"There is a surprisingly abundant amount of information about the human ancestral environment that we do know to a reasonable degree of certainty. For example, ancestral humans “had two sexes; chose mates; had color vision calibrated to the spectral properties of sunlight; lived in a biotic environ- ment with predators; were predated on; bled when wound- ed; were incapacitated from injuries; were vulnerable to a large variety of parasites and pathogens; and had deleterious recessives rendering them subject to inbreeding depression if they mated with siblings”"(Confer et al.)
It seems to me that evolutionary psychology (EP) bases many of its claims on "facts" like the ones mentioned above. I don't think EP is a useless or pointless field, but because of the very blunt facts that it uses as its basis for all its assumptions, I believe EP's explanatory power is slim. Especially when this course is about cognition, EP has very little to tell us. Basic explanations, like fear of snakes/spiders/heights are understandable, as are EP's explanation's for basic mate selection tendencies. These above examples are powerful humans phenomenons however, and I see them being linked to our "reptilian brain". The finer aspects of cognition i.e. how we make decisions, why there is art etc. seem much too complicated to have EP make conclusions about them, especially given the blunt facts (like those mentioned in the quote) that EP depends on.
I agree with the article's claim concerning applicability, especially in the clinical sense. By exploring our history, and testing accordingly, a better understanding of ourselves as a species could lead to better treatment of modern illness'.
"Understanding the evolved function of a psychological mechanism, or why it exists (often referred to as an ultimate explanation) provides a complementary level of analysis to that of understanding the details of how the mechanism works (often referred to as a proximate explanation). Both types of explanation are required for a complete understanding … Knowledge of ultimate functions is invaluable in guiding the search for the proximate causes, just as understanding proximate implementation informs the search for ultimate function."
Like many of my classmates have discussed before, evolutionary psychology may be useful (although, at the moment, only in a limited number of cases) in explaining the WHY aspect of behaviour, but it really doesn't help us much when it comes to finding out HOW certain mechanisms work. However, this sort of dichotomy doesn't appear to have such a clear-cut distinction in cognitive science, rather the WHY and HOW tend to be grouped together, as in "why and how organisms can do what they can do" (the easy problem) and "why and how anything at all can feel" (the hard problem).
Upon first reading the article, I wondered why that would be the case. It seems to me that evolutionary psychology hypotheses are not necessarily "better" at explaining why we behave the way we do than. The reason that some of these hypotheses are accepted could be that they aren't exactly verifiable. Most explanations given by evolutionary psychology are merely simplistic inferences that "make sense", but not empirically proven. Unlike cognitive science which relies heavily on reverse engineering to test the working hypotheses regarding the how and why of causal mechanisms, EP theories are rarely used to generate evolutionary models (which can then be used to verify if the hypotheses are indeed the explanation we seek), which is why they don't provide us with explanations about how we evolved certain processing strategies.
I agree with you in the (few) reasons why evolutionary psychology may be useful-- but do you think one of these ways could be that human evolution itself could provide part of the "how" explanation? As humans adapted and changed, the physical mechanisms of our bodies changed as well. Do you think that along with these physical changes came the ability to perform tasks earlier humans could not? Maybe new human abilities are evidence of how adapted mechanisms work.
For Freud, the meaning of life is sex. For Frankl, the meaning of life is meaning. For the the Evolutionary Psychologist, the meaning of life is the survival of the community's genes.
From my (mis)understanding, evolution follows from three premises. 1) Kids inherit traits from parents 2) Parents give kids what they need for survival and reproduction. 3) What kids need the most, parents give at a higher rate. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Parents can give you solutions to problems they or their antecedents had because the trait giving process is dynamic. The gifts change.
Buss et al. argued, and pretty poignantly I think, that any explanation of a causal mechanism of behavior must take evolution into account. If you want to know how something works, you need to know why it does what it does. You have yet to give a complete causal story of human behavior until you get at the ultimate reason for the behavior.
That said, Buss et al. provided a lot of really good example of really dumb experiments. The good news is that they were indeed experiments, “testable” and “falsifiable” through and through. The one with which I take most umbridge is the Neuhoff et al. 2001 study on “overestimation of approaching sounds compared to receding sounds.” Crazy thing, humans do feel approaching noises as louder than receding noise, because of the Doppler shift.
There’s an idea that all of our capabilities stem from some more fundamental, “general” ability. If you’re a computationalist, you gotta say that it all boils down to grounding symbols, and maths. If you can do that, you can explain away everything with the Church Turing thesis. There’s no adaptation to make reading-glasses or potato peelers, just some tool making ability. Everybody agrees, a trait exists, but we need a causal mechanism to explain the behavior. The causal mechanism according to cognitive science must be sufficient to produce the behavior. According to evolutionary psychology, the causal mechanism must be necessary and sufficient. That’s the novelty.
Culture: I really dug how they explained culture’s potential influence on shaping our minds. Doesn’t our our culture explain our behavior? Hieddeger, and I hope I got this right here, says that any sort of feelings we have are given to us by our culture. True, we don’t live in a vacuum. But it’s also true that we have bodies. That’s professor Pihl’s way of framing the nature-nurture schmooze. But culture alone is not a causal explanation of human behavior (sorry anthro majors). Buss et al. figures that you can have culture mold the individual one of two ways. Either all of our input is cultural, in which case we still need to explain how the machine we have can perform operations on and with this input. Alternatively, culture is the program, the set of algorithms, in which case we still need to explain how the machine we have is capable of reading the rules.
Considering culture as either the evocative stimuli (evoked culture) or the program (transmitted culture) disregards the dynamics of human behavior. T3 fails in this regard. The computer cannot change the program.
Daina Craffa, a PhD student here at McGill Transcultural Psychiatry program, figured that any explanation of how a human learns about its culture needs to include a feedback loop. The culture influences the brain and the brain produces the behavior. But the brain can break away from the culture. I hate to invoke the word choice, but it seems fitting. An individual can choose to revolt against the culture, without programming from another culture. This sort of civil disobedience that cannot be explained by cultural influence leads the religious talk about divine inspiration, or prophecy. Rationality would also explain it, but where do the axioms come from?
Another thought. Even if we could program a T3 robot to behave ethically, rather, especially if we program a T3 robot to behave ethically, it will fail the Turing Test. Human’s are not rational, and therefore not ethical. We depend on our intuitions, which come from our culture. So it’s I tricky. Really, the question is, how we do start a revolution?
Socialization: I also liked what they wrote about socialization, on pg. 117,
“The relative dearth of evidence for the potency of parental socialization on subsequant psychological development has caused some theorists to shift their emphasis away from parental socialization [...] Given the large amounts of effort parents … expend… on their children, it would defy evolutionary logic if there were no adaptations in parents associated with socialization.”
The logic referred to: a statistical significant number of parents expend energy on their kids to give them culture. Parents can’t change their kids. But all parents try to (this is false, tantamount to saying all parents speak motherese to their children. But lets assume it’s true for argument's sake). Since humans are only driven to pass along their genes, this behavior socialization must have some sort of use, effect some sort of change. The reason for the behavior must have a distal cause.
Of course this is silly. All humans love their children and socialization is just the manifestation of this love.
All in all, evolutionary psychology is necessary if we want to explain human behavior. Cognitive modelling is great, but it forgets that we are biological systems with an origin. We got to be the way we are by coming from somewhere.
I have to disagree with you, Alex, about your claim that "Even if we could program a T3 robot to behave ethically, rather, especially if we program a T3 robot to behave ethically, it will fail the Turing Test. Human’s are not rational, and therefore not ethical. We depend on our intuitions, which come from our culture." I disagree because the debate over whether we arrive at moral judgments through intuition or through rational thought is far from resolved. There are some people who do think that the process by which we make decide if something is right or wrong is through quick tricks (heuristics) and shortcuts that nonetheless allow us to think through the consequences of our actions logically. Dubljevìc proposes that we look at the agent, we ask "who would do this?" or "would a good person do this", we look at the action itself and ask "is this inherently wrong" or "is it wrong according to my religion, my social group, my job's code of ethics" and then finally, we look at the consequences "what will happen if I do this". In this model, there is a strong argument that moral thinking and judgments do occur through rational thinking, and could possibly be reverse-engineered.
This article argues that psychological adaptations have been preserved in the genome because they solve specific problems of survival and reproduction. “Understanding the evolved function of a psychological mechanism, or why it exists (often referred to as an ultimate explanation) provides a complementary level of analysis to that of understanding the details of how the mechanism works (often referred to as a proximate explanation).” If we know something exists, and we already know how it works, do we really need to know why it exists from an evolutionary standpoint? Is the reason something was preserved in the genome at all relevant to reverse engineering cognition? I’m inclined to say no. I’m sure there have been cases where knowing why something existed helped us determine its mechanism. However, clearly there are also cases (COGNITION) where knowing the purpose of something provides very little information about how it works. This paper states that we have cognitive biases that are designed to err in the least costly direction, making you more likely to think a rustling in the bushes that isn’t a snake is threatening than miss a rustling in the bushes that is actually a snake. Doesn’t this have a lot more to do with the learning and experience than social information than an innate cognitive bias to think every sound is a threat? “Learning requires evolved psychological adaptations, housed in the brain, that enable learning to occur” I feel like at this point evolutionary psychology is trying to encompass everything. If learning is also a psychological adaptation for survival, why did it not evolve to be powerful enough to override the adaptations that aren’t beneficial anymore? Overall, I think I’m just failing to see what evolutionary psychology can tell us about how cognition works. If you successfully created a T3 robot that passed the Turing test, or even better a colony of Turing test passing T3 robots that could miraculously reproduce, wouldn’t they just continue to evolve psychological adaptations just like humans have been?
I think evolutionary psychological hypotheses are interesting in that they help us understand why we are how we are. It is interesting because it brings insight on what features were important and helpful for the survival of humans. For most of its history humanity has lived under very poorly developed conditions where it was much more subjected to the forces of nature than it is now, and those conditions shaped for the most part what our physical bodies are today. However, technical progress (labour) allowed humans to produce their own living conditions and this way ‘control’ survival, ever increasingly. Technical progress leading to higher survival/reproduction also meant formation of greater and more stable social groups, and of their culture. This process of development made the survival of humans to rely more on their production (productive forces and corresponding social organization) than on their physical features, as they were now able to allow survival to a broader range of individuals. My main points are these: humanity has interfered with strict evolution 1) by transforming nature with its work, 2) by the creation of a determinant other than nature: culture. Therefore, it becomes impossible to understand subsequent human development under the lens of evolution because, although what was acquired or shaped through evolution mostly persists, it is now due to the combined action of environmental and cultural determinants. In this light, some moves of evolutionary psychology mentioned in the article appear nonsensical. Although mentioned as ‘perplexing’ or ‘conceptual’ limitations, some phenomena can just not be observed under this lens (like suicide or homosexuality). To accept this one must accept that some human phenomena persist despite not favouring reproductive success, because humans through their production have come to defy evolution. Furthermore, the evolutionists mentioned in the article terribly fail at understanding a phenomenon such as suicide. Their theoretical posture fatally blinds them to social/subjective causes of distress such as a bad quality of life due to chronic pain (termed ‘ill condition’), discrimination and oppression (termed ‘failure in heterosexual mating’ (!!)). Also I don’t find the distinction that is made in the article between evoked and transmitted culture very pertinent as I think they are part of the same. In my opinion the erroneous separation is based on the failure to recognize that any cultural expression is the representation of a material relation, of humans to their environment. In the same way ideals of beauty may be shaped by the presence of pathogens in the surrounding nature, ‘local moral repugnance at the thought of ingesting certain foods such as beef or pork’ is, such as religious prohibitions on the consumption of certain foods that served to keep people away from products known to propagate diseases.
The benefits of evolutionary psychology to cognitive science are unquestionable. EP provides the "why" (or "how did this come to be") of our mental capacities, which is an important consideration, as it allows us "reverse-engineers" to understand some mental systems on a more abstract, functionally-based, rather than behaviourally-based level. Also interesting is the ability of evolutionary psychology to abstract away any specific, culturally (or "nurture") generated qualities, as it is clear that some evolved system is being used to create those qualities, given an environmental stimulus (even if it is a "misuse", which seems to me a poor term to use, as even if the purpose of the system is not a relevant or important one under new conditions, the evolved mechanism is still functioning in the same way, towards the same purpose). Of course, evolutionary psychology comes with a set of caveats: of course, fundamentally it cannot answer the "how" question, and so cannot be used exclusively; it also struggles with some of the classic "bias-confirmation" problems in psychology in general, where experimentation often requires a preconceived hypothesis, which introduces some aspect of self-confirmation into tests. As such, evolutionary psychology is a tool to be used, and will certainly be a useful field on the road to the solution to the questions of cognitive science, though it must be used carefully, peripherally, and with a high degree of skepticism.
"Understanding the evolved function of a psychological mechanism, or why it exists (ultimate explanation) provides a complementary level of analysis to that of understanding the details of how the mechanism works (proximate explanation). Both types of explanation are required for a comlete understanding, and indeed they mutually inform one another."
To me, it seems that evolutionary explanations of the type provided in the article elucidate the behavior that we are attempting to explain. These explanations are of the form "X generates output Y because output Y is used/is desirable for Z." They tell us about the behavior "outside the box", and they present an explanation of how that behavior fits into the needs of the human organism over the course of evolution. In many cases these explanations make the nature of the behavior more clear (helping to answer the question of "what" the behavior is). (For example, the authors claim that "it was not until evolutionary psychoogists hypothesized sex differences in evolved design features that such differences [in jealousy behavior] were discovered.)
However, evolutionary explanations do not tell us about what's "inside the box", i.e. how the behavior (useful for Z) is generated.
So the authors are correct to claim that ultimate explanations are (at most) complementary to proximal explanations: they cannot take the place of proximal explanations, or tell us how, but might serve to give us possible answers to "why" our behavior is generated.
It may be seen as problematic to assume that there is a "why" in the first place—the authors explicitly caution against making the assumption that our functions were "designed for" some purpose. Sometimes if we start talking about "functions", we slip into ungrounded talk about "purposes".
"The problem of combinatorial explosion. Domain-general theories of rationality imply a deliberate calculation of ends and a sample space of means to achieve those ends. Performing the computations needed to sift through that sample space requires more time than is available for solving many adaptive problems, which must be solved in real time. [...] A domain-general mechanism “must evaluate all alternatives it can define. Permutations being what they are, alternatives increase exponentially as the problem complexity increases” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994, p. 94). Consequently, combinatorial explosion paralyzes a truly domain-general mechanism (Frankenhuis & Ploeger, 2007)."
To understand the issue raised by the authors, I believe it is important to consider the feild of Artificial Intelligence (AI). But before we do that, let's define what a rational agent is, since the authors make no attempt to do so. They even go so far as to put quotation marks around the word "rational" as though there is no accepted definition for what constitutes a "rational" agent. I believe the following should suffice for discussions about agents navigating a sample space:
Rational agent: an agent that uses the rules of logic to make decisions
In their argument on combinatorial explosion, the authors of this paper are essentially making claims about computational complexity. They claim that, for an agent to be rational, it must investigate all possibilities and combinations in a sample space. I agree this method of finding a solution would necessarily have exponential complexity. If there were no time constraints on the problem, this method would also necessarily be optimal (i.e., able to find the best solution if one exists) and complete (i.e., able to find all solutions that exist). In AI, however, computers employ the use of search algorithms and heuristics to leverage domain-specific knowledge and find solutions. Such heuristics and search algorithms frequently bring the complexity down to a polynomial function.
In the case of human beings, there are frequently time constraints on the computations we can perform. If we exceed these time constraints, we can no longer reach a desired solution to the scenario we are involved in. In other words, if X is true when time has run out then:
X --> Failure
Knowing this, a rational agent may employ a search heuristic that stipulates the agent must make a decision using the best information and estimates available to them before X is true. I would argue that humans employ these heuristics, which are perfectly rational although not complete or necessarily optimal. Such limitations are the byproduct of working within dynamic, unobservable, continuous, and stochastic environments (i.e., the types of environments humans work within). Moreover, these limitations have little to do with whether or not an agent is rational and more to do with how they use logic and which types of logic (e.g., temporal, probabalistic) they use.
As a final note, I do not have an opinion as to whether or not human beings are perfectly rational agents. I do, however, think that the argument of combinatorial explosion in this paper was particularly feeble.
I have read on some comments which we saying that EP helps us to know why we have adapted to certain behaviors but it doesn't help us to know how it happened.
This puzzled me a bit because of what we have learned about epigenetics, which is the field of how genes are regulated. Obviously not all genes relate to aspect of behaviour but some patterns of behaviours have been linked to a complex network of gene expression. What happens with epigenetics is that depending on your interaction with the environment certain genes start to become more or less expressed. This adaptation can occur in a fast way and more importantly has been shown to be transferred across generations. For example, our fear of snakes might have raised from our ancestors learning through time to have a stress response when seeing a snake, which could have enhanced the expression of cortisol through time.
However, the only problem is that I don't see why certain features would stick through time and why other don't (other than the explanation of this aids for survival and reproduction). What I mean is that we don't know how it is that this change is preserved through and this one is not.
To further evaluate this point I also find that the human craving for fatty, sugary foods persisting into the present when we are no longer hunter-gatherers very odd. While there are still people who do not have access to the same resources others do, there are millions of people in North America that receive ample (if not well-rounded) nourishment. As rates of obesity/high blood pressure climb, this desire for the most calorie-laden foods is prevalent when it is starting to become maladaptive for many people.
Fear of snakes is a harmless, semi-vestigial characteristic that does not necessarily have a place today but it still has a useful purpose. Nothing negative comes of being afraid of snakes since (depending on location) we rarely encounter them in our day to day lives. Craving junk food is the complete opposite. In the 1st world countries among populations that have been well-fed for centuries, why would bad food still be so appealing? Places that have not seen starvation as a common problem among its inhabitants have not changed since their forager ancestors. When a behavior has become harmful, why have we not evolved past it or buried it in our genes?
In my opinion, the evolutionary psychologists perspective that “the human mind is a complex integrated assembly of many functionally specialized psychological adaptations that evolved as solutions to numerous and qualitatively distinct adaptive problems” does not entirely consider the full scope of cognitive processing. And along similar lines, I don’t believe that the brain’s adaptive mechanism are entirely domain specific, as described by the authors when they write that “learning is best explained by evolved learning adaptations that have at least some specialized design features, rather than by a single all-purpose general learning adaptation”. In order to address my first concern it is important to note the EP perspective that psychological adaptations must have occurred by natural selection, and thus according to traits associated with particular genes. This, to me, seems to ignore the vast psychological adaptability due to brain plasticity alone. Of course the effective and efficient plasticity that occurs in humans most definitely was selected for evolutionarily, and it is even likely that various cultures or various current environments continue to select for genetically influenced variations in brain development. However, even if certain primitive psychological phenomena govern our behavior (which it most likely does to a certain extent), human cognition is far more adaptable and sporadic, as we can observe by the huge inter-population variations in behavior. Furthermore, the developmental studies have yet to show a direct coordination between ones genetic code, and the specific wiring of the brain. This provides evidence that neural mechanisms, which I would only presume govern psychological mechanism, are not entirely dependent on the genetic code, and might rely much more heavily on developmental requirements associated with input from the current environment. It seems that true cognition cannot be entirely explained by evolutionary psychology alone, but instead requires the integration of multiple explanatory disciplines such as evolution, development, the direct physiological functions of the nervous system (governing plasticity, neurogenesis etc…), as well as epigenetic phenomenon. With regards to domain specific versus domain general mechanism, we have already studied direct instance in which general mechanism contribute vastly to human cognition. The most obvious example I can recount is that of categorization in humans. The logistics of this mechanism, by which sensorimotor information is assessed for invariants according to trial and error and internal learning, functions consistently across all sensory modalities, giving a prominent example of a psychological mechanism that functions across all domains. As the article “Evolutionary Psychology” argues, however, the learning mechanism that govern categorization might in themselves differ across various domains. These learning mechanisms might function according to different rules that have adapted on the basis of their abilities to contribute to the survival of an organism during distant environmental pasts. This again seems less plausible to me on the basis of the general mechanism outlined by synaptic plasticity, which having not yet been proven to cause psychological learning, is often associated with it. Similar molecules, and proteins are deeply associated with the synaptic plasticity that occurs across multiple circuits of the nervous system, including sensory neurons of the auditory, visual, and somatosensory cortex, as well as processing areas in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. If these plastic mechanism in the nervous system are the same, why can’t learning mechanism be general instructions for modifying information, as opposed to specific instances in which learning has evolved differently to assess which foods, or partners are best for one’s survival?
"But multiple personality is a pathology, and the personalities usually only emerge one at a time. "
Dissociative Identity Disorder no longer holds the prestige it once had. It may not even exist at all.
Tartakovsky, M. (2011). Dispelling Myths about Dissociative Identity Disorder. Psych Central. Retrieved on March 23, 2015, from http://psychcentral.com/lib/dispelling-myths-about-dissociative-identity-disorder/0009785
"We are a T3 level, and the candidate is no longer just a computer, computing, but a robot, a dynamical system, doing not only computation, but also sensorimotor transduction, and perhaps a lot of other essential internal dynamic processes in between too." (Harnad, 2012)
I'm still having trouble articulating the difference between something dynamic and something digital. Maybe, a dynamic thing makes fluid, continuous movements while a digital thing just makes discrete approximations of a continuous thing?
Either way, behavior is dynamic. Right? And if so, then Dennet's projection behavior explains consciousness as a dynamic behavior of sifting through stimulus at various levels, like pour water down a water clock.
Computational means discrete and syntactic; dynamic means physical properties like movement, intensity, charge. But why are you posting this in Week 7?
"...there has not been enough time for natural selection to forge or modify complex psychological adaptations to effectively utilize the evolutionarily novel inputs associated with birth control."
I think that evolutionary psychologists are using the existence of novel environmental phenomena to ignore a larger issue within evolutionary psychology: the addition of new adaptations onto other adaptations. For the infidelity example, although paternal uncertainty may be the original motivator of spousal jealousy in males, over time other factors have started piggybacking onto relationships that also cause jealousy: social contract, trust, telling the truth, social status/reputation, etc. To say that jealousy will disappear over time once we catch up to the inputs associated with birth control is to ignore all the other adaptions that have come to motivate jealousy as well.
This may have been just a limitation of the example used, and not evolutionary psychology in general (although from the brief exposure I've had to it in other classes, unfortunately this does not seem to be a one-time oversight). Either way, evolutionary psychologists must focus on explaining the evolutionary benefits of the new adaptations, and WHY the new adaptations merged with older ones instead of adapting on their own (and maybe even if these new adaptations could have occurred without the previous ones).
It seems to me that based on an evolutionary psychology approach, in order to build a T3 Robot, we would have to identify all the evolutionarily created adaptive mechanisms in our brain. i.e. we would have to make sure the T3 robot shared the same blindspots and incompatible adaptations to modern society that we humans have, (as pointed out in the article) in addition to predicting how the mind works. If we are to take evolutionary psychology to be valid, then the how is not enough to explain the brain, but also the why, the history of humanity on an evolutionary time scale, and to trace the content specific (and historically accidental) aspects of our brain, and not just the general how of its mechanics. We are not beings that simply follow a set of rules, born as a blank slate, but instead inherit the hundreds of thousands of years (and millions if you trace humans back to the first life forms on this planet) of historical instances which have shaped the specificity of the human in its present state. Here evolutionary psychology is grounding the mind in history, not in an abstract and general ''rationality of the mind.'' Evolutionary psychology then helps with arguments against computationalism, arguing that the historical specificity of the brain is what allows it to do what it does, and that there is no general equation which could account for each and every evolutionary instance which has led the brain to act in the way it does. The brain then functions in a constant dialogue between structures built over time and novel experiences which interact with these structures.
So, what are the practical applications of evolutionary psychology? I myself had never really considered it myself. I’m not entirely convinced of its necessity for our current lives. The environments of our ancestors, their struggles and issues, were most likely incredibly different from those which we deal with today. Though apparently one clinical psychologist is has created a “six-step treatment for depression includes increasing omega-3 fatty acid consumption, getting at least 30 minutes of daily exposure to sunlight, ramping up exercise, socializing daily with friends and family, engaging in antiruminative activity, and adopting patterns of good sleep hygiene—all procedures designed to mimic ancestral living conditions.” This works yes, but there could be other explanations. For example the fulfillment of basic human needs. Our bodies require omega-3s, vitamin D (from sunlight), and movement so our muscles don’t atrophy and to keep our blood moving, etc. This regimen just seems logical so why justify it with something about ‘ancestral living conditions’? What bothers me most is that we don’t know the conditions in which our ancestors lived and how they changed with time. How stable are the traits we adapted then and those we have now? Next the authors tell us: “Legal scholars are increasingly using knowledge of evolved psychological adaptations to understand how to better regulate human behavior and guide policy decisions.” Human behavior is constantly changing and adapting to the environment. The example used here is about sexual harassment and stalking and the gender differences in its perception. I see the validity of historical research to shed light on the matter but evolutionary research? Furthermore, perhaps we should be more focused educating people for change in the future rather than digging for excuses for this behavior from the past. Perhaps I am being harsh on evolutionary psychology but it is a field that I still don’t fully understand or see validity in. Perhaps one day I’ll get it but for now I’m happier to focus on what can be done now to change the social climate for the better.
"evolutionary psychologists suggest that the human mind is a complex integrated assembly of many functionally specialized psychological adaptations that evolved as solutions to numerous and qualitatively distinct adaptive problems—a premise about adaptations shared widely by evolutionary biologists in understanding nonhuman animals"
While the basic principle behind evolutionary psychology seems like a plausible hypothesis for things like fear of snakes or spiders, or explaining sexual arousal, I think it becomes hard to draw the line of how much evolutionary psychologists can explain about behavioral nuances within its framework. At what point does something can we decide if a given characteristic is due to psychological adaptations or not? I think part of why evolutionary psychology is scrutinized so much is because it is an easy method to construe a scenario in order to make sense of a given behavioral phenomena.
Confer et al. defend evolutionary psychology as a valuable discipline. They begin by giving a theoretical background starting with Darwin's theory of natural selection, where traits that help an organism survive and reproduce will be passed on at a greater rate than those traits that don't confer an advantage. This can give rise to adaptations that are inherited characteristics with functional value helping survival and reproduction; by-products that don't have functional value but are still inherited; and noise, which are random variations in characteristics.
I think that linking this week's readings to CatComCon was a bit harder than previous weeks. However the discussion on ultimate explanations (which answers why an evolved mechanism exists) and proximate explanations (how the mechanism works) is relevant to the hard problem of how and why we feel. The common queries are also questions we can ask about cognitive science and the study of consciousness. "Can evolutionary psychological hypotheses be empirically tested or falsified?" The authors argue that "precisely formulated evolutionary psychological hypotheses that yield specific predictions about design features that are not known to exist prior to empirical testing are fully amenable to empirical confirmation and falsification." (Design features are merely attributes about some evolved psychological mechanism). The same could be said about the study of consciousness and cognitive science. However in practice, the other minds problem makes it difficult to test anything about consciousness in machines, since we don't (and can't!) know when it's happening.
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"There is a surprisingly abundant amount of information about the human ancestral environment that we do know to a reasonable degree of certainty. For example, ancestral humans “had two sexes; chose mates; had color vision calibrated to the spectral properties of sunlight; lived in a biotic environ- ment with predators; were predated on; bled when wound- ed; were incapacitated from injuries; were vulnerable to a large variety of parasites and pathogens; and had deleterious recessives rendering them subject to inbreeding depression if they mated with siblings”"(Confer et al.)
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that evolutionary psychology (EP) bases many of its claims on "facts" like the ones mentioned above. I don't think EP is a useless or pointless field, but because of the very blunt facts that it uses as its basis for all its assumptions, I believe EP's explanatory power is slim. Especially when this course is about cognition, EP has very little to tell us. Basic explanations, like fear of snakes/spiders/heights are understandable, as are EP's explanation's for basic mate selection tendencies. These above examples are powerful humans phenomenons however, and I see them being linked to our "reptilian brain". The finer aspects of cognition i.e. how we make decisions, why there is art etc. seem much too complicated to have EP make conclusions about them, especially given the blunt facts (like those mentioned in the quote) that EP depends on.
I agree with the article's claim concerning applicability, especially in the clinical sense. By exploring our history, and testing accordingly, a better understanding of ourselves as a species could lead to better treatment of modern illness'.
"Understanding the evolved function of a psychological mechanism, or why it exists (often referred to as an ultimate explanation) provides a complementary level of analysis to that of understanding the details of how the mechanism works (often referred to as a proximate explanation). Both types of explanation are required for a complete understanding … Knowledge of ultimate functions is invaluable in guiding the search for the proximate causes, just as understanding proximate implementation informs the search for ultimate function."
ReplyDeleteLike many of my classmates have discussed before, evolutionary psychology may be useful (although, at the moment, only in a limited number of cases) in explaining the WHY aspect of behaviour, but it really doesn't help us much when it comes to finding out HOW certain mechanisms work. However, this sort of dichotomy doesn't appear to have such a clear-cut distinction in cognitive science, rather the WHY and HOW tend to be grouped together, as in "why and how organisms can do what they can do" (the easy problem) and "why and how anything at all can feel" (the hard problem).
Upon first reading the article, I wondered why that would be the case. It seems to me that evolutionary psychology hypotheses are not necessarily "better" at explaining why we behave the way we do than. The reason that some of these hypotheses are accepted could be that they aren't exactly verifiable. Most explanations given by evolutionary psychology are merely simplistic inferences that "make sense", but not empirically proven. Unlike cognitive science which relies heavily on reverse engineering to test the working hypotheses regarding the how and why of causal mechanisms, EP theories are rarely used to generate evolutionary models (which can then be used to verify if the hypotheses are indeed the explanation we seek), which is why they don't provide us with explanations about how we evolved certain processing strategies.
I agree with you in the (few) reasons why evolutionary psychology may be useful-- but do you think one of these ways could be that human evolution itself could provide part of the "how" explanation? As humans adapted and changed, the physical mechanisms of our bodies changed as well. Do you think that along with these physical changes came the ability to perform tasks earlier humans could not? Maybe new human abilities are evidence of how adapted mechanisms work.
DeleteFor Freud, the meaning of life is sex. For Frankl, the meaning of life is meaning. For the the Evolutionary Psychologist, the meaning of life is the survival of the community's genes.
ReplyDeleteFrom my (mis)understanding, evolution follows from three premises.
1) Kids inherit traits from parents
2) Parents give kids what they need for survival and reproduction.
3) What kids need the most, parents give at a higher rate.
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Parents can give you solutions to problems they or their antecedents had because the trait giving process is dynamic. The gifts change.
Buss et al. argued, and pretty poignantly I think, that any explanation of a causal mechanism of behavior must take evolution into account. If you want to know how something works, you need to know why it does what it does. You have yet to give a complete causal story of human behavior until you get at the ultimate reason for the behavior.
That said, Buss et al. provided a lot of really good example of really dumb experiments. The good news is that they were indeed experiments, “testable” and “falsifiable” through and through. The one with which I take most umbridge is the Neuhoff et al. 2001 study on “overestimation of approaching sounds compared to receding sounds.” Crazy thing, humans do feel approaching noises as louder than receding noise, because of the Doppler shift.
There’s an idea that all of our capabilities stem from some more fundamental, “general” ability. If you’re a computationalist, you gotta say that it all boils down to grounding symbols, and maths. If you can do that, you can explain away everything with the Church Turing thesis.
There’s no adaptation to make reading-glasses or potato peelers, just some tool making ability. Everybody agrees, a trait exists, but we need a causal mechanism to explain the behavior. The causal mechanism according to cognitive science must be sufficient to produce the behavior. According to evolutionary psychology, the causal mechanism must be necessary and sufficient. That’s the novelty.
Culture: I really dug how they explained culture’s potential influence on shaping our minds. Doesn’t our our culture explain our behavior? Hieddeger, and I hope I got this right here, says that any sort of feelings we have are given to us by our culture. True, we don’t live in a vacuum. But it’s also true that we have bodies. That’s professor Pihl’s way of framing the nature-nurture schmooze. But culture alone is not a causal explanation of human behavior (sorry anthro majors). Buss et al. figures that you can have culture mold the individual one of two ways. Either all of our input is cultural, in which case we still need to explain how the machine we have can perform operations on and with this input. Alternatively, culture is the program, the set of algorithms, in which case we still need to explain how the machine we have is capable of reading the rules.
Considering culture as either the evocative stimuli (evoked culture) or the program (transmitted culture) disregards the dynamics of human behavior. T3 fails in this regard. The computer cannot change the program.
Daina Craffa, a PhD student here at McGill Transcultural Psychiatry program, figured that any explanation of how a human learns about its culture needs to include a feedback loop. The culture influences the brain and the brain produces the behavior. But the brain can break away from the culture. I hate to invoke the word choice, but it seems fitting. An individual can choose to revolt against the culture, without programming from another culture. This sort of civil disobedience that cannot be explained by cultural influence leads the religious talk about divine inspiration, or prophecy. Rationality would also explain it, but where do the axioms come from?
Another thought. Even if we could program a T3 robot to behave ethically, rather, especially if we program a T3 robot to behave ethically, it will fail the Turing Test. Human’s are not rational, and therefore not ethical. We depend on our intuitions, which come from our culture. So it’s I tricky. Really, the question is, how we do start a revolution?
ReplyDeleteSocialization: I also liked what they wrote about socialization, on pg. 117,
“The relative dearth of evidence for the potency of parental socialization on subsequant psychological development has caused some theorists to shift their emphasis away from parental socialization [...] Given the large amounts of effort parents … expend… on their children, it would defy evolutionary logic if there were no adaptations in parents associated with socialization.”
The logic referred to: a statistical significant number of parents expend energy on their kids to give them culture. Parents can’t change their kids. But all parents try to (this is false, tantamount to saying all parents speak motherese to their children. But lets assume it’s true for argument's sake). Since humans are only driven to pass along their genes, this behavior socialization must have some sort of use, effect some sort of change. The reason for the behavior must have a distal cause.
Of course this is silly. All humans love their children and socialization is just the manifestation of this love.
All in all, evolutionary psychology is necessary if we want to explain human behavior. Cognitive modelling is great, but it forgets that we are biological systems with an origin. We got to be the way we are by coming from somewhere.
I have to disagree with you, Alex, about your claim that "Even if we could program a T3 robot to behave ethically, rather, especially if we program a T3 robot to behave ethically, it will fail the Turing Test. Human’s are not rational, and therefore not ethical. We depend on our intuitions, which come from our culture."
DeleteI disagree because the debate over whether we arrive at moral judgments through intuition or through rational thought is far from resolved.
There are some people who do think that the process by which we make decide if something is right or wrong is through quick tricks (heuristics) and shortcuts that nonetheless allow us to think through the consequences of our actions logically. Dubljevìc proposes that we look at the agent, we ask "who would do this?" or "would a good person do this", we look at the action itself and ask "is this inherently wrong" or "is it wrong according to my religion, my social group, my job's code of ethics" and then finally, we look at the consequences "what will happen if I do this". In this model, there is a strong argument that moral thinking and judgments do occur through rational thinking, and could possibly be reverse-engineered.
This article argues that psychological adaptations have been preserved in the genome because they solve specific problems of survival and reproduction.
ReplyDelete“Understanding the evolved function of a psychological mechanism, or why it exists (often referred to as an ultimate explanation) provides a complementary level of analysis to that of understanding the details of how the mechanism works (often referred to as a proximate explanation).”
If we know something exists, and we already know how it works, do we really need to know why it exists from an evolutionary standpoint? Is the reason something was preserved in the genome at all relevant to reverse engineering cognition? I’m inclined to say no. I’m sure there have been cases where knowing why something existed helped us determine its mechanism. However, clearly there are also cases (COGNITION) where knowing the purpose of something provides very little information about how it works. This paper states that we have cognitive biases that are designed to err in the least costly direction, making you more likely to think a rustling in the bushes that isn’t a snake is threatening than miss a rustling in the bushes that is actually a snake. Doesn’t this have a lot more to do with the learning and experience than social information than an innate cognitive bias to think every sound is a threat?
“Learning requires evolved psychological adaptations, housed in the brain, that enable learning to occur”
I feel like at this point evolutionary psychology is trying to encompass everything. If learning is also a psychological adaptation for survival, why did it not evolve to be powerful enough to override the adaptations that aren’t beneficial anymore? Overall, I think I’m just failing to see what evolutionary psychology can tell us about how cognition works. If you successfully created a T3 robot that passed the Turing test, or even better a colony of Turing test passing T3 robots that could miraculously reproduce, wouldn’t they just continue to evolve psychological adaptations just like humans have been?
I think evolutionary psychological hypotheses are interesting in that they help us understand why we are how we are. It is interesting because it brings insight on what features were important and helpful for the survival of humans. For most of its history humanity has lived under very poorly developed conditions where it was much more subjected to the forces of nature than it is now, and those conditions shaped for the most part what our physical bodies are today. However, technical progress (labour) allowed humans to produce their own living conditions and this way ‘control’ survival, ever increasingly. Technical progress leading to higher survival/reproduction also meant formation of greater and more stable social groups, and of their culture. This process of development made the survival of humans to rely more on their production (productive forces and corresponding social organization) than on their physical features, as they were now able to allow survival to a broader range of individuals.
ReplyDeleteMy main points are these: humanity has interfered with strict evolution 1) by transforming nature with its work, 2) by the creation of a determinant other than nature: culture. Therefore, it becomes impossible to understand subsequent human development under the lens of evolution because, although what was acquired or shaped through evolution mostly persists, it is now due to the combined action of environmental and cultural determinants.
In this light, some moves of evolutionary psychology mentioned in the article appear nonsensical. Although mentioned as ‘perplexing’ or ‘conceptual’ limitations, some phenomena can just not be observed under this lens (like suicide or homosexuality). To accept this one must accept that some human phenomena persist despite not favouring reproductive success, because humans through their production have come to defy evolution. Furthermore, the evolutionists mentioned in the article terribly fail at understanding a phenomenon such as suicide. Their theoretical posture fatally blinds them to social/subjective causes of distress such as a bad quality of life due to chronic pain (termed ‘ill condition’), discrimination and oppression (termed ‘failure in heterosexual mating’ (!!)).
Also I don’t find the distinction that is made in the article between evoked and transmitted culture very pertinent as I think they are part of the same. In my opinion the erroneous separation is based on the failure to recognize that any cultural expression is the representation of a material relation, of humans to their environment. In the same way ideals of beauty may be shaped by the presence of pathogens in the surrounding nature, ‘local moral repugnance at the thought of ingesting certain foods such as beef or pork’ is, such as religious prohibitions on the consumption of certain foods that served to keep people away from products known to propagate diseases.
The benefits of evolutionary psychology to cognitive science are unquestionable. EP provides the "why" (or "how did this come to be") of our mental capacities, which is an important consideration, as it allows us "reverse-engineers" to understand some mental systems on a more abstract, functionally-based, rather than behaviourally-based level. Also interesting is the ability of evolutionary psychology to abstract away any specific, culturally (or "nurture") generated qualities, as it is clear that some evolved system is being used to create those qualities, given an environmental stimulus (even if it is a "misuse", which seems to me a poor term to use, as even if the purpose of the system is not a relevant or important one under new conditions, the evolved mechanism is still functioning in the same way, towards the same purpose). Of course, evolutionary psychology comes with a set of caveats: of course, fundamentally it cannot answer the "how" question, and so cannot be used exclusively; it also struggles with some of the classic "bias-confirmation" problems in psychology in general, where experimentation often requires a preconceived hypothesis, which introduces some aspect of self-confirmation into tests. As such, evolutionary psychology is a tool to be used, and will certainly be a useful field on the road to the solution to the questions of cognitive science, though it must be used carefully, peripherally, and with a high degree of skepticism.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"Understanding the evolved function of a psychological mechanism, or why it exists (ultimate explanation) provides a complementary level of analysis to that of understanding the details of how the mechanism works (proximate explanation). Both types of explanation are required for a comlete understanding, and indeed they mutually inform one another."
ReplyDeleteTo me, it seems that evolutionary explanations of the type provided in the article elucidate the behavior that we are attempting to explain. These explanations are of the form "X generates output Y because output Y is used/is desirable for Z." They tell us about the behavior "outside the box", and they present an explanation of how that behavior fits into the needs of the human organism over the course of evolution. In many cases these explanations make the nature of the behavior more clear (helping to answer the question of "what" the behavior is). (For example, the authors claim that "it was not until evolutionary psychoogists hypothesized sex differences in evolved design features that such differences [in jealousy behavior] were discovered.)
However, evolutionary explanations do not tell us about what's "inside the box", i.e. how the behavior (useful for Z) is generated.
So the authors are correct to claim that ultimate explanations are (at most) complementary to proximal explanations: they cannot take the place of proximal explanations, or tell us how, but might serve to give us possible answers to "why" our behavior is generated.
It may be seen as problematic to assume that there is a "why" in the first place—the authors explicitly caution against making the assumption that our functions were "designed for" some purpose. Sometimes if we start talking about "functions", we slip into ungrounded talk about "purposes".
"The problem of combinatorial explosion.
ReplyDeleteDomain-general theories of rationality imply a deliberate calculation
of ends and a sample space of means to achieve those
ends. Performing the computations needed to sift through that
sample space requires more time than is available for solving
many adaptive problems, which must be solved in real time. [...] A domain-general mechanism
“must evaluate all alternatives it can define. Permutations
being what they are, alternatives increase exponentially as the
problem complexity increases” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994, p.
94). Consequently, combinatorial explosion paralyzes a truly
domain-general mechanism (Frankenhuis & Ploeger, 2007)."
To understand the issue raised by the authors, I believe it is important to consider the feild of Artificial Intelligence (AI). But before we do that, let's define what a rational agent is, since the authors make no attempt to do so. They even go so far as to put quotation marks around the word "rational" as though there is no accepted definition for what constitutes a "rational" agent. I believe the following should suffice for discussions about agents navigating a sample space:
Rational agent: an agent that uses the rules of logic to make decisions
In their argument on combinatorial explosion, the authors of this paper are essentially making claims about computational complexity. They claim that, for an agent to be rational, it must investigate all possibilities and combinations in a sample space. I agree this method of finding a solution would necessarily have exponential complexity. If there were no time constraints on the problem, this method would also necessarily be optimal (i.e., able to find the best solution if one exists) and complete (i.e., able to find all solutions that exist). In AI, however, computers employ the use of search algorithms and heuristics to leverage domain-specific knowledge and find solutions. Such heuristics and search algorithms frequently bring the complexity down to a polynomial function.
In the case of human beings, there are frequently time constraints on the computations we can perform. If we exceed these time constraints, we can no longer reach a desired solution to the scenario we are involved in. In other words, if X is true when time has run out then:
X --> Failure
Knowing this, a rational agent may employ a search heuristic that stipulates the agent must make a decision using the best information and estimates available to them before X is true. I would argue that humans employ these heuristics, which are perfectly rational although not complete or necessarily optimal. Such limitations are the byproduct of working within dynamic, unobservable, continuous, and stochastic environments (i.e., the types of environments humans work within). Moreover, these limitations have little to do with whether or not an agent is rational and more to do with how they use logic and which types of logic (e.g., temporal, probabalistic) they use.
As a final note, I do not have an opinion as to whether or not human beings are perfectly rational agents. I do, however, think that the argument of combinatorial explosion in this paper was particularly feeble.
I have read on some comments which we saying that EP helps us to know why we have adapted to certain behaviors but it doesn't help us to know how it happened.
ReplyDeleteThis puzzled me a bit because of what we have learned about epigenetics, which is the field of how genes are regulated. Obviously not all genes relate to aspect of behaviour but some patterns of behaviours have been linked to a complex network of gene expression.
What happens with epigenetics is that depending on your interaction with the environment certain genes start to become more or less expressed. This adaptation can occur in a fast way and more importantly has been shown to be transferred across generations.
For example, our fear of snakes might have raised from our ancestors learning through time to have a stress response when seeing a snake, which could have enhanced the expression of cortisol through time.
However, the only problem is that I don't see why certain features would stick through time and why other don't (other than the explanation of this aids for survival and reproduction). What I mean is that we don't know how it is that this change is preserved through and this one is not.
To further evaluate this point I also find that the human craving for fatty, sugary foods persisting into the present when we are no longer hunter-gatherers very odd. While there are still people who do not have access to the same resources others do, there are millions of people in North America that receive ample (if not well-rounded) nourishment. As rates of obesity/high blood pressure climb, this desire for the most calorie-laden foods is prevalent when it is starting to become maladaptive for many people.
DeleteFear of snakes is a harmless, semi-vestigial characteristic that does not necessarily have a place today but it still has a useful purpose. Nothing negative comes of being afraid of snakes since (depending on location) we rarely encounter them in our day to day lives. Craving junk food is the complete opposite. In the 1st world countries among populations that have been well-fed for centuries, why would bad food still be so appealing? Places that have not seen starvation as a common problem among its inhabitants have not changed since their forager ancestors. When a behavior has become harmful, why have we not evolved past it or buried it in our genes?
In my opinion, the evolutionary psychologists perspective that “the human mind is a complex integrated assembly of many functionally specialized psychological adaptations that evolved as solutions to numerous and qualitatively distinct adaptive problems” does not entirely consider the full scope of cognitive processing. And along similar lines, I don’t believe that the brain’s adaptive mechanism are entirely domain specific, as described by the authors when they write that “learning is best explained by evolved learning adaptations that have at least some specialized design features, rather than by a single all-purpose general learning adaptation”.
ReplyDeleteIn order to address my first concern it is important to note the EP perspective that psychological adaptations must have occurred by natural selection, and thus according to traits associated with particular genes. This, to me, seems to ignore the vast psychological adaptability due to brain plasticity alone. Of course the effective and efficient plasticity that occurs in humans most definitely was selected for evolutionarily, and it is even likely that various cultures or various current environments continue to select for genetically influenced variations in brain development. However, even if certain primitive psychological phenomena govern our behavior (which it most likely does to a certain extent), human cognition is far more adaptable and sporadic, as we can observe by the huge inter-population variations in behavior. Furthermore, the developmental studies have yet to show a direct coordination between ones genetic code, and the specific wiring of the brain. This provides evidence that neural mechanisms, which I would only presume govern psychological mechanism, are not entirely dependent on the genetic code, and might rely much more heavily on developmental requirements associated with input from the current environment. It seems that true cognition cannot be entirely explained by evolutionary psychology alone, but instead requires the integration of multiple explanatory disciplines such as evolution, development, the direct physiological functions of the nervous system (governing plasticity, neurogenesis etc…), as well as epigenetic phenomenon.
With regards to domain specific versus domain general mechanism, we have already studied direct instance in which general mechanism contribute vastly to human cognition. The most obvious example I can recount is that of categorization in humans. The logistics of this mechanism, by which sensorimotor information is assessed for invariants according to trial and error and internal learning, functions consistently across all sensory modalities, giving a prominent example of a psychological mechanism that functions across all domains. As the article “Evolutionary Psychology” argues, however, the learning mechanism that govern categorization might in themselves differ across various domains. These learning mechanisms might function according to different rules that have adapted on the basis of their abilities to contribute to the survival of an organism during distant environmental pasts. This again seems less plausible to me on the basis of the general mechanism outlined by synaptic plasticity, which having not yet been proven to cause psychological learning, is often associated with it. Similar molecules, and proteins are deeply associated with the synaptic plasticity that occurs across multiple circuits of the nervous system, including sensory neurons of the auditory, visual, and somatosensory cortex, as well as processing areas in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. If these plastic mechanism in the nervous system are the same, why can’t learning mechanism be general instructions for modifying information, as opposed to specific instances in which learning has evolved differently to assess which foods, or partners are best for one’s survival?
"But multiple personality is a pathology, and the
ReplyDeletepersonalities usually only emerge one at a time. "
Dissociative Identity Disorder no longer holds the prestige it once had. It may not even exist at all.
Tartakovsky, M. (2011). Dispelling Myths about Dissociative Identity Disorder. Psych Central. Retrieved on March 23, 2015, from http://psychcentral.com/lib/dispelling-myths-about-dissociative-identity-disorder/0009785
"We are a T3 level, and the candidate is no longer just a computer, computing, but a robot, a dynamical system, doing not only computation, but also sensorimotor transduction, and perhaps a lot of other essential internal dynamic processes in between too." (Harnad, 2012)
DeleteI'm still having trouble articulating the difference between something dynamic and something digital. Maybe, a dynamic thing makes fluid, continuous movements while a digital thing just makes discrete approximations of a continuous thing?
Either way, behavior is dynamic. Right? And if so, then Dennet's projection behavior explains consciousness as a dynamic behavior of sifting through stimulus at various levels, like pour water down a water clock.
Computational means discrete and syntactic; dynamic means physical properties like movement, intensity, charge. But why are you posting this in Week 7?
Delete"...there has not been enough time for natural selection to forge or modify complex psychological adaptations to effectively utilize the evolutionarily novel inputs associated with birth control."
ReplyDeleteI think that evolutionary psychologists are using the existence of novel environmental phenomena to ignore a larger issue within evolutionary psychology: the addition of new adaptations onto other adaptations. For the infidelity example, although paternal uncertainty may be the original motivator of spousal jealousy in males, over time other factors have started piggybacking onto relationships that also cause jealousy: social contract, trust, telling the truth, social status/reputation, etc. To say that jealousy will disappear over time once we catch up to the inputs associated with birth control is to ignore all the other adaptions that have come to motivate jealousy as well.
This may have been just a limitation of the example used, and not evolutionary psychology in general (although from the brief exposure I've had to it in other classes, unfortunately this does not seem to be a one-time oversight). Either way, evolutionary psychologists must focus on explaining the evolutionary benefits of the new adaptations, and WHY the new adaptations merged with older ones instead of adapting on their own (and maybe even if these new adaptations could have occurred without the previous ones).
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that based on an evolutionary psychology approach, in order to build a T3 Robot, we would have to identify all the evolutionarily created adaptive mechanisms in our brain. i.e. we would have to make sure the T3 robot shared the same blindspots and incompatible adaptations to modern society that we humans have, (as pointed out in the article) in addition to predicting how the mind works. If we are to take evolutionary psychology to be valid, then the how is not enough to explain the brain, but also the why, the history of humanity on an evolutionary time scale, and to trace the content specific (and historically accidental) aspects of our brain, and not just the general how of its mechanics. We are not beings that simply follow a set of rules, born as a blank slate, but instead inherit the hundreds of thousands of years (and millions if you trace humans back to the first life forms on this planet) of historical instances which have shaped the specificity of the human in its present state. Here evolutionary psychology is grounding the mind in history, not in an abstract and general ''rationality of the mind.'' Evolutionary psychology then helps with arguments against computationalism, arguing that the historical specificity of the brain is what allows it to do what it does, and that there is no general equation which could account for each and every evolutionary instance which has led the brain to act in the way it does. The brain then functions in a constant dialogue between structures built over time and novel experiences which interact with these structures.
So, what are the practical applications of evolutionary psychology? I myself had never really considered it myself. I’m not entirely convinced of its necessity for our current lives. The environments of our ancestors, their struggles and issues, were most likely incredibly different from those which we deal with today. Though apparently one clinical psychologist is has created a “six-step treatment for depression includes increasing omega-3 fatty acid consumption, getting at least 30 minutes of daily exposure to sunlight, ramping up exercise, socializing daily with friends and family, engaging in antiruminative activity, and adopting patterns of good sleep hygiene—all procedures designed to mimic ancestral living conditions.” This works yes, but there could be other explanations. For example the fulfillment of basic human needs. Our bodies require omega-3s, vitamin D (from sunlight), and movement so our muscles don’t atrophy and to keep our blood moving, etc. This regimen just seems logical so why justify it with something about ‘ancestral living conditions’? What bothers me most is that we don’t know the conditions in which our ancestors lived and how they changed with time. How stable are the traits we adapted then and those we have now?
ReplyDeleteNext the authors tell us: “Legal scholars are increasingly using knowledge of evolved psychological adaptations to understand how to better regulate human behavior and guide policy decisions.” Human behavior is constantly changing and adapting to the environment. The example used here is about sexual harassment and stalking and the gender differences in its perception. I see the validity of historical research to shed light on the matter but evolutionary research? Furthermore, perhaps we should be more focused educating people for change in the future rather than digging for excuses for this behavior from the past.
Perhaps I am being harsh on evolutionary psychology but it is a field that I still don’t fully understand or see validity in. Perhaps one day I’ll get it but for now I’m happier to focus on what can be done now to change the social climate for the better.
"evolutionary psychologists suggest that the human mind is a complex integrated assembly of many functionally specialized psychological adaptations that evolved as solutions to numerous and qualitatively distinct adaptive problems—a premise about adaptations shared widely by evolutionary biologists in understanding nonhuman animals"
ReplyDeleteWhile the basic principle behind evolutionary psychology seems like a plausible hypothesis for things like fear of snakes or spiders, or explaining sexual arousal, I think it becomes hard to draw the line of how much evolutionary psychologists can explain about behavioral nuances within its framework. At what point does something can we decide if a given characteristic is due to psychological adaptations or not? I think part of why evolutionary psychology is scrutinized so much is because it is an easy method to construe a scenario in order to make sense of a given behavioral phenomena.
Confer et al. defend evolutionary psychology as a valuable discipline. They begin by giving a theoretical background starting with Darwin's theory of natural selection, where traits that help an organism survive and reproduce will be passed on at a greater rate than those traits that don't confer an advantage. This can give rise to adaptations that are inherited characteristics with functional value helping survival and reproduction; by-products that don't have functional value but are still inherited; and noise, which are random variations in characteristics.
ReplyDeleteI think that linking this week's readings to CatComCon was a bit harder than previous weeks. However the discussion on ultimate explanations (which answers why an evolved mechanism exists) and proximate explanations (how the mechanism works) is relevant to the hard problem of how and why we feel. The common queries are also questions we can ask about cognitive science and the study of consciousness. "Can evolutionary psychological hypotheses be empirically tested or falsified?" The authors argue that "precisely formulated evolutionary psychological hypotheses that yield specific predictions about design features that are not known to exist prior to empirical testing are fully amenable to empirical confirmation and falsification." (Design features are merely attributes about some evolved psychological mechanism). The same could be said about the study of consciousness and cognitive science. However in practice, the other minds problem makes it difficult to test anything about consciousness in machines, since we don't (and can't!) know when it's happening.
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ReplyDelete