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Evolution in Mind: An Introduction to Evolutionary Psychology
We aren't very strong, nor very fast, we have insufficient body hair to keep us warm and dry, and we will never eat bananas with our feet. But like our chimpanzee cousins, we, the naked apes, have evolved to flourish in our surroundings--a cultural environment largely of our own creation. For the human race, the critical evolution of the past million years has been the evolution of our minds. Yet psychology, the very science that purports to understand us, has long been deeply ambivalent about Darwin's unsettling discoveries. In an accessible, level-headed overview, Henry Plotkin describes the new rapprochement called 'evolutionary psychology.' He examines how such a powerful theory as Darwinism could have been disregarded by much academic psychology and shows why the relationship between the two must be readdressed. The theory and data of evolutionary biology and animal behavior can illuminate many of our most basic mental processes and language learning, perception, social understanding, and most controversially, culture and the sharing of knowledge and beliefs. Ranging from the nature-nurture question, which has bedeviled philosophers and scientists for thousands of years, to recent debates about the mind's structure, Evolution in Mind vividly demonstrates how an evolutionary perspective helps us understand what we are, and how we got that way.
- GenresEvolution
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
47 people want to read
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March 24, 2016
(A long and academic review replete with references that I originally published in 2000 in the journal Ethology)
Evolutionary Psychology or evolution in psychology?
Just over 20 years ago E.O. Wilson made the astute observation that, “By today’s standards a broad scientist can be defined as one who is a student of three subjects: his discipline..., the lower antidiscipline..., and the subject to which his speciality stands as the antidiscipline” (Wilson 1978) By antidiscipline Wilson meant the field which contains the units of the most immediate lower level of organization: for example, physics for chemistry, biochemistry for genetics, and so on. As scientific disciplines matured, said Wilson, their eventual abutment with their antidisciplines would generate competition, aversions, confusions and treaties – in short all the signs that a creative synthesis was in the works.
Historically, psychology as a science has excelled at the competition, aversions and confusions, but has sadly lacked many examples of overt synthesis, whether within or outside the discipline. I say “overt synthesis” because despite the vitriol separating, for example, cognitivists and behaviorists within psychology, behaviorist methodology is used by many “cognitive” psychologists, and many “behaviorists” readily employ hidden constructs in their theorizing. Similarly, the covert assimilation of external disciplines into psychology has also long been evident. The very terms “reinforcer” and “unconditional stimulus” assume a species-specific constraint. A pigeon will spontaneously begin to peck a lit key if its illumination is repeatedly followed by the delivery of grain. A rat will not. A rat will quickly learn to avoid a food whose intake is followed by an injection of lithium chloride (a substance which produces nausea), while it will not avoid a food which is followed by electric shock. In each case the behavior of the animal can be said to be species-specific and yet also be described by using a common, functional language.
However, one must admit that the assimilation between psychology and other sciences has not been of the kind Wilson envisioned when he spoke of antidisciplines. The most probable reason for this state of affairs is simply that psychology and its conceptual neighbors, neuroscience, ethology / behavioral ecology, and anthropology, until quite recently, have not been mature enough for a meaningful synthesis to occur. Be that as it may, these disciplines have begun to more publicly respond to one another. The results in psychology have been a splintering of the discipline into subfields such as biopsychology and socialpsychology. Evolutionary psychology is the most recent addition to the psychological bouillabaisse, and Henry Plotkin’s new book Evolution in Mind is both a description of and a argument for this field.
Evolution in Mind, is first and foremost a piece of advocacy. Evolutionary theory, Plotkin writes, “has until relatively recently been lodged somewhere at the back of the collective mind of psychology rather than being its chief driving idea” (p. 261). This is a situation which Plotkin hopes to at least partially remedy with his book. Note that Plotkin is not saying that an evolutionary perspective should be one of several causal views of behavior à la Niko Tinbergen. He is stating that ontological, proximate and functional causality all rest upon evolutionary causality. In short, Plotkin is claiming that evolutionary biology is an appropriate antidiscipline for psychology. Plotkin structures his argument along three lines. First he differentiates between “now-and-forever” sciences and historical sciences. Psychology we are shown rests firmly in the latter category. Secondly, he defends a view that the animal mind is essentially modular. Third, in the long tradition of psychological polemical writing, he creates a bogeyman, behaviorism, which he rails against and uses to represent the antithesis of “good,” i.e. evolutionary-centered psychology. Each of these arguments and rhetorical devices will be considered in turn.
Plotkin begins his book by emphasizing a distinction eloquently made in the writings of Richard Dawkins and Steven J. Gould. “Now-and-forever” sciences, such a physics, assume that the causal structure of their domain is relatively constant. Gravity operates now as it did when Newton derived his calculus. However, in evolutionary biology “another part of the explanation..., historical antecedence, will always differ because what you are explaining now, a beak shape for instance, is the way it is because of selection forces, mutations,..., acting sometime in the past on a beak of a different shape” (p. 14). Species, in short, are not billiard balls. Provide an equal and opposite force to a billiard ball and the ball will stop. Provide an equal and opposite selection pressure to a species, and it will “move” in a new direction. After emphasizing this distinction Plotkin then provides an “ontogeny of psychology” which culminates in a discussion of the nature-nurture issue. He shows how psychology began its existence as a now-and-forever science, birthed as it was from physiology and psycho-physics, and fitfully transformed itself into an historical science. The synthesis between evolutionary theory and psychology becomes possible once one realizes that the ontogeny of behavior (nurture) is limited by and a product of the evolution of behavior (nature). Or as Plotkin more emphatically states, “Unraveling the nature-nurture issue is what psychology, properly done, is all about...[T]he nature--nurture issue is the unavoidable way by which evolution gets into every psychological nook and cranny” (pp. 70-71).
Despite his goals, with which many will find themselves in accordance, Plotkin’s analysis of the history of psychology is misleading. For instance, he admits that psychological theorizing of the 1930's and 1940's acknowledged genetically determined constraints on learning, but he then castigates these theories for being overly functional, that is paying only lip-service to neurological and genetic variables. He also claims that “the rise of behaviourism destroyed the place of evolutionary thinking in psychology for almost half a century” (pp. 27-28), and he credits the rise of cognitivism in psychology (i.e. the increasing acceptance of hypothetical variables) during the 1960s for permitting a co-joining of evolutionary and psychological perspectives. Such statements betray a lack of historical sophistication. Yes, neuroscience and evolutionary perspectives contribute to an understanding of behavior, but what exactly could they contribute to psychology in the 1930's and 1940's? Indeed, one might argue that psychology’s grand learning theories from this period were premature in the synthesis which they did attempt. Secondly, the rise of cognitivism within psychology might have correlated with an increase in psychological studies which emphasized constraints on learning. But one must remember that ethology and evolutionary theory during this period were also undergoing exciting conceptual changes (e.g. the new synthesis, an emphasis on cost-benefit analyses, etc.) which made them more approachable by psychologists of all types. Finally, behaviorists, by broadening psychology to include non-human animals, were indeed Darwinian in that they assumed a continuity between species. This assumption might have been simplistic, but it was there none the less, and marked a transition from psychology as a purely human-centered enterprise.
However, we can forgive Plotkin his historical bias for, as stated earlier, Evolution in Mind is primarily a piece of advocacy. The Evolutionary Psychology it wishes to define does not conciliate its two composite disciplines. Rather evolutionary psychology is to be viewed as a certain kind of evolution grafted on to a certain kind of psychology. How else does one explain in an otherwise excellent chapter describing sociobiology, selfish-gene theory and behavioral ecology the following?
Such a statement ignores research concerning constraints on learning (e.g., Breland & Breland, 1961; Garcia, J., Evin, F.R., & Koelling, R.A. 1966), the use of optimality analyses to model behavior (e.g., Kacelnik 1984; Shimp 1966; Staddon 1979) and attempts, albeit crude, to compare learning theory with natural selection (e.g., Skinner 1966). Also, psychologists from this period were not the only ones looking to other disciplines for inspiration. For example, we now know that predator learning in the blackbird seems to be a case of classical conditioning (Curio & Ernst, 1988) and that song variants in the male blackbird are partially shaped by the female via operant conditioning (West & King, 1988). Apparently, such work does not fall under Plotkin’s category of evolutionary psychology. By evolution, he means sociobiology, selfish-gene theory and game theory. By psychology Plotkin means an approach to understanding behavior which begins with the premise that the animal mind is fundamentally modular, and he spends the second half of his book defending this approach.
The easiest way to understand what Plotkin means by modularity is by analogy. In evolutionary biology one might use the term “a gene for” followed by some physical attribute, such as neck length or body color. The modularity of mind conceptualization offered by Plotkin is merely the “gene for” terminology adapted to psychology. In neither case are we referring to either actual DNA or neurons. Rather, the terms simply permit one to assume an adaptationist stance toward the feature in question. Thus, when Plotkin speaks of modules for language, face recognition, causal learning, and for discerning the mental state in others he is essentially saying that these are computational abilities which have experienced targeted selection pressures during the evolution of Homo sapiens.
The three chapters in Evolution in Mind which expound the modularity of mind approach cover a tremendous amount of material. We encounter Skinner’s, Piaget’s and Chomsky’s approaches to language acquisition, descriptions of Hume’s philosophy, an extended definition of adaptations, research investigating the understanding of causality by infants, research investigating the attribution of mental states by children, and an argument that culture, itself, is an adapted trait. Plotkin should be commended for making this material both comprehensible and interesting. This is not to say, though, that we should blithely accept statements such as, ““There is increasing...evidence that within the first year or two after birth, the mind of the infant differentiates into a number of primary or first-order cognitive modules which are evolved structures of mind present in all humans irrespective of culture” (p. 186). Again, to highlight the weaknesses in Plotkin’s insistence on “mental modularity,” let us return to our “gene for” analogy.
Saying that there is a gene for some attribute of an organism’s machinery is quite different than saying that there is a gene for specific behavior patterns. How meaningful, after all, is it to say that there is a “gene for alcoholism,” or a “gene for cooperation”? Yes, at a certain level of analysis such a conceptualization is useful (e.g., a game theoretical approach), but we should remain cognizant that claiming a “gene for cooperation,” say, is merely a conceptual device. Cooperation, after all, might depend upon several processes – perhaps the ability of individuals to reliably recognize one another for a certain period of time – and these abilities might be multiply-determined by several computational processes. That is, if one process fails, others might “pick up the slack.” Therefore, a “gene for cooperation” can not be held to be a unitary and discrete entity or system of entities.
Human language ability, which Plotkin uses as his exemplar in arguing for the modularity of mind, also nicely highlights this approach’s weaknesses. Few would argue that the human brain is specialized for language, and few would argue against a certain degree of anatomical fixedness for this ability. However, it does not follow that there is a module for language. Language is itself a composite of several mechanisms: those underlying sequencing, acoustic memory, memory for movement, and stimulus equivalence, to name but a few, and none of these mechanisms can be said to be exclusively used by language.
Finally, all works of advocacy, such as Evolution in Mind, require a bogeyman – a group or a set of ideas that define the wrong way of doing things, thus delineating more clearly the advocated right way of doing things. For example, Group selection has served as a whipping boy for many a proponent of a gene-centric approach to evolution. In Evolution in Mind, the bogeyman is “behaviorism.” We are told 1) “It is fair to say that [Skinner’s] greatest achievement as an outspoken representative of extreme behaviourism was to demonstrate quite conclusively the intellectually bankrupt nature of this school of thought” (p. 144), 2) that “[behaviourists] pursued their work entirely within the framework of now-and-again causation” (pp. 29-30), 3) that behaviourists concerned themselves with “surface phenomena rather than deep causes (p. 141), and 4) that “the behaviourist...view is, as always, the least interesting psychologically” (p 212). Of course, no “ism” has a monopoly on scientific truth, and neither psychology nor evolutionary theory will benefit from a philosophical balkanization within their respective disciplines. In Evolution in Mind Plotkin would be better off admitting that for most of the 20th century neither evolutionary biology nor psychology had a clear enough understanding of the essential behavioral variables for anything but the most tentative of conversations. Happily, though, the conversation has become more substantive, and will only deepen in the 21st century.
References
Breland, K., & Breland, M. (1961). The misbehavior of organisms. American Psychologist, 16, 681-684.
Curio, E. (1988). Cultural transmission of enemy recognition by birds, In T.R. Zentall & B.G. Galef, Jr. (Eds.), Social learning: Psychological and biological perspectives (pp. 75 - 98). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Garcia, J., Evin, F.R., & Koelling, R.A. (1966). Learning with prolonged delay of reinforcement. Psychonomic Science, 5, 121 - 122.
Kacelnik, A. (1984). Central place foraging in starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). I. Patch residence time. Journal of Animal Ecology, 53, 283 - 299.
Shimp, C.P. (1966). Probabilistic reinforced choice behavior in pigeons. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 9, 443 - 455.
Skinner, B.F. (1966). The phylogeny and ontogeny of behavior, Science, 153, 1205-1213.
Staddon, J.E.R. (1979). Operant behavior as adaptation to constraint. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 108, 48 - 67.
West, M.J., & King, A.P. (1988). Female visual display affect the development of male song in the cowbird. Nature, 334, 244 - 246.
Wilson, E.O. (1978). On Human Nature. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, p. 8.
Evolutionary Psychology or evolution in psychology?
Just over 20 years ago E.O. Wilson made the astute observation that, “By today’s standards a broad scientist can be defined as one who is a student of three subjects: his discipline..., the lower antidiscipline..., and the subject to which his speciality stands as the antidiscipline” (Wilson 1978) By antidiscipline Wilson meant the field which contains the units of the most immediate lower level of organization: for example, physics for chemistry, biochemistry for genetics, and so on. As scientific disciplines matured, said Wilson, their eventual abutment with their antidisciplines would generate competition, aversions, confusions and treaties – in short all the signs that a creative synthesis was in the works.
Historically, psychology as a science has excelled at the competition, aversions and confusions, but has sadly lacked many examples of overt synthesis, whether within or outside the discipline. I say “overt synthesis” because despite the vitriol separating, for example, cognitivists and behaviorists within psychology, behaviorist methodology is used by many “cognitive” psychologists, and many “behaviorists” readily employ hidden constructs in their theorizing. Similarly, the covert assimilation of external disciplines into psychology has also long been evident. The very terms “reinforcer” and “unconditional stimulus” assume a species-specific constraint. A pigeon will spontaneously begin to peck a lit key if its illumination is repeatedly followed by the delivery of grain. A rat will not. A rat will quickly learn to avoid a food whose intake is followed by an injection of lithium chloride (a substance which produces nausea), while it will not avoid a food which is followed by electric shock. In each case the behavior of the animal can be said to be species-specific and yet also be described by using a common, functional language.
However, one must admit that the assimilation between psychology and other sciences has not been of the kind Wilson envisioned when he spoke of antidisciplines. The most probable reason for this state of affairs is simply that psychology and its conceptual neighbors, neuroscience, ethology / behavioral ecology, and anthropology, until quite recently, have not been mature enough for a meaningful synthesis to occur. Be that as it may, these disciplines have begun to more publicly respond to one another. The results in psychology have been a splintering of the discipline into subfields such as biopsychology and socialpsychology. Evolutionary psychology is the most recent addition to the psychological bouillabaisse, and Henry Plotkin’s new book Evolution in Mind is both a description of and a argument for this field.
Evolution in Mind, is first and foremost a piece of advocacy. Evolutionary theory, Plotkin writes, “has until relatively recently been lodged somewhere at the back of the collective mind of psychology rather than being its chief driving idea” (p. 261). This is a situation which Plotkin hopes to at least partially remedy with his book. Note that Plotkin is not saying that an evolutionary perspective should be one of several causal views of behavior à la Niko Tinbergen. He is stating that ontological, proximate and functional causality all rest upon evolutionary causality. In short, Plotkin is claiming that evolutionary biology is an appropriate antidiscipline for psychology. Plotkin structures his argument along three lines. First he differentiates between “now-and-forever” sciences and historical sciences. Psychology we are shown rests firmly in the latter category. Secondly, he defends a view that the animal mind is essentially modular. Third, in the long tradition of psychological polemical writing, he creates a bogeyman, behaviorism, which he rails against and uses to represent the antithesis of “good,” i.e. evolutionary-centered psychology. Each of these arguments and rhetorical devices will be considered in turn.
Plotkin begins his book by emphasizing a distinction eloquently made in the writings of Richard Dawkins and Steven J. Gould. “Now-and-forever” sciences, such a physics, assume that the causal structure of their domain is relatively constant. Gravity operates now as it did when Newton derived his calculus. However, in evolutionary biology “another part of the explanation..., historical antecedence, will always differ because what you are explaining now, a beak shape for instance, is the way it is because of selection forces, mutations,..., acting sometime in the past on a beak of a different shape” (p. 14). Species, in short, are not billiard balls. Provide an equal and opposite force to a billiard ball and the ball will stop. Provide an equal and opposite selection pressure to a species, and it will “move” in a new direction. After emphasizing this distinction Plotkin then provides an “ontogeny of psychology” which culminates in a discussion of the nature-nurture issue. He shows how psychology began its existence as a now-and-forever science, birthed as it was from physiology and psycho-physics, and fitfully transformed itself into an historical science. The synthesis between evolutionary theory and psychology becomes possible once one realizes that the ontogeny of behavior (nurture) is limited by and a product of the evolution of behavior (nature). Or as Plotkin more emphatically states, “Unraveling the nature-nurture issue is what psychology, properly done, is all about...[T]he nature--nurture issue is the unavoidable way by which evolution gets into every psychological nook and cranny” (pp. 70-71).
Despite his goals, with which many will find themselves in accordance, Plotkin’s analysis of the history of psychology is misleading. For instance, he admits that psychological theorizing of the 1930's and 1940's acknowledged genetically determined constraints on learning, but he then castigates these theories for being overly functional, that is paying only lip-service to neurological and genetic variables. He also claims that “the rise of behaviourism destroyed the place of evolutionary thinking in psychology for almost half a century” (pp. 27-28), and he credits the rise of cognitivism in psychology (i.e. the increasing acceptance of hypothetical variables) during the 1960s for permitting a co-joining of evolutionary and psychological perspectives. Such statements betray a lack of historical sophistication. Yes, neuroscience and evolutionary perspectives contribute to an understanding of behavior, but what exactly could they contribute to psychology in the 1930's and 1940's? Indeed, one might argue that psychology’s grand learning theories from this period were premature in the synthesis which they did attempt. Secondly, the rise of cognitivism within psychology might have correlated with an increase in psychological studies which emphasized constraints on learning. But one must remember that ethology and evolutionary theory during this period were also undergoing exciting conceptual changes (e.g. the new synthesis, an emphasis on cost-benefit analyses, etc.) which made them more approachable by psychologists of all types. Finally, behaviorists, by broadening psychology to include non-human animals, were indeed Darwinian in that they assumed a continuity between species. This assumption might have been simplistic, but it was there none the less, and marked a transition from psychology as a purely human-centered enterprise.
However, we can forgive Plotkin his historical bias for, as stated earlier, Evolution in Mind is primarily a piece of advocacy. The Evolutionary Psychology it wishes to define does not conciliate its two composite disciplines. Rather evolutionary psychology is to be viewed as a certain kind of evolution grafted on to a certain kind of psychology. How else does one explain in an otherwise excellent chapter describing sociobiology, selfish-gene theory and behavioral ecology the following?
Nothing bears greater testimony to the extent to which psychology remains aloof from evolutionary thinking than that these momentous events in what, in effect, is our intellectual and scientific neighbor’s house, passed almost unremarked in psychology. Psychology’s most important and influential scholarly journals over the period 1975 to 1990,...., carried almost no reference to this change. (p. 73)
Such a statement ignores research concerning constraints on learning (e.g., Breland & Breland, 1961; Garcia, J., Evin, F.R., & Koelling, R.A. 1966), the use of optimality analyses to model behavior (e.g., Kacelnik 1984; Shimp 1966; Staddon 1979) and attempts, albeit crude, to compare learning theory with natural selection (e.g., Skinner 1966). Also, psychologists from this period were not the only ones looking to other disciplines for inspiration. For example, we now know that predator learning in the blackbird seems to be a case of classical conditioning (Curio & Ernst, 1988) and that song variants in the male blackbird are partially shaped by the female via operant conditioning (West & King, 1988). Apparently, such work does not fall under Plotkin’s category of evolutionary psychology. By evolution, he means sociobiology, selfish-gene theory and game theory. By psychology Plotkin means an approach to understanding behavior which begins with the premise that the animal mind is fundamentally modular, and he spends the second half of his book defending this approach.
The easiest way to understand what Plotkin means by modularity is by analogy. In evolutionary biology one might use the term “a gene for” followed by some physical attribute, such as neck length or body color. The modularity of mind conceptualization offered by Plotkin is merely the “gene for” terminology adapted to psychology. In neither case are we referring to either actual DNA or neurons. Rather, the terms simply permit one to assume an adaptationist stance toward the feature in question. Thus, when Plotkin speaks of modules for language, face recognition, causal learning, and for discerning the mental state in others he is essentially saying that these are computational abilities which have experienced targeted selection pressures during the evolution of Homo sapiens.
The three chapters in Evolution in Mind which expound the modularity of mind approach cover a tremendous amount of material. We encounter Skinner’s, Piaget’s and Chomsky’s approaches to language acquisition, descriptions of Hume’s philosophy, an extended definition of adaptations, research investigating the understanding of causality by infants, research investigating the attribution of mental states by children, and an argument that culture, itself, is an adapted trait. Plotkin should be commended for making this material both comprehensible and interesting. This is not to say, though, that we should blithely accept statements such as, ““There is increasing...evidence that within the first year or two after birth, the mind of the infant differentiates into a number of primary or first-order cognitive modules which are evolved structures of mind present in all humans irrespective of culture” (p. 186). Again, to highlight the weaknesses in Plotkin’s insistence on “mental modularity,” let us return to our “gene for” analogy.
Saying that there is a gene for some attribute of an organism’s machinery is quite different than saying that there is a gene for specific behavior patterns. How meaningful, after all, is it to say that there is a “gene for alcoholism,” or a “gene for cooperation”? Yes, at a certain level of analysis such a conceptualization is useful (e.g., a game theoretical approach), but we should remain cognizant that claiming a “gene for cooperation,” say, is merely a conceptual device. Cooperation, after all, might depend upon several processes – perhaps the ability of individuals to reliably recognize one another for a certain period of time – and these abilities might be multiply-determined by several computational processes. That is, if one process fails, others might “pick up the slack.” Therefore, a “gene for cooperation” can not be held to be a unitary and discrete entity or system of entities.
Human language ability, which Plotkin uses as his exemplar in arguing for the modularity of mind, also nicely highlights this approach’s weaknesses. Few would argue that the human brain is specialized for language, and few would argue against a certain degree of anatomical fixedness for this ability. However, it does not follow that there is a module for language. Language is itself a composite of several mechanisms: those underlying sequencing, acoustic memory, memory for movement, and stimulus equivalence, to name but a few, and none of these mechanisms can be said to be exclusively used by language.
Finally, all works of advocacy, such as Evolution in Mind, require a bogeyman – a group or a set of ideas that define the wrong way of doing things, thus delineating more clearly the advocated right way of doing things. For example, Group selection has served as a whipping boy for many a proponent of a gene-centric approach to evolution. In Evolution in Mind, the bogeyman is “behaviorism.” We are told 1) “It is fair to say that [Skinner’s] greatest achievement as an outspoken representative of extreme behaviourism was to demonstrate quite conclusively the intellectually bankrupt nature of this school of thought” (p. 144), 2) that “[behaviourists] pursued their work entirely within the framework of now-and-again causation” (pp. 29-30), 3) that behaviourists concerned themselves with “surface phenomena rather than deep causes (p. 141), and 4) that “the behaviourist...view is, as always, the least interesting psychologically” (p 212). Of course, no “ism” has a monopoly on scientific truth, and neither psychology nor evolutionary theory will benefit from a philosophical balkanization within their respective disciplines. In Evolution in Mind Plotkin would be better off admitting that for most of the 20th century neither evolutionary biology nor psychology had a clear enough understanding of the essential behavioral variables for anything but the most tentative of conversations. Happily, though, the conversation has become more substantive, and will only deepen in the 21st century.
References
Breland, K., & Breland, M. (1961). The misbehavior of organisms. American Psychologist, 16, 681-684.
Curio, E. (1988). Cultural transmission of enemy recognition by birds, In T.R. Zentall & B.G. Galef, Jr. (Eds.), Social learning: Psychological and biological perspectives (pp. 75 - 98). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.
Garcia, J., Evin, F.R., & Koelling, R.A. (1966). Learning with prolonged delay of reinforcement. Psychonomic Science, 5, 121 - 122.
Kacelnik, A. (1984). Central place foraging in starlings (Sturnus vulgaris). I. Patch residence time. Journal of Animal Ecology, 53, 283 - 299.
Shimp, C.P. (1966). Probabilistic reinforced choice behavior in pigeons. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 9, 443 - 455.
Skinner, B.F. (1966). The phylogeny and ontogeny of behavior, Science, 153, 1205-1213.
Staddon, J.E.R. (1979). Operant behavior as adaptation to constraint. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 108, 48 - 67.
West, M.J., & King, A.P. (1988). Female visual display affect the development of male song in the cowbird. Nature, 334, 244 - 246.
Wilson, E.O. (1978). On Human Nature. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, p. 8.
September 12, 2024
AN ATTEMPT TO MAKE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY A "TEXTBOOK" EXAMPLE
Author Henry Plotkin wrote in the Preface to this 1997 book, "Selfish Gene theory, behavioural ecology and Game Theory... has not penetrated through to the work of the makers of opinion in academic psychology; it is hardly surprising, then, that it has had so little impact on the writers of textbooks... [This] deprives people of a feel for what should be a properly rounded understanding of the human mind, which is as much a product of evolution as are our hands or our eyes... This book is an attempt to remedy this situation in some small way." (Pg. viii)
He states, "There is... no élan vital, no life force beyond physics and chemistry. The same argument is run in psychology... the mind is not some non-physical essence that follows the person about. The mind is the workings of the brain, and the connectivity of billions of individual brain cells is of a complexity probably greater than any other known thing, bar none. None the less, no matter how complex that connectivity, the mind and the brain are just chemistry and physics. There are simply no dualist psychologists in existence---nobody thinks that what psychologists study is some kind of immaterial spirit." (Pg. 89)
He says, "Even if some aspects of language can be explained by other, broad processes and mechanisms like attention, memory and imitation, in many respects there is nothing else quite like it. This difference between language and other cognitive functions is the place where I am driving a conceptual wedge. My intention is to show that language cannot be explained by general-purpose intelligence, because once that is demonstrated that is all one needs... to make the general case that the knowing mind does not comprise only general purpose, tabula rasa, intelligence that has no structure apart from that written on to it by experience. In fact... the weight of evidence is that the knowing mind has a much finer-grained structure than just language and the rest---the rest itself has structure, being made up of different modules of function." (Pg. 160)
He argues, "To deny that our most unique, complex and characteristic trait is a product of evolution and maintain the view that none of its component processes must have evolved is, in essence, to deny the force of evolution in human history. In other words, it is to adopt an anti-evolutionary stance.
"We are coming to the end of a century marked by extraordinary achievements in science. One of these has been the growth of evolutionary theory. It would be oddly regressive to think of our most distinctive characteristics as somehow having arisen for non-evolutionary reasons. There is not much intellectual risk, it seems to me, in making the assumption that human culture is a product of human evolution, and that is the assumption that we will make here." (Pg. 225)
He suggests, "Consciousness allows us to project the workings of our own minds on to those of others in order to calculate what they are going to do. Consciousness, then, may well have evolved because of its adaptive advantages for us, both as internalized device for testing possible future events, and for us projecting on to others the capacity for such internalized testing and predicting the consequences for their behavior. Consciousness may be the glamorous high-ground of psychology, but where the bulk of research in psychology continues to be done is in the traditional areas of sensory systems, perception, attention, action, memory and learning.
"One of the features of all these mainstream areas of psychology is that we can be reasonably certain, given similarity of functional demands, that similar psychological processes are widespread across many animals; and given phylogenetic relatedness, it is likely that some part of the mechanisms underlying these processes are shared in closely related species." (Pg. 266)
This is an excellent introduction to this subject (although its arguments are not likely to persuade many critics of the discipline).
Author Henry Plotkin wrote in the Preface to this 1997 book, "Selfish Gene theory, behavioural ecology and Game Theory... has not penetrated through to the work of the makers of opinion in academic psychology; it is hardly surprising, then, that it has had so little impact on the writers of textbooks... [This] deprives people of a feel for what should be a properly rounded understanding of the human mind, which is as much a product of evolution as are our hands or our eyes... This book is an attempt to remedy this situation in some small way." (Pg. viii)
He states, "There is... no élan vital, no life force beyond physics and chemistry. The same argument is run in psychology... the mind is not some non-physical essence that follows the person about. The mind is the workings of the brain, and the connectivity of billions of individual brain cells is of a complexity probably greater than any other known thing, bar none. None the less, no matter how complex that connectivity, the mind and the brain are just chemistry and physics. There are simply no dualist psychologists in existence---nobody thinks that what psychologists study is some kind of immaterial spirit." (Pg. 89)
He says, "Even if some aspects of language can be explained by other, broad processes and mechanisms like attention, memory and imitation, in many respects there is nothing else quite like it. This difference between language and other cognitive functions is the place where I am driving a conceptual wedge. My intention is to show that language cannot be explained by general-purpose intelligence, because once that is demonstrated that is all one needs... to make the general case that the knowing mind does not comprise only general purpose, tabula rasa, intelligence that has no structure apart from that written on to it by experience. In fact... the weight of evidence is that the knowing mind has a much finer-grained structure than just language and the rest---the rest itself has structure, being made up of different modules of function." (Pg. 160)
He argues, "To deny that our most unique, complex and characteristic trait is a product of evolution and maintain the view that none of its component processes must have evolved is, in essence, to deny the force of evolution in human history. In other words, it is to adopt an anti-evolutionary stance.
"We are coming to the end of a century marked by extraordinary achievements in science. One of these has been the growth of evolutionary theory. It would be oddly regressive to think of our most distinctive characteristics as somehow having arisen for non-evolutionary reasons. There is not much intellectual risk, it seems to me, in making the assumption that human culture is a product of human evolution, and that is the assumption that we will make here." (Pg. 225)
He suggests, "Consciousness allows us to project the workings of our own minds on to those of others in order to calculate what they are going to do. Consciousness, then, may well have evolved because of its adaptive advantages for us, both as internalized device for testing possible future events, and for us projecting on to others the capacity for such internalized testing and predicting the consequences for their behavior. Consciousness may be the glamorous high-ground of psychology, but where the bulk of research in psychology continues to be done is in the traditional areas of sensory systems, perception, attention, action, memory and learning.
"One of the features of all these mainstream areas of psychology is that we can be reasonably certain, given similarity of functional demands, that similar psychological processes are widespread across many animals; and given phylogenetic relatedness, it is likely that some part of the mechanisms underlying these processes are shared in closely related species." (Pg. 266)
This is an excellent introduction to this subject (although its arguments are not likely to persuade many critics of the discipline).
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