Topic:	Evolution of the Human Mind
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Guest:	Leda Cosmides, Professor of Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara
What is it?	Is the human mind a relatively inflexible program bequeathed to us by evolution, and culture just a veneer that gives age-old urges a respectable cover?   Or our minds largely the product of language, culture, and civilization, with evolution having supplied only the most basic hardware and operating system?   John and Ken welcome Leda Cosmides to shed some light on the human mind.

About the Guest

Leda Cosmides is best known for her work in pioneering the new field of evolutionary psychology. She developed her interest in rebuilding psychology along evolutionary lines while an undergraduate at Harvard, where she got her A.B. in biology (1979) and her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology (1985). Cosmides did postdoctoral work with Roger Shepard at Stanford and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has been on the faculty since 1991. Cosmides won the 1988 American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research, the 1993 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology, and a J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. In 1992, with John Tooby, she published The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, an edited volume designed to be a state of the art survey of the new field. Leda Cosmides is currently Professor of Psychology at UCSB. She and John Tooby founded and co-direct the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

Listening Notes

Evolutionary psychology is a field that uses evolutionary theory to explain why the human mind is the way it is. Some philosophers, such as Hume, thought the human mind starts as a blank slate with certain general capacities to learn. Natural selection says that humans come with more built in to their minds than we previously thought. How do these two views differ? To help with the discussion, Ken introduces Leda Cosmides, an evolutionary psychologist at UC Santa Barbara. Cosmides gives some background about the field of evolutionary psychology. Then, she gives an example to show how evolutionary psychology sheds light on human behavior, the problem of inbreeding. She explains what mechanisms developed in the mind to turn off romantic interest in siblings.

Evolutionary psychology seems to allow us to predict moral attitudes about certain acts based on postulated mental mechanisms. These mechanisms seem to provide some knowledge that could not exist on, say, a Humean conception of the mind. Further, they account for both altruism and avoidance of incest. Ken resists by asking if culture doesn't allow for transmission of acquired information across generations. Don't cultures vary greatly? Isn't this a counterexample to evolutionary psychology? Cosmides denies that claiming humans have a capacity for culture really solves anything. What algorithms could be brought in to explain cultural issues? Are culture and evolution separate streams for information transfer?

How does evolutionary psychology make sense of adaptations that were beneficial for our ancient ancestors but that are bad for us now. Ken thinks this raises a philosophical problem about "ought" and "is". He points out that we need to be careful about inferring from what evolutionary psychology says WAS the case, how our ancestors did behave, to what ought to be the case, how we should behave today. John asks whether the cognitive architecture required by Darwinian algorithms could accidentally result in brains that are capable of handling more complicated things, like quantum physics. Ken follows up by asking how evolutionary psychologists differentiate between activities we do now, such as philosophy and physics, and activities that were adapted for in our ancestors, such as kin identification. Cosmides gives some examples of ways in which evolutionary psychologists differentiate between these two kinds of tasks.

• Amy Standen the Roving Philosophical Reporter (Seek to 05:36): Amy Standen interviews a psychology professor about the sex specific differences in males and females. The professor talks about how our basic behavior is the same as that of our ancient ancestors.

• Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher (Seek to 49:54): Ian Shoales gives a short history of standardized intelligence tests.

Additional Resources

• A detailed, short introduction to evolutionary psychology can be found in Kim Sterelny's and Paul Griffith's Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology

• Michael Gazzaniga's excellent cognitive neuroscience textbook

• An interview with evolutionary psychology advocate Steven Pinker

• Pinker's books: The Blank Slate, The Language Instinct, and How the Mind Works, all provide more information about and a further defense of evolutionary psychology.

• Jerry Fodor wrote a stinging critique of evolutionary psychology called The Mind Doesn't Work that Way

• The book on evolutionary psychology which Leda Cosmides helped edit, The Adapted Mind.  (Kim Sterelny's review of The Adapted Mind can be found in Biology and Philosophy volume 10 pp. 365-380 -- subscription required.)

• An excellent annotated bibliography for evolutionary psychology

• Stephen Jay Gould's essay, "The Pleasures of Pluralism", the last half of which is a criticism of evolutionary psychology.

• A news article drawing conclusions about the sexes from evolutionary psychology

• The Latest on the Best, a collection of essays about evolution edited by John Dupre which includes an essay on evolutionary psychology written by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

• Website for the Center for Evolutionary Psychology