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Leda Cosmides Associate Professor Department of Psychology University of California-Santa Barbara

Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason?

28 April Guest Lecture for Spring 2000 Graduate Seminar:   Evolution & Learning

ABSTRACT: Since the Enlightenment, the human mind has been conceived of as a blank slate, written on by the hand of experience. In recent years, the technological metaphor used to describe the architecture of our minds has been updated, from "blank slate" to "general purpose computer", but the central tenet of this view has remained the same: All of the particulars of what we think and feel derive externally, from the physical and social world. The mind has no inherent content. An alternative view has been emerging from evolutionary psychology and related fields. New research suggests that our minds are full of specialized reasoning circuits that organize the way we interpret our life experiences. These specialized circuits evolved in the Pleistocene and before, and were designed to solve the day-to-day problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors -- problems such as cooperating with others, coping with aggression, foraging for food, and choosing a mate. Although these circuits were designed to solve the problems of an ancestral and largely vanished way of life, they are enduring components of our cognitive architecture that give contour to our lives even today. Evolutionarily rigorous theories of adaptive function can be powerful inferential tools to guide research on the mind's design. To illustrate, I will discuss research on the design of circuits that appear to be specialized for reasoning about social contracts and reciprocity.   RELATED READING: Tooby, J. and L. Cosmides. 1992. The psychological foundations of culture. In: J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. (New York: Oxford University Press). Cosmides, L. and J. Tooby. 1992. Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In: J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. (New York: Oxford University Press).   ONLINE RESOURCES: Dr. Cosmides' Departmental Page Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer Leda Cosmides & John Tooby (1997) Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason? Cosmides & Tooby (RealAudio) Evolutionary Psychology: A Tutorial Cosmides & Tooby, in progress (PDF) Center for Evolutionary Psychology Cosmides & Tooby, Co-Directors UCSB Department of Anthropology

OTHER SPRING 2000 SPEAKERS:   Colin Allen   .  Tim Tully   .  Michael Fanselow   .  Alan Kamil

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