ABSTRACT
For anyone whose worldview is reliably informed by science, the idea that the complex organs of the human body should be explained scientically as the product of evolution is, as they say, a no-brainer. And that includes the most complex organ of all, the human brain. But now what about the human mind? Is that to be explained scientically as the product of evolution? Here it is worth beginning with what the psychologists Tooby and Cosmides (1992; more on them below) call the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) of mind. According to the SSSM, the mind’s innate evolutionary endowment (the cognitive elements with which we are born) is nigh on exhausted by our senses, some basic drives such as hunger and fear, and a capacity for general-purpose learning. In other words, knowledge-wise the mind at birth is pretty much what philosophers will recognize as a Lockean blank slate. What evolution has done is give that epistemically empty vessel the means to learn postnatally from its cultural environment. At root, then, it’s culture, rather than evolution, that explains the character of the complex information-rich structure which that empty vessel becomes. Now, Tooby and Cosmides are not just psychologists; they are evolutionary psychologists, and their understanding of what an evolutionary model in psychology ought to look like is very different indeed from the SSSM-generated picture. Here we need to get clear about some labels. In the current intellectual climate, the term “evolutionary psychology” is often used to identify not simply any psychological science that takes its cues from evolutionary biology, but rather a very specic, limelight-hogging, socially explosive, scientically controversial, and philosophically intriguing stream of such work. The research in question is based on a number of conceptual and theoretical principles (to be discussed later) that are not merely antithetical to the SSSM model of mind; in addition, they are rejected by plenty of other psychological theorists who take their work to have robust evolutionary roots. The narrow use of the term
“evolutionary psychology” is no doubt irksome to the latter group of thinkers, but (with suitable apologies) I shall adopt it in what follows. Moreover, given the fact that evolutionary psychology (narrowly conceived) has attracted a good deal of philosophical attention, both supportive and critical, I shall organize this entry around an attempt to lay bare exactly what the conceptual foundations of that specic paradigm are, plus a survey of some of the chief criticisms levelled against it. Certain other evolutionary models in psychology will make brief appearances as critical responses to evolutionary psychology, which is not to say that this exhausts the interest of those alternative models.
