THE ADAPTED MIND : EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND THE GENERATION OF CULTURE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Jerome H. Barkow | 678 pages | 11 Jan 1996 | Oxford University Press Inc | 9780195101072 | English | New York, United States The Adapted Mind : Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture PDF Book At least in this volume, no outrageous claims are made, just modest suggestions that some correlations seem to exist and might support a particular evolutionary hypothesis, that more research is needed. Americans have a more individualistic culture. Phillips Academy. The Standard Social Science Model requires an impossible psychology. Moreover, the Standard Model has become so well-internalized and has so strongly shaped how we now experience and interpret social science phenomena that it will be difficult to free ourselves ofthe preconceptions that the Standard Model imposes until its Procrustean operations on psychology and anthropology are examined. By thinking about all three kinds of explanation at once we build vertically integrated theory, theory that passes the compatibility test of this book's Introduction. Equally, ifthese processes were all that were operating, complex order would never appear and would quickly degrade even ifit did. Fernald For example, the atomic theory allowed chemists to see thermodynamics in a new way: The atomic theory was connected to Newtonian mechanics through the kinetic theory of heat, and thermodynamics was recast as statistical mechanics. This article needs additional citations for verification. Biological evolution of culturally patterned behavior. Individuals who have the new design will tend to have more offspring than those who lack it, those of their offspring who inherit the new design will have more offspring, and so on, until, after enough generations, every member ofthe species will have the new design feature. Most significant was the failure to distinguish adaptationist evolutionary biology from behavior genetics. This morality play, seemingly bound forever to the wheel of intellectual life, has been through innumerable incarnations, playing itselfout in different arenas in different times rationalism versus empiricism, heredity versus environment, instinct versus learning, nature versus nurture, human universals versus cultural relativism, human nature versus human culture, innate behavior versus acquired behavior, Chomsky versus Piaget, biological determinism versus social determinism, essentialism versus social construction, modularity versus domain-generality, and so on. However, they argue, whether a mechanism is closed or open, as well as the range of forms it can assume if it is open, is something that is encoded in genetic instructions that have been fine-tuned through millions of years of evolution. To many scholarly communities, conceptual unification became an enemy, and the relevance ofother fields a menace to their freedom to interpret human reality in any way they chose. Neither "biology," "evolution," "society," or "the environment" directly impose behavioral outcomes, without an immensely long and intricate intervening chain ofcausation involving interactions with an entire configuration of other causal elements. In fact, this development is only an acceleration of the process of conceptual unification that has been building in science since the Renaissance. A social science theory that is incompatible with known psychology is as dubious as a neurophysiological theory that requires an impossible biochemistry. Kirby Robert Kurzban Michael T. And yet there were other areas that made me sit up as a hobby photographer with an interest in landscapes, evolved aesthetic reponses to landscape particularly caught my eye -- shame it was so late in the book! Natural Language and Natural Selection. Cosmides and Tooby seem to have set up this scarecrow to make their own ideas appear more "revolutionary. In any case, even advocates of such avenues ofretreat do not appear to be fully serious about them because few are actually willing to accept what is necessarily entailed by such a stance: Those who jettison the epistemological standards ofscience are no longer in a position to use their intellectual product to make any claims about what is true of the world or to dispute the others' claims about what is true. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Liam Fisher rated it it was ok May 11, Finally, the editors would like to express their heartfelt gratitude to the contributors to the volume, who labored far above and beyond the call of duty. Although researchers have long been aware that the species-typical architecture of the human mind is the product of our evolutionary history, it has only been in the last three decades that advances in such fields as evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and paleoanthropology have made the fact of our evolution illuminating. I c. Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors--problems such as mate selection, language acquisition, cooperation, and sexual infidelity. Thus, to support the SSSM was to oppose racism and sexism and to challenge the SSSM was, intentionally or not, to lend support to racism, sexism, and, more generally an SSSM way ofdefining the problem , "biological determinism. Consequently, the traditional view of the mind as a general-purpose computer, tabula rasa, or passive recipient of culture is being replaced by the view that the mind resembles an intricate network of functionally specialized computers, each of which imposes contentful structure on human mental organization and culture. Refresh and try again. The existence of rapid historical change and the multitude of spontaneous human "cross-fostering experiments" effectively disposes of the racialist notion that human intergroup. Since these similarities are considered to be "cultural," they are, either implicitly or explicitly, considered to be the consequence of informational substance inherited jointly from the preceding generation by all who display the similarity. However different these characterizations may appear to be in some respects, those who espouse them are united in affirming that this substance-whatever its character-is in Durkheim's phrase "external to the individual. The Adapted Mind : Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture Writer The individual is the more or less passive recipient of her culture and is the product of that culture. Content protection. Social scientists who paid any attention to neuroscience, ethology, and cognitive psychology were increasingly, if uneasily, aware of the evidence that the nervous system was complex and not well characterized by the image ofthe "blank slate. Indeed, they have usually avoided addressing how functional action-such as mate choice, food choice, or effort calculation-takes place at all. The Standard Social Science Model's Treatment of Culture This logic has critically shaped how nearly every issue has been approached and debated in the social sciences. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Return to Book Page. Tooby and Cosmides devote the larger part of their essay to establishing that the human mind cannot consist exclusively or even primarily, of domain-general mechanisms. Allow Cookies Read More. These richly content-sensitive evolved mechanisms tend to impose certain types of content and conceptual organization on human mental life and, hence, strongly shape the nature ofhuman social life and what is culturally transmitted across generations. The evolutionary and psychological foundations of the social sciences. The Standard Social Science Model requires an impossible psychology. These differences in psychological design cause differences in behavior: Upon perceiving a rattlesnake, a coyote might run from it, but another rattlesnake might try to mate with it. The volume closes with an essay by Jerome Barkow. A physical description cannot tell one what the computer was designed to do; an information-processing description cannot tell one the physical processes by virtue of which the programs are run. In what is surely a graver defect, we have had to omit discussion of the many important dissident subcommunities in sociology, anthropology, economics, and other disciplines, which have sloughed offor never adopted the Standard Social Science Model. Rating details. In defining culture as the central concept ofanthropology, the M precluded the development of the range of alternative anthropologies that would have resulted if, say, human nature, economic and subsistence activity, ecological adaptation, human universals, the organization ofincentives inside groups, institutional propagation, species-typical psychology, or a host of other reasonable possibilities had been selected instead. These defects have been responsible for the chronic difficulties encountered by the social sciences. Introduction to concepts and theories in physical science 2nd ed. Get A Copy. Since these similarities are considered to be "cultural," they are, either implicitly or explicitly, considered to be the consequence of informational substance inherited jointly from the preceding generation by all who display the similarity. Psychologists certainly were not forced by the character oftheir data into these types ofconclusions e. First, with the advent of the cognitive revolution, human nature can finally be defined precisely as the set of universal, species-typical information-processing programs