The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2016). The theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology: Foundations (pp. 3–87). John Wiley & Sons, Inc..
Motivation
The goals of evolutionary psychologists are
The mapping of our universal human nature (high-resolution models of the evolved adaptations).
Reconstruct social sciences towards an accurate, natural science-based model of human nature, moving away from the
The Standard Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) contains many incorrect assumptions, such as that the human learning system is general-purpose and content-independent
Many evolutionary psychology models contradict this assumption
Evolutionary psychology views culture as a manufactured product of our evolved neurocomputational programs situated in individuals living in groups
People have innate ideas
The Intellectual Origins of Evolutionary Psychology
Three building blocks of evolutionary psychology
Modern adaptationist revolution in theoretical evolutionary biology: The existence of antientropic functional organization involves the history of selection through adaptation
The rise of information theory and computational science: Logical operations can now be carried out mechanically and physically
The emergence of serious attempts to reconstruct the ancestral conditions, way of life, and research in animal behaviors.
Evolutionary psychology's view on the environment
People develop internal systems that generate responses to informational input, i.e., it is a system processing function.
Evolutionary Psychology
Workflow:
Carefully specifying an adaptive information processing problem
Perform task analysis on the problem
Generate hypotheses about the structure of the programs
Principles of Organic Design
Natural Selection is an Engineer that Designs Organic Machines
Genes have two primary ways of propagating: increase the probability of offspring, increase the reproduction of others who are more likely to carry the same gene (family)
Adaptive behavior increases the frequency of the alleles underlying the behavior.
Enduring conditions that create reproductive opportunities or obstacles constitute adaptive problems.
The environment of adaptive problems + adaptive problems = Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA)
Psychology is Reverse Engineering
Psychologists dissect the brain's computational architecture into functionally isolable information processing units and determine how those units operate.
Many properties of organisms are not adaptations: adaptations vs. byproduct vs. noise.
Design Evidence
Research must produce evidence of a fit between the design and the proposed function.
Theories of Good Design are a Heuristic for Discovery
There is a systematic method for using theories of adaptive function and principles of good design to discover new programs
Nature and Nurture from an Adaptationist Perspective
Innate is not the opposite of learned
Any learned behavior is the joint product of innate equipment interacting with environmental input.
A function is generally specialized for a domain and can be activated after birth.
Behavior is caused by evolved mechanisms operating on information from the environment, so there is no need to distinguish between genetically determined vs. environment-determined.
Species' developmentally relevant environment is just as much the creation of the evolutionary process as the genes are
Adaptations can be conceptualized as operating in two different modes: functional (performing its evolved function) and organizational mode (constructing the adaptation and furnishing it with information)
Selection interacting with sexual recombination tends to impose at the genetic level near uniformity in the latent or potential functional design.
Behavior geneticists explore the extent to which differences in their genes account for differences among individuals. Evolutionary psychologists explore the design of the universal evolved psychological and neural architecture.
Genetic variability tends to be predominantly nonadaptive or maladaptive.
Evolutionary vs. traditional psychology
Evolutionary psychologists expect a mind paced with domain-specific, content-rich programs specialized for solving ancestral problems.
Each domain-specialized mechanism will be part of a vertically integrated system.
Computational Adaptationist Approaches to Motivation and Emotion
A content-free general-purpose system is a bad design
A content-free general-purpose system is not good at solving anything well
Too many combinations of domains mean without a domain-specialized learning mechanism, we wouldn't be learning at all
A domain-specific learning system can infer cues and information based on the domain
From domain to domain, adaptive behaviors are widely different. So, one procedure can not solve all.
The motivational system involves a series of evolved content-specific conceptual elements.
Emotions as a Solution to the Short-term Problem of Mechanism Coordination
Question
What is motivational domain vs. motivation. What is the relationship between motivation and value in terms of general vs. domain specific.
Why does cognitive science intrinsically involves motivation, can it just be about content-specific conceptual element that are general purpose?
Why does emotions have to be the orchestration process, not attention / sailency, and why can it not be reducible to any one category of effects?
How are emotion (affective? ), cognition (cognitive), and behavioral system fit together?
Covariate structure of the world arises personality?
In order to study / define personality, we have to look at the ancestral environment, what about things such as childhood trama?
Domain specific vs. statistical independent, can personality be domain specific?
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