The Causal Role of Consciousness: a Conceptual Addendum to Human Evolutionary Psychology

Review of General Psychology Copyright 2004 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 2004, Vol. 8, No. 4, 227–248 1089-2680/04/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.8.4.227 The Causal Role of Consciousness: A Conceptual Addendum to Human Evolutionary Psychology Jesse M. Bering Todd K. Shackelford University of Arkansas Florida Atlantic University By concentrating on the unconscious processes driving evolutionary mechanisms, evolutionary psychology has neglected the role of consciousness in generating human adaptations. The authors argue that there exist several “Darwinian algorithms” that are grounded in a novel representational system. Among such adaptations are information- retention homicide, the killing of others who are believed to possess information about the self that has the potential to jeopardize inclusive fitness, and those generating suicide, which may necessitate the capacity for self-referential emotions such as shame. The authors offer these examples to support their argument that human psychology is characterized by a representational system in which conscious motives have inserted themselves at the level of the gene and have fundamentally changed the nature of hominid evolution. Evolutionary psychologists frequently reca- However, in certain cases, this approach may pitulate the theme that adaptive behaviors are not accurately capture the complexities of hu- guided by unconscious processes servicing ge- man evolution because it tends to ignore the role netic selection in individual organisms (Buss, of consciousness in the emergence of unique 1995, 1999; Daly & Wilson, 1999; Dawkins, human adaptations. We define consciousness as 1986; Leger, Kamil, & French, 2001; Symons, that naturally occurring cognitive representa- 1992). Among many other examples, such tional capacity permitting explicit and reflective “blind” fitness-enhancing algorithms include accounts of the—mostly causative—contents of those that are devoted to mate selection, child mind, contents harbored by the psychological rearing, and altruism. For instance, individuals frame of the self and, as a consequence, the need not be consciously aware of the reasons psychological frames of others. Because con- they find pronounced interocular distance unat- sciousness is often deeply interwoven with un- tractive in a potential mate (Fink & Penton- conscious selection pressures, selection at the Voak, 2002; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1993), are level of the gene cannot always be neatly more likely to emotionally disengage from their cleaved off from intentionality at the level of the infants born with chromosomal abnormalities human organism. A new suite of adaptations than they are healthy children (Bjorklund, may have been fostered by such higher order Yunger, & Pellegrini, 2002; Daly & Wilson, cognitive processes once they were in place, 1981, 1995), or are most likely to assist others being uniquely plumbed from the metarepresen- when the costs of helping are relatively low and tational abilities (i.e., cognitive resources en- the likelihood of reciprocation is high (Axelrod abling general perspective taking and access to & Hamilton, 1981; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; epistemic positions) of early humans (Baron- Trivers, 1971) to directly and reliably engage in Cohen, 1999; Bering & Povinelli, in press; Po- behaviors guided by these evolved heuristics. vinelli & Giambrone, 2000; Tomasello, 1999). This argument should not be confused with genetic teleology, as if the organism has any say in the instantiation of its own adaptations. Jesse M. Bering, Department of Psychology, University Rather, it implies only that intentionality has of Arkansas; Todd K. Shackelford, Department of Psychol- played an important causal role in human evo- ogy, Florida Atlantic University. lutionary processes and is an integrative dy- Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to Jesse M. Bering, Department of Psychology, namic asserting itself at the level of the gene. University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701. E-mail: That is, once the heritability for consciousness [email protected] reached floor level, it began to exert a unique 227 228 BERING AND SHACKELFORD selective pressure on human behavior, serving winian algorithms are usefully exacted at the essentially as an endogenous force that “re- ultimate level of genetic selection, but for cer- wrote” adaptations that had evolved before con- tain human adaptations, the evolution of such sciousness. In addition, consciousness may algorithms cannot be explained without invok- have precipitated new categories of ancestrally ing consciousness as an explanatory frame. adaptive behaviors that had no precedent in Therefore, in the present article, we argue that evolutionary history. consciousness has played an important causal If the foregoing analysis is correct, then hu- role in ancestrally adaptive human behaviors. man evolutionary psychology could be revised We concentrate on the evolution of ancestrally profitably to accommodate the unique selective adaptive behaviors that arguably depend on the forces driving human behavior, forces that have presence of consciousness to produce the asso- been overshadowed by the theoretical domi- ciated genetic advantages. Indeed, conscious- nance of ultimate explanations of adaptation ness was, in many respects, the “problem” that (i.e., blind mechanisms of genetic fitness). This such adaptations were designed to solve. With- strict attention to the blind mechanisms of ge- out such a “problem,” there would have been no netic fitness is useful in dealing with the behav- selective pressure to have evolved mechanisms ioral etiology of species that have not evolved promoting specific solutions to the crisis of so- the bundle of causal reasoning skills equated cial knowledge. with “consciousness” or “intentionality,” but it may not always be a successful strategy for Representational Discontinuity From addressing the origins of humans. This is be- Continuous Processes of Change cause the appearance of such a representational system may be directly responsible for many The central argument advanced here is that qualitative differences in the behavioral moti- once an intentionality function was normatively vations of humans and other species, and it is entrenched in human cognition, a series of evo- these conscious motivations that drive unique lutionary adumbrations to initial low-level (i.e., adaptations in the former. unconsciously inspired) adaptive behaviors oc- Of course, even if this is the case, these curred, capitalizing on this new representational large-scale differences mechanistically can only system and, in the process, establishing new promote behavioral selection on the same ulti- heuristic strategies. These strategies can then be mate scale of genetic selection as the behaviors said to have opened up untrammeled tracts of of other species. The actual mechanisms of se- genetic fitness. Much of this article is devoted to lection and genetic inheritance are firmly estab- examples of these previously unexploited tracts, lished and are not at issue (Alexander, 1987; but for now it is important to recognize that Buss, Haselton, Shackelford, Bleske, & Wake- throughout the 5 to 7 million year course of field, 1998; Daly & Wilson, 1988; Dawkins, hominid evolution, neurocognitive changes un- 1989; Williams, 1992). However, this model derlying this representational system advanced predicts that certain human adaptations, includ- rapidly and dramatically, ultimately leading to ing suicide and certain forms of homicide, could an evolutionarily novel system subserving ab- not have evolved were it not for consciousness. stract causal reasoning at least by the time mod- Thus, we should find no homologous behaviors ern humans arrived on the scene 150,000 years in closely related species. Other adaptive behav- ago in sub-Saharan Africa (Povinelli, 2000; Po- iors, including (among many other examples) vinelli & Bering, 2002; Povinelli, Bering, & altruism and cooperation (e.g., Johnson & Giambrone, 2000). The phylogenetic revamp- Kru¨ger, in press; Wedekind & Malinski, 2000), ing of this primate neurocognitive apparatus probably evolved before consciousness and are was both quantitative and qualitative in nature: shared with other primate species but were dra- quantitative in the sense of physical expansion matically reorganized in human brains to ac- of the frontal cortex and increased brain mass commodate the new demands of an intentional- and qualitative in the sense of reaching a critical ity system. Evolutionary psychology must threshold allowing genuine representational therefore begin to examine how consciousness changes in the core cognitive system. These built on ancient adaptations in the primate lin- changes thus built on existing structures while eage to construct novel human adaptations. Dar- simultaneously creating unprecedented psycho- CAUSAL ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS 229 logical mechanisms (Povinelli et al., 2000; To- ral milieu. Chimpanzee societies, in contrast, as masello, 1999; Tomasello & Call, 1997). What a result of the absence of these vehicles of this means is that we should expect to find both information (an apparent symptom of metarep- similarities and legitimate differences in the resentational deficit), appear to regularly un- cognitive and, accordingly, the behavioral as- dergo a “slippage” of cultural innovations in semblages between modern humans and their which new trends fail to be adequately trans- closest genetic relatives. mitted between generations and each individual

Load more