ABSTRACT
Nativists argue that they can, whereas empiricists claim that the human mind begins as a blank slate, which needs to be filled with experiences. Evolutionary psychology can be seen as one possible modern nativist position. Natural selection is a process of environmental filtering, where the environment 'filters out' those organisms least equipped to survive in it. Evolutionary psychology claims that human minds evolved to solve the problems of the environment they lived in approximately 2.4 million 10,000 years ago, a period known as the environment of evolutionary adaptation. It maintains that the mind largely consists in a collection of mini-computers, each of which is specialized to do a particular task. It also entails that aspects of the human mind may now be maladaptive: they worked well to solve problems faced by humans during the environment of evolutionary adaptation, but in the absence of those problems in the modern world they can generate unhelpful behaviors.
