Meeting 3: Sociobiology & Evolutionary Psychology (1/28)

Required Readings:

• Tooby and Cosmides, "Toward Mapping the Evolved Functional Organization of Mind and Brain" [CIEB §9]
• Buller, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Critique" [CIEB §10]
• Haufe, "Perverse Engineering" [PDF]
• S&D, Chapters 13-14 **

If we are indeed products of evolution, then doesn’t it stand to reason that our evolutionary past can tell us something about ourselves now (as well as our futures)? This was the basic premise of the “sociobiologists” in the mid-70s and the “evolutionary psychologists” prevalent now. But sociobiology was a controversial theory (or framework) right from the start. Critics smelled genetic determinism, bad adaptationist thinking, sloppy argument, weak empirical support, and so on.

Evolutionary psychology billed itself as the grown-up, fixed-up, and focused version of essentially the same program: integrating evolutionary biology with human psychology. One of the central battlegrounds of this debate concerns our cognitive architecture: is the mind a sort of all-purpose, plastic computer or is it (as many influential evolutionary psychologists suppose) a conglomeration of domain-specific modules? If the latter, presumably, our evolutionary history as foraging primates ought to shed some light on certain features of our psychology now. After all, recorded history represents a rather small portion of hominid history.

I am extremely skeptical about much of evolutionary psychology. So are Buller and Haufe. As you probably know, skepticism is ambiguous: it can mean either disbelief or suspension of belief. Both seem appropriate. Some of the empirical claims of evolutionary psychologists seem to be false; other claims simply lack adequate support. And yet, there is something undeniably attractive about evolutionary psychology as a general strategy, as perhaps, there is with certain forms of adaptationism. The challenge, then, would seem to be how to separate the wheat from the chaff. What if anything can our evolutionary history tell us about ourselves?

Study Questions

• What concerns about sociobiology (as described in the *optional* S&D reading) seem to you most pressing? What about for evolutionary psychology?
• What do you think of Tooby and Cosmides’ claim that the human brain is adapted to the hunting-gathering lifestyle of our Pleistocene forebears?
• Tooby and Cosmides claim that understanding human neural architecture is “a problem in reverse engineering” (184). What, specifically, does this entail?
• Haufe claims that the method of reverse engineering (RE) in evolutionary biology faces some deep conceptual difficulties. What are these difficulties? What empirical difficulties does RE face?
• What are the experiments with the Watson selection task supposed to show about the "modularity" of the mind? Why does Buller believe that they fail to show this?
• Evolutionary psychologists have argued that domain-general cognitive mechanisms, insofar as they are (or would have been) maladaptive, are impossible. Why is this claim false?
• It has been alleged that evolutionary psychology (like sociobiology) involves a heavy does of adaptationism. What kind(s) of adaptationism would you suppose this to be and why?
• What significance does the possibility of genetic drift have in discussions of evolutionary psychology?