ABSTRACT
Evolutionary psychology, in the broadest sense of the term, began with Charles Darwin's rather shocking claim in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) that human minds are similar to the minds of other species. By and large, there are two ways that contemporary analytic philosophers understand the mind. They are either type-type identity theorists or they are functionalists. One advantage of adopting an evolutionary perspective on mind is that it helps define the appropriate methodologies for learning about minded creatures. Theoretically, the application of evolutionary theory to psychological issues must start with what is known as Morgan's Canon. Robert Barton (2012) uses phylogenetic comparative analysis, a statistical modeling technique that combines data about the relatedness among species with data about their traits, to examine changes in the cerebellum and the neocortex in mammals over time. The cerebellum might be fundamentally involved in modeling, predicting, organizing, and learning complex sequences of events and behaviors.
