Revolution

The Future of Psychology

Further Reading

The Author

Acknowledgements

Index

What is Evolutionary Psychology?

Evolutionary psychology is the combination of two sciences – evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology. These two sciences are like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We need both pieces if we want to understand human behaviour.

We will begin by looking at each of these sciences separately. Then we will see how evolutionary psychology puts them together to arrive at a complete scientific account of human nature.

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the most powerful theory of the mind ever developed. It has transformed psychology from a vague set of unclear ideas into a true science. There are two main ideas.

(1)

Actions are caused by mental processes.

(2)

The mind is a computer.

you mean, the mind is like a computer? no, and you’ll see why in a moment ...

Let’s have a look at these two ideas in more detail.

Actions Are Caused by Mental Processes

Psychology is the science of human behaviour. It attempts to explain why humans act the way they do.

We are all amateur psychologists. We constantly offer explanations for our actions and for the actions of others. For example, when I see Jim pick up an umbrella as he leaves the house, I might explain this action in the following way.

jim thinks it’s going to rain, and he wants to stay dry. this kind of explanation is called a mentalistic explanation because it refers to mental processes like beliefs and desires.

When we say that “Jim thought it was going to rain”, we are saying that Jim had a certain belief. When we say that “Jim wanted to stay dry”, we are saying that Jim had a certain desire.

Behaviourist Psychology

When we explain actions by referring to beliefs and desires, we are claiming that these mental processes are the causes of our actions. This way of explaining actions in terms of beliefs and desires is so common that philosophers call it “commonsense psychology” or “folk psychology”. Folk psychology has been around for thousands of years.

In the 1920s, some psychologists claimed that folk psychology was unscientific. J.B. Watson (1878-1958) and B.F. Skinner (1904-90) argued that beliefs, desires and other mental processes were not real things. They thought that the only way for psychology to become a true science was to give up talking about such “mythical entities”.

it isn’t necessary to refer to “the mind” when explaining behaviour. behaviour is not caused by thoughts, but by external stimuli.

This view is known as Behaviourism. From the 1920s until the 1960s, most psychologists were Behaviourists. During these years, most psychologists denied the existence of “the mind”.

In the 1960s, psychologists began to reject behaviourism. There were two main reasons for this. On the one hand, as a purely logical matter, philosophers realized that they simply could not eliminate talk about beliefs and desires from explanations of human behaviour. On the other hand, the development of computers, and work in artificial intelligence, provided a way of testing – and refuting – Behaviourist theories of learning.

With the abandonment of Behaviourism, it once again became acceptable for scientists to talk about “the mind”.

the mind is a valid scientific concept after all. this is the first main idea of cognitive psychology.

In this sense, cognitive psychology has a lot in common with folk psychology. Like folk psychology, cognitive psychology explains actions by referring to mental processes. Unlike folk psychology, however, cognitive psychology has a very precise idea of what these mental processes are – they are computations. This takes us on to the second main idea of cognitive psychology.

The Mind is a Computer

The second main idea of cognitive psychology is that the mind is a computer program. But cognitive psychologists mean something very special by the term “computer”. Basing themselves on the pioneering work of the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-54), cognitive psychologists define a computer as a set of operations for processing information.

in othe words, a computer is not a physical machine, but rather an abstract specification of a possible machine. a computer, in this sense, may be built in many different ways.

Many different sorts of physical machine could process information in the same way. In this case, even though the machines would have physically different designs, they would all be the same kind of computer.

So, a computer is not a piece of hardware, but a piece of software. The essence of a computer does not lie in the materials from which it is made, but in the programs it executes. In order to run a program, such as a computer game, you need a machine to run it on. But you can run the same program on different kinds of machine.

The machines are physically different, but when you install the same program on them, they behave in the same way.

the key to the behaviour is the program, not the materials out of which the machine is made.

For cognitive psychology, then, the mind is a piece of software. It is a very complicated kind of program. Cognitive psychologists can describe this program in the language of information-processing without needing to describe the details of the brain. The brain is just the physical machine that runs the program called the mind. The brain is the hardware, the mind is the software.

Metaphors of the Mind

People have often attempted to understand the mind by comparing it with the latest technology. In the past few hundred years, the mind has been described as a clock, a watch, a telegraph system, and much else. In the late 19th century, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) borrowed from contemporary developments in hydraulics, and compared the mind to a system of channels and waterways.

The waterways could somenmes be blocked, in which case the fluid would soon overflow into another channel.

The problem with all these comparisons was that they were little more than interesting metaphors. They did not help very much to advance understanding of the mind because there was no clear way of generating testable predictions from them.

A Testable Model

All this changed with the advent of cognitive psychology. Comparing the mind to a computer was different from previous technological analogies because the precise language of information-processing allowed testable hypotheses about the mind to be clearly formulated.

Also, there is a much better reason for comparing the mind to a computer than to a clock or an irrigation system – they have the same function.

the function of the mind, like that of the computer, is to process information. it is not to tell the time or to distribute water.

Unlike earlier comparisons, then, the computational theory of mind can be taken literally; the mind is not just like a computer, it is a computer.

This concludes our brief overview of cognitive science. It is now time to examine the other piece of the jigsaw puzzle: evolutionary biology.

Evolutionary Biology

During the last two thousand years, most people in the West believed that human beings had been created directly by God. According to the Bible, the first two human beings, Adam and Eve, had no father or mother, and sprang into existence in adult form. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, some people began to question this view, including Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), grandfather of Charles.

i wrote a poem about evolution before charles was even born

But it wasn’t until Charles Darwin (1809-82) published The Origin of Species in 1859 that the sceptics had an alternative explanation for the origin of humanity. This alternative is evolutionary biology.

According to evolutionary biology, human beings are descended from ape-like ancestors and ultimately share a single common ancestor with all other living things on earth. This common ancestor, the first living thing, lived about 4 billion years ago. It was very simple.

in fact, it was far less complex than a single cell.

About 3.5 billion years ago, some of these little creatures began to gang up together and form the first cells. Around 600 million years ago, the first multicellular organisms began to appear: small worms and other sea-dwelling creatures.

A hundred million years later, the first land-dwelling organisms appeared – first microbes, then plants. This paved the way for terrestrial animals, including insects, and then amphibians. From amphibians came reptiles, birds and mammals. The first primates appeared around 55 million years ago.

they were agile tree-dwellers that ate fruit and looked rather like modern lemurs.

From these creatures are descended monkeys, apes and humans. The first true humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) appeared about 150,000 years ago in Africa.

Heredity and Mutation

How did all of this come about? What is it that drives evolution? There is no mysterious deity guiding the process. It all happens because of two things: heredity and mutation.

heredity means that offspring tend to resemble their parents.

HEREDITY

mutation means that sometimes this! resemblance is not perfect.

MUTATION

In order to understand both of these things, we must understand something about genes.

Genes