Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer
Leda Cosmides & John Tooby Co-Directors
Center for Evolutionary Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara
Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a
computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate
to your environmental circumstances.
Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection
to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary
Principle 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of
what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious
experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler
that it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are
very difficult to solve -- they require very complicated neural circuitry.
Principle 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving
different adaptive problems.
A basic engineering principle
is that the same machine is rarely capable of solving two different problems
equally well. We have both screw drivers and saws because each solves a
particular problem better than the other. Just imagine trying to cut planks
of wood with a screw driver or to turn screws with a saw. (Elsewhere they
say the mind is a Swiss Army knife)
Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.
The environment that humans
-- and, therefore, human minds -- evolved in was very different
from our modern environment. Our ancestors spent well over 99% of our species'
evolutionary history living in hunter-gatherer societies. ...this way of
life endured for most of the last 10 million years.
The Standard Social Science Model
Both before and after Darwin, a common view among philosophers and
scientists has been that the human mind resembles a blank slate
.... the central tenet of these Empiricist views has remained the same.
Indeed, it has become the reigning orthodoxy in mainstream anthropology,
sociology, and most areas of psychology. According to this orthodoxy, all
of the specific content of the human mind originally derives from the "outside"
-- from the environment and the social world -- and the evolved architecture
of the mind consists solely or predominantly of a small number of general
purpose mechanisms that are content-independent, and which sail under names
such as "learning," "induction," "intelligence," "imitation," "rationality,"
"the capacity for culture," or simply "culture."
..mechanisms that govern reasoning, learning, and memory are assumed
to operate uniformly, according to unchanging principles, regardless of
the content they are operating on or the larger category or domain involved.
(For this reason, they are described as content-independent or domain-general.)
According to this familiar view -- what we have elsewhere called the
Standard Social Science Model -- the contents of human minds are
primarily (or entirely) free social constructions, and the social sciences
are autonomous and disconnected from any evolutionary or psychological
foundation (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).