ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, a discipline known as evolutionary psychology (EP) has become increasingly prominent in the public imagination. Promoted by such popular and semipopular texts as Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (1997), Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Robert Wright's The Moral Animal (1994), and David Buss’ The Evolution of Desire (1994), EP is the latest model in a venerable tradition of attempts to explain human behavior and cognition as mechanisms shaped by the forces of natural selection. According to EP, our evolutionary heritage is apparent in modern humans through the organ of our “adapted mind” (in the phrase of Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992); that is, our inherited mental architecture evolved to solve particular adaptive problems of survival and reproduction faced by our ancestors. We utilize these same mental adaptations or modules in our modern existence, although while often navigating a very different physical and cultural landscape. Thus, cognition and intelligence have a history; to fully understand them, we must look back to the evolutionary past that formed them. But before we can truly examine the evolution of intelligence, we need to examine the evolutionary framework itself.
