Evolutionary psychology is an evolutionary approach to human nature. Attachment Theory is also grounded in certain evolutionary ideas, and Behavior Genetics is a field concerned with that all-important evolutionary mechanism, the gene. One author summed up the basic idea of evolutionary psychology this way:
Other Referenced Works 1. It gained wide attention in with the publication of the landmark volume The Adapted Mind by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, and since then numerous textbooks for example, Buss and popular presentations for example, Pinker; Wright have appeared.
These days, Evolutionary Psychology is a powerful research program that has generated some interesting research, but it has also sparked a heated debate about its aspirations and limitations see, for example, Rose and Rose The human mind is not an all-purpose problem solver relying on a limited number of general principles that are universally applied to all problems—a view that dominated early artificial intelligence AI and behaviorism for example, Skinner For the idea of an all-purpose problem solver see, for example, Newell and Simon ; for some of the earliest AI work related to this idea see, for example, Newell and SimonNewell et al.
Rather, the human mind is a collection of independent, task-specific cognitive mechanisms, a collection of instincts adapted for solving evolutionary significant problems. The human mind is sort of a Swiss Army knife Pinker This conception of the mind is based on three important ideas adopted from other disciplines Cosmides and Tooby54; Samuels The Computational Model of the Mind Following the development of modern logic Boole ; Frege and the formalization of the notion of computation Turingearly AI construed logical operations as mechanically executable information processing routines.
Eventually, this led to the idea that mental processes for example, reasoning and mental states for example, beliefs and desires may themselves also be analyzable in purely syntactic terms.
The "Computational Theory of Mind," developed by philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, for instance, conceives of mental states as relations between a thinker and symbolic representations of the content of the states, and of mental processes as formal operations on the syntactic features of those representations.
Evolutionary Psychology endorses the computational model of the mind as an information processing system or a formal symbol manipulator and thus treats the mind as a collection of "computational machines" Cosmides and Tooby54 or "information-processing mechanisms" Tooby and Cosmides a, 21 that receive input from the environment and produce behavior or physiological changes as output.
To this, it adds an evolutionary perspective: The brain is thus not just like a computer.
The Computational Model of the Mind: The human mind is an information processing system, physically realized in the brain, and can be described at a computational level as a device whose evolutionary function is to process information by mapping informational input onto behavioral output.
The Modularity of Mind Early attempts at simulating human intelligence revealed that artificial cognitive systems that are not already equipped with a fair amount of "innate knowledge" about a particular problem domain are unable to solve even the easiest problems see, for example, the idea of "scripts" in Schank and Abelson In the s and s, the work of scientists like Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, or David Marr further undermined the idea of the mind as a "blank slate" which acquires knowledge about the world by means of only a couple of general learning mechanisms.
Their findings suggested instead that the mind incorporates a number of cognitive subsystems that are triggered only by a certain kind of input. While Marr was working on the neuroscience of vision, Chomsky famously criticized the behaviorist idea that language acquisition is just an ordinary kind of learning that follows the stimulus-response model by proving the intractability of some learning algorithms see, for example, his review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior or Chomsky ; for a later statement of similar ideas see Chomsky According to his "Poverty of the Stimulus" argument, a child cannot learn her first language through observation because the available stimuli that is, the utterances of adult speakers neither enable her to produce grammatically correct nor prevent her from producing grammatically incorrect sentences.
Instead, Chomsky argued, we possess a "language acquisition device" which, rather than extracting all information from the world through some general mechanism, comes already equipped with a certain amount of "innate knowledge.
The model of the mind as a general learning mechanism that is indiscriminately applied to any problem domain was also disconfirmed in other areas of cognitive science.
Garcia and Koelling showed that while rats can learn some associations by means of stimulus-response mechanisms, others, albeit structurally similar, cannot be learned at all, or only much slower: Galef demonstrated that rats readily eat a new kind of food if they smell it at another rat's mouth, but not if they smell it at another part of the body.
Mineka and Cook showed that a laboratory raised monkey that initially did not show fear of snakes started to do so once he observed another monkey exhibiting fear of snakes; yet, he didn't start to show fear of flowers when observing the other doing so.
Comparable "learning biases" have been found for humans in various areas for example, Cook et al.
Evolutionary Psychologists conclude that the assumption that the human mind is composed mainly of a few content-free cognitive processes that are "thought to govern how one acquires a language and a gender identity, an aversion to incest and an appreciation for vistas, a desire for friends and a fear of spiders—indeed, nearly every thought and feeling of which humans are capable" Ermer et al.
Such mechanisms would be "limited to knowing what can be validly derived by general processes from perceptual information" Cosmides and Tooby92 and thus incapable of efficiently solving adaptive problems see section 2d.effects of aggression and kin-recognition Svetlana Krivenko1, Mikhail Burtsev2 1 Moscow Institute of Physics and Technologies, Institutsky per., 9, Weismann put forward the theory of evolutionary emergence of death known today as the theory of programmed death or .
“The Nature theory will be explained by looking at genetic makeup, hormones in particular the testosterone hormone and the effects on aggression in both males and females, and finally the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the management of exhibiting aggression particularly in .
Evolutionary Explanations of Aggression By Lauren & Sarah Aggressive behaviour by humans Influences Explanations of human aggression Evolutionary Explanations The influence of infidelity on aggressive behaviour The influence of jealousy Thank you for listening Fromm () states that human aggression.
Evolutionary psychology is an approach to the psychological sciences in which principles and results drawn from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology, and neuroscience are integrated with the rest of psychology in order to map human nature.
Description. New research about human origins is so compelling that it has turned a widely accepted theory on its head. In the s, the first quantifications of primate DNA showed that humans are genetically very close to chimpanzees, and primatologists .
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