Can Evolution Explain How the Mind Works? a Review of the Evolutionary Psychology Debates Introduction
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Faith, Form and Meaning: a Report on the U.K. Centenary Conference
Faith, Form and Meaning: A Report on the U.K. Centenary Conference Robin A. Hodgkin The United Kingdom Centenary Conference on Michael Polanyi’s thought was held at St George’s, Windsor Castle, in November, 1991. It was planned as an exploration of certain key ideas from the later chapters of Personal Knowledge, and thus to contribute to the current, growing conversation between literature, science and theology in the areas of faith, form and meaning. We were particularly encouraged when three distinguished speakers agreed to come: Professor Stephen Prickett from Glasgow University, Professor Brian Goodwin from the Open University and Professor the Rev’d Dan Hardy from Princeton. Their three lectures, summarised below, sparked off searching and lively discussion in the groups that also met. Important contributions were also made by three Hungarian guests. I Stephen Prickett, in a paper entitled, “Ambiguity and Symbol in Living Language,” placed Polanyi within a tradition which flows through Coleridge and the Romantic Movement and on to Newman. “Anyone familiar with [Coleridge and Newman] will have little difficulty in recognising in Polanyi one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished exponents of that same `fiduciary’ tradition. Both share a common epistemology, believing that commitment is an essential part of knowing, and that such knowledge...belongs to and is inescapably a part of a linguistic community.” Prickett then stressed a number of similarities between Newman and Polanyi, but there were differences too: “The most striking... is that whereas Newman finds his linguistic community in `the community of faith,’ in other words the Catholic Church itself, standing in contradistinction to the World which surrounds it, Polanyi sees no reason at all to cordon off the life and language of the Church from that of the rest of human existence and seems to imply that all language is of its intrinsic nature `fiduciary,’ and ultimately, therefore, pointing towards the existence of God. -
The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College Fall 2005
The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College Fall 2005 Course Pro-Seminar on Sociological Theory (SOCI 6333) Time Tuesday, 7:15-10:00 p.m. Place North 228 Instructor David E. Pearson, Ph.D. Office South 295 Phone 882-7265 Email [email protected] Office Hours Monday-Thursday 12:05-1:30 (and by appointment) Description: During the Fall 2005 semester, SOCI 6333 examines the assumptions of neo-Darwinian theory and its relevance for sociology. The major neo-Darwinian concepts examined are three: sexual selection, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism. Format: Classes will include both lectures and discussions in which students assume primary responsibility for analyzing the week’s readings. Given this format, it is required that all readings be completed prior to the class session. Attendance: Regular class attendance is expected. More than one unexcused absence will result in a lowering of your final grade. Make-Up Policy: You are responsible for all readings and class materials missed due to absences. A grade of zero will be given when you are not present to take an examination, give a presentation, or when written work is handed in late. Make-ups and extensions will be given only in documented instances of emergency or extreme illness. Scholastic Dishonesty: Students who engage in scholastic dishonesty are subject to disciplinary penalties, including the possibility of failure in the course and expulsion. Scholastic dishonesty includes but is not limited to cheating, plagiarism, or any act designed to give unfair advantage to a student or the attempt to commit such acts. -
Has the Decline of Violence Reversed Since the Better Angels of Our Nature Was Written?
Has the Decline of Violence Reversed since The Better Angels of Our Nature was Written? Steven Pinker Many journalists, citing recent violence in Syria, Iraq, Gaza, and Ukraine, have asked me whether the decline of violence has gone into reverse since The Better Angels of Our Nature was written. The question betrays the same statistical misconceptions that led me to write Better Angels in the first place. People always think that violence has increased because they reason from memorable examples rather than from global data. If at any time you cherry-pick the most violent place in the world, then you’ll discover that yes, it’s violent. That has nothing to do with overall rates or trends in violence. The basic problem is that journalism is a systematically misleading way to understand the world. News is about things that happen, not about things that don’t happen. You never see a reporter standing on the streets of Angola, Sri Lanka, or Vietnam saying “I’m here reporting that a war has not broken out today.” It’s only by looking at data on the world as a whole that you get an accurate picture of the trends. Objectively, there has indeed been an uptick in war deaths in 2013 compared to 2012 (it’s too early to have data for 2014), mostly due to the war in Syria. But the overall level of deaths is still far below those of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when the world was a far more dangerous place. Even putting aside the obvious examples (such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 3- million-death war in Vietnam), one sees that the conflicts of today are far less damaging than those of past decades. -
In Defense of Massive Modularity
3 In Defense of Massive Modularity Dan Sperber In October 1990, a psychologist, Susan Gelman, and three anthropolo- gists whose interest in cognition had been guided and encouraged by Jacques Mehler, Scott Atran, Larry Hirschfeld, and myself, organized a conference on “Cultural Knowledge and Domain Specificity” (see Hirsch- feld and Gelman, 1994). Jacques advised us in the preparation of the conference, and while we failed to convince him to write a paper, he did play a major role in the discussions. A main issue at stake was the degree to which cognitive development, everyday cognition, and cultural knowledge are based on dedicated do- main-specific mechanisms, as opposed to a domain-general intelligence and learning capacity. Thanks in particular to the work of developmental psychologists such as Susan Carey, Rochel Gelman, Susan Gelman, Frank Keil, Alan Leslie, Jacques Mehler, Elizabeth Spelke (who were all there), the issue of domain-specificity—which, of course, Noam Chomsky had been the first to raise—was becoming a central one in cognitive psychol- ogy. Evolutionary psychology, represented at the conference by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, was putting forward new arguments for seeing human cognition as involving mostly domain- or task-specific evolved adaptations. We were a few anthropologists, far from the main- stream of our discipline, who also saw domain-specific cognitive pro- cesses as both constraining and contributing to cultural development. Taking for granted that domain-specific dispositions are an important feature of human cognition, three questions arise: 1. To what extent are these domain-specific dispositions based on truly autonomous mental mechanisms or “modules,” as opposed to being 48 D. -
The Root of Heidegger's Concern for the Earth at the Consummation of Metaphysics: the Nietzsche Lectures
Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2, 2009 TRIBUTE TO BRIAN GOODWIN 1931-2009 Arran Gare Brian Goodwin, the visionary mathematician, biologist, philosopher and teacher, died on 15th July, at the age of 78. Goodwin was not only a founding member of the editorial board of Cosmos & History, he was the patron of the Joseph Needham Centre for Complex Processes Research from which Cosmos & History emerged. He was highly supportive of the research of this group and the aspirations for Cosmos & History, but more importantly, his work itself was an inspiration and a symbol of the bold thinking, transcending all disciplinary boundaries, with a passionate concern to augment life, that both the Joseph Needham Centre for Complex Processes Research and Cosmos & History have sought to promote. Goodwin’s vision was summarized in words recently recorded by an MSc student of Holistic Science at Schumacher College: Nature and Culture are One, Not Two … The Great Work, the Magnum Opus, in which we are now inexorably engaged, is a cultural transformation that will either carry us into a new age on earth or will result in our disappearance from the planet. The choice is in our hands … This Gaian Renaissance will lead to what Thomas Berry calls the Ecozoic Age, in which all inhabitants of the planet are governed by principles of Earth Jurisprudence in an Earth Democracy. We can all experience lives of meaning and know that indeed there is no truth beyond the magic of creative participation in the life of the cosmos that embodies the liberation of Chaos, the abundance of Gaia, and the love of Eros. -
The Evolutionary Biology of Decision Making
University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Faculty Publications, Department of Psychology Psychology, Department of 2008 The Evolutionary Biology of Decision Making Jeffrey R. Stevens University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/psychfacpub Part of the Psychiatry and Psychology Commons Stevens, Jeffrey R., "The Evolutionary Biology of Decision Making" (2008). Faculty Publications, Department of Psychology. 523. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/psychfacpub/523 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Psychology, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications, Department of Psychology by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Published in BETTER THAN CONSCIOUS? DECISION MAKING, THE HUMAN MIND, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR INSTITUTIONS, ed. Christoph Engel and Wolf Singer (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), pp. 285-304. Copyright 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology & the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. Used by permission. 13 The Evolutionary Biology of Decision Making Jeffrey R. Stevens Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, 14195 Berlin, Germany Abstract Evolutionary and psychological approaches to decision making remain largely separate endeavors. Each offers necessary techniques and perspectives which, when integrated, will aid the study of decision making in both humans and nonhuman animals. The evolutionary focus on selection pressures highlights the goals of decisions and the con ditions under which different selection processes likely influence decision making. An evolutionary view also suggests that fully rational decision processes do not likely exist in nature. -
Evolution by Natural Selection, Formulated Independently by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace
UNIT 4 EVOLUTIONARY PATT EVOLUTIONARY E RNS AND PROC E SS E Evolution by Natural S 22 Selection Natural selection In this chapter you will learn that explains how Evolution is one of the most populations become important ideas in modern biology well suited to their environments over time. The shape and by reviewing by asking by applying coloration of leafy sea The rise of What is the evidence for evolution? Evolution in action: dragons (a fish closely evolutionary thought two case studies related to seahorses) 22.1 22.4 are heritable traits that with regard to help them to hide from predators. The pattern of evolution: The process of species have changed evolution by natural and are related 22.2 selection 22.3 keeping in mind Common myths about natural selection and adaptation 22.5 his chapter is about one of the great ideas in science: the theory of evolution by natural selection, formulated independently by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. The theory explains how T populations—individuals of the same species that live in the same area at the same time—have come to be adapted to environments ranging from arctic tundra to tropical wet forest. It revealed one of the five key attributes of life: Populations of organisms evolve. In other words, the heritable characteris- This chapter is part of the tics of populations change over time (Chapter 1). Big Picture. See how on Evolution by natural selection is one of the best supported and most important theories in the history pages 516–517. of scientific research. -
Introduction ROBERT AUNGER a Number of Prominent Academics
CHAPTER 1: Introduction ROBERT AUNGER A number of prominent academics have recently argued that we are entering a period in which evolutionary theory is being applied to every conceivable domain of inquiry. Witness the development of fields such as evolutionary ecology (Krebs and Davies 1997), evolutionary economics (Nelson and Winter 1982), evolutionary psychology (Barkow et al. 1992), evolutionary linguistics (Pinker 1994) and literary theory (Carroll 1995), evolutionary epistemology (Callebaut and Pinxten 1987), evolutionary computational science (Koza 1992), evolutionary medicine (Nesse and Williams 1994) and psychiatry (McGuire and Troisi 1998) -- even evolutionary chemistry (Wilson and Czarnik 1997) and evolutionary physics (Smolin 1997). Such developments certainly suggest that Darwin’s legacy continues to grow. The new millennium can therefore be called the Age of Universal Darwinism (Dennett 1995; Cziko 1995). What unifies these approaches? Dan Dennett (1995) has argued that Darwin’s “dangerous idea” is an abstract algorithm, often called the “replicator dynamic.” This dynamic consists of repeated iterations of selection from among randomly mutating replicators. Replicators, in turn, are units of information with the ability to reproduce themselves using resources from some material substrate. Couched in these terms, the evolutionary process is obviously quite general. for example, the replicator dynamic, when played out on biological material such as DNA, is called natural selection. But Dennett suggests there are essentially no limits to the phenomena which can be treated using this algorithm, although there will be variation in the degree to which such treatment leads to productive insights. The primary hold-out from “evolutionarization,” it seems, is the social sciences. Twenty-five years have now passed since the biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the notion of a meme, or an idea that becomes commonly shared through social transmission, into the scholastic lexicon. -
Balanced Biosocial Theory for the Social Sciences
UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations 1-1-2004 Balanced biosocial theory for the social sciences Michael A Restivo University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/rtds Repository Citation Restivo, Michael A, "Balanced biosocial theory for the social sciences" (2004). UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations. 1635. http://dx.doi.org/10.25669/5jp5-vy39 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BALANCED BIOSOCIAL THEORY FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES by Michael A. Restivo Bachelor of Arts IPIoridkijSjlarrhcIJiuAHsrsity 2001 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillm ent ofdœnxpnnnnenkfbrthe Master of Arts Degree in Sociology Departm ent of Sociology College of Liberal Arts Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas M ay 2004 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1422154 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. -
Moral Implications of Darwinian Evolution for Human Reference
Andrews University Digital Commons @ Andrews University Dissertations Graduate Research 2006 Moral Implications of Darwinian Evolution for Human Reference Based in Christian Ethics: a Critical Analysis and Response to the "Moral Individualism" of James Rachels Stephen Bauer Andrews University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations Part of the Christianity Commons, Ethics in Religion Commons, Evolution Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Bauer, Stephen, "Moral Implications of Darwinian Evolution for Human Reference Based in Christian Ethics: a Critical Analysis and Response to the "Moral Individualism" of James Rachels" (2006). Dissertations. 16. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/16 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Research at Digital Commons @ Andrews University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Andrews University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your interest in the Andrews University Digital Library of Dissertations and Theses. Please honor the copyright of this document by not duplicating or distributing additional copies in any form without the author’s express written permission. Thanks for your cooperation. Andrews University Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary MORAL IMPLICATIONS OF DARWINIAN EVOLUTION FOR HUMAN PREFERENCE BASED IN CHRISTIAN ETHICS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND RESPONSE TO THE “MORAL INDIVIDUALISM” OF JAMES RACHELS A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by Stephen Bauer November 2006 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3248152 Copyright 2006 by Bauer, Stephen All rights reserved. -
Past and Present Environments
Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 2011, 275-278 DOI: 10.1556/JEP.9.2011.3.5 PAST AND PRESENT ENVIRONMENTS A review of Decision Making: Towards an Evolutionary Psychology of Rationality, by Mauro Maldonato. Sussex Academic Press (2010), 121 pages, $32.50. ISBN: 978-1-84519-421-5 (paperback) 1 2 CHELSEA ROSS AND ANDREAS WILKE Department of Psychology, Clarkson University In his book, Maldonato provides a thoughtful look at how early scholars viewed de- cision-making and rationality. He takes the reader on an illustrative journey through the historic passages of decision-making all the way to modern notions of a more limited rationality and how humans can make choices under risk and uncertainty. He discusses Kahneman and Tversky’s seminal work on heuristics and biases— “short cuts” that rely on little information and modest cognitive resources that sometimes lead to persistent failures, but usually allow the decision-maker to make fast and fairly reliable choices. Herbert Simon and Gerd Gigerenzer’s work on bounded rationality is discussed, with respect to its influence on decision-making research in economics and psychology. For Maldonato, the principle of bounded ra- tionality—that organisms have limited resources, such as time, information, and cognitive capacity with which to find solutions to the problems they face—is a key insight to understanding the evolution of decision-making. Maldonato proposes that evolutionary pressures urged the human mind to adopt a primitive decision-making process. For the purpose of survival, the majority of human choices had to be made by means of simple and fast decision strategies, because the decision-making system developed under general human cognitive limitations and from environmental pressures that selected for decision strategies suited for the harsh ancestral living environments as well as the resources at hand. -
Preferences Under Pressure
Eric Skoog Preferences Under Pressure Conflict, Threat Cues and Willingness to Compromise Dissertation presented at Uppsala University to be publicly examined in Zootissalen, EBC, Villavägen 9, Uppsala, Friday, 13 March 2020 at 10:15 for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The examination will be conducted in English. Faculty examiner: Associate Professor Thomas Zeitzoff (American University, School of Public Affairs). Abstract Skoog, E. 2020. Preferences Under Pressure. Conflict, Threat Cues and Willingness to Compromise. Report / Department of Peace and Conflict Research 121. 66 pp. Uppsala: Department of Peace and Conflict Research. ISBN 978-91-506-2805-0. Understanding how preferences are formed is a key question in the social sciences. The ability of agents to interact with each other is a prerequisite for well-functioning societies. Nevertheless, the process whereby the preferences of agents in conflict are formed have often been black boxed, and the literature on the effects of armed conflict on individuals reveals a great variation in terms of outcomes. Sometimes, individuals are willing to cooperate and interact even with former enemies, while sometimes, we see outright refusal to cooperate or interact at all. In this dissertation, I look at the role of threat in driving some of these divergent results. Armed conflict is rife with physical threats to life, limb and property, and there has been much research pointing to the impact of threat on preferences, attitudes and behavior. Research in the field of evolutionary psychology has revealed that threat is not a singular category, but a nuanced phenomenon, where different types of threat may lead to different responses.