Monday, April 24, 2006

DEFINITION OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY &
DISCOVERING A DUMMY (Explains Itself)

Here’s a whole section, ‘Evolutionary Psychology’, from the opening chapter, “Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology” of the HANDBOOK OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, edited by David Buss.

The brain’s a computer. I wouldn’t dare try to make a synopsis of this particular section. These details are important and will give you a good look at the field of evolutionary psychology. Nearly 2000 words.

[OPEN QUOTE] Evolutionary Psychology

Like cognitive scientists, when evolutionary psychologists refer to the mind, they mean the set of information processing devices, embodied in neural tissue, that is responsible for all conscious and nonconscious mental activity, that generates all behavior, and that regulates the body. Like other psychologists, evolutionary psychologists test hypotheses about the design of these computational devices using methods from, for example, cognitive psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, experimental economics, cognitive neuroscience, genetics, physiological psychology, and cross-cultural field work.

The primary tool that allows evolutionary psychologists to go beyond traditional psychologists in studying the mind is that they take full advantage in their research of an overlooked reality: The programs comprising the human mind were designed by natural selection to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors—problems such as finding a mate, cooperating with others, hunting, gathering, protecting children, navigating, avoiding predators, avoiding exploitation, and so on. Knowing this allows evolutionary psychologists to approach the study of the mind like an engineer. You start by carefully specifying an adaptive information processing problem; then you do a task analysis of that problem. A task analysis consists of identifying what properties a program would have to have to solve that problem well. This approach allows you to generate hypotheses about the structure of the programs that comprise the mind, which can then be tested.

From this point of view, there are precise causal connections that link the four developments discussed earlier into a coherent framework for thinking about human nature and society (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992):

C-1: Each organ in the body evolved to serve a function: The intestines digest, the heart pumps blood, and the liver detoxifies poisons. The brain's evolved function is to extract information from the environment and use that information to generate behavior and regulate physiology. Hence, the brain is not just like a computer. It is a computer—that is, a physical system that was designed to process information (Advance 1). Its programs were designed not by an engineer, but by natural selection, a causal process that retains and discards design features based on how well they solved adaptive problems in past environments (Advance 4).

The fact that the brain processes information is not an accidental side effect of some metabolic process. The brain was designed by natural selection to be a computer. Therefore, if you want to describe its operation in a way that captures its evolved function, you need to think of it as composed of programs that process information. The question then becomes: What programs are to be found in the human brain? What are the reliably developing, species-typical programs that, taken together, comprise the human mind?

C-2: Individual behavior is generated by this evolved computer, in response to information that it extracts from the internal and external environment (including the social environment, Advance 1). To understand an individual's behavior, therefore, you need to know both the information that the person registered and the structure of the programs that generated his or her behavior.

C-3: The programs that comprise the human brain were sculpted over evolutionary time by the ancestral environments and selection pressures experienced by the hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended (Advances 2 and 4). Each evolved program exists because it produced behavior that promoted the survival and reproduction of our ancestors better than alternative programs that arose during human evolutionary history. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize hunter-gatherer life because the evolutionary process is slow—it takes thousands of generations to build a program of any complexity. The industrial revolution—even the agricultural revolution—is too brief a period to have selected for complex new cognitive programs (4).

C-4: Although the behavior our evolved programs generate would, on average, have been adaptive (reproduction promoting) in ancestral environments, there is no guarantee that it will be so now. Modern environments differ importantly from ancestral ones, particularly when it comes to social behavior. We no longer live in small, face-to-face societies, in seminomadic bands of 20 to 100 people, many of whom were close relatives. Yet, our cognitive programs were designed for that social world.

C-5: Perhaps most importantly, natural selection will ensure that the brain is composed of many different programs, many (or all) of which will be specialized for solving their own corresponding adaptive problems. That is, the evolutionary process will not produce a predominantly general-purpose, equipotential, domain-general architecture (Advance 3).

In fact, this is a ubiquitous engineering outcome. The existence of recurrent computational problems leads to functionally specialized application software. For example, the demand for effective word processing and good digital music playback led to different application programs because many of the design features that make a program an effective word processing program are different from those that make a program a good digital music player. Indeed, the greater the number of functionally specialized programs (or subroutines) your computer has installed, the more intelligent your computer is, and the more things it can accomplish. The same is true for organisms. Armed with this insight, we can lay to rest the myth that the more evolved organization the human mind has, the more inflexible its response. Interpreting the emotional expressions of others, seeing beauty, learning language, loving your child—all these enhancements to human mental life are made possible by specialized neural programs built by natural selection.

To survive and reproduce reliably as a hunter-gatherer required the solution of a large and diverse array of adaptive information-processing problems. These ranged from predator vigilance and prey stalking to plant gathering, mate selection, childbirth, parental care, coalition formation, and disease avoidance. Design features that make a program good at choosing nutritious foods, for example, are ill suited for finding a fertile mate or recognizing free riders. Some sets of problems would have required differentiated computational solutions.

The demand for diverse computational designs can be clearly seen when results from evolutionary theory (Advance 4) are combined with data about ancestral environments (Advance 2) to model different ancestral computational problems. The design features necessary for solving one problem are usually markedly different from the features required to construct programs capable of solving another adaptive problem. For example, game theoretic analyses of conditional helping show that programs designed for logical reasoning would be poorly designed for detecting cheaters in social exchange and vice versa; this incommensurability selected for programs that are functionally specialized for reasoning about reciprocity or exchange (Cosmides & Tooby, Chapter 20, this volume).

C-6: Finally, descriptions of the computational architecture of our evolved mechanisms allows a systematic understanding of cultural and social phenomena. The mind is not like a video camera, passively recording the world but imparting no content of its own. Domain-specific programs organize our experiences, create our inferences, inject certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental life, give us our passions, and provide cross-culturally universal frames of meaning that allow us to understand the actions and intentions of others. They invite us to think certain kinds of thoughts; they make certain ideas, feelings, and reactions seem reasonable, interesting, and memorable. Consequently, they play a key role in determining which ideas and customs will easily spread from mind to mind and which will not (Boyer, 2001; Sperber, 1994, 1996; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). That is, they play a crucial role in shaping human culture.

Instincts are often thought of as the opposite of reasoning, decision making, and learning. But the reasoning, decision-making, and learning programs that evolutionary psychologists have been discovering (1) are complexly specialized for solving an adaptive problem, (2) reliably develop in all normal human beings, (3) develop without any conscious effort and in the absence of formal instruction, (4) are applied without any awareness of their underlying logic, and (5) are distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. In other words, they have all the hallmarks of what we usually think of as instinct (Pinker, 1994). In fact, we can think of these specialized circuits as instincts: reasoning instincts, decision instincts, motivational instincts, and learning instincts. They make certain kinds of inferences and decisions just as easy, effortless, and natural to us as humans as catching flies is to a frog or burrowing is to a mole.

Consider this example from the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (1995). Like adults, normal 4-year-olds easily and automatically note eye direction in others, and use it to make inferences about the mental states of the gazer. For example, 4 year-olds, like adults, infer that when presented with an array of candy, the gazer wants the particular candy he or she is looking at. Children with autism do not make this inference. Although children with this developmental disorder can compute eye direction correctly, they cannot use that information to infer what someone wants. Normal individuals know, spontaneously and with no mental effort, that the person wants the candy he or she is looking at. This is so obvious to us that it hardly seems to require an inference at all. It is just common sense. But "common sense" is caused: It is produced by cognitive mechanisms. To infer a mental state (wanting) from information about eye direction requires a computation. There is an inference circuit—a reasoning instinct—that produces this inference. When the circuit that does this computation is broken or fails to develop, the inference cannot be made. Those with autism fail this task because they lack this reasoning instinct, even though they often acquire very sophisticated competences of other sorts. If the mind consisted of a domain-general knowledge acquisition system, narrow impairments of this kind would not be possible.

Instincts are invisible to our intuitions, even as they generate them. They are no more accessible to consciousness than our retinal cells and line detectors but are just as important in manufacturing our perceptions of the world. As a species, we have been blind to the existence of these instincts, not because we lack them but precisely because they work so well. Because they process information so effortlessly and automatically, their operation disappears unnoticed into the background. Moreover, these instincts structure our thought and experience so powerfully we mistake their products for features of the external world: Color, beauty, status, friendship, charm—all are computed by the mind and then experienced as if they were objective properties of the objects they are attributed to. These mechanisms limit our sense of behavioral possibility to choices people commonly make, shielding us from seeing how complex and regulated the mechanics of choice is. Indeed, these mechanisms make it difficult to imagine how things could be otherwise. As a result, we take normal behavior for granted: We do not realize that normal behavior needs to be explained at all.

As behavioral scientists, we need corrective lenses to overcome our instinct blindness. The brain is fantastically complex, packed with programs, most of which are currently unknown to science. Theories of adaptive function can serve as corrective lenses for psychologists, allowing us to see computational problems that are invisible to human intuition. When carefully thought out, these functional theories can lead us to look for programs in the brain that no one had previously suspected.
_______________________________________________________

Footnote (4) Unidimensional traits, caused by quantitative genetic variation (e.g., taller, shorter), can be adjusted in less time; see Tooby & Cosmides, 1990b.

No comments: