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cognitive adaptations
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Evolutionary Psychology | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy iep.utm.edu 10 facts
referenceDavid Buller (2005) argues in 'Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature' that the empirical tests used by Evolutionary Psychologists to establish cognitive adaptations in areas like cheater detection, mating, marriage, and parenthood are flawed.
claimEvolutionary psychologists seek human universals and posit that cognitive adaptations require humans to be genetically similar.
claimOne cannot infer 'ought' from 'is' regarding cognitive adaptations because natural selection does not guarantee optimal solutions, ancestral environments differ from current environments, and 'fitness increasing' traits are not necessarily 'morally praiseworthy'.
claimEvolutionary psychologists, as described by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in 1990, do not claim that human behavior or culture is uniform globally, but rather that the genes required for cognitive adaptations and the cognitive adaptations themselves are universal, even if resulting behaviors vary.
quoteDiscovering cognitive adaptations requires formulating a computational theory that provides a catalog of the specific information processing problems.
claimEvolutionary psychology defines the human mind as a set of cognitive adaptations, or modules, designed by natural selection to solve recurrent information processing problems that arose in the evolutionary environment of human ancestors.
claimEvolutionary Psychology emphasizes that cognitive adaptations are highly flexible and contingent on environmental factors.
procedureEvolutionary Psychology utilizes a method known as 'functional analysis' to discover cognitive mechanisms, which involves starting with hypotheses about adaptive problems faced by ancestors and inferring the cognitive adaptations that evolved to solve them.
claimEvolutionary psychologists argue that complex cognitive adaptations are unlikely to vary substantially between individuals because they require hundreds or thousands of genes working in concert; if genes varied significantly, it would be improbable for all necessary genes for a complex adaptation to be present in the same individual during sexual reproduction.
referenceJohn Tooby and Leda Cosmides' paper 'On the Universality of Human Nature and the Uniqueness of the Individual: The Role of Genetics and Adaptation' (1990) presents a genetic argument that cognitive adaptations are human universals.
Evolutionary psychology - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 2 facts
referenceLeda Cosmides and John Tooby authored the chapter 'Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange' in the book 'The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture', published by Oxford University Press in 1992.
claimThe purpose of evolutionary psychology is to identify evolved emotional and cognitive adaptations that represent 'human psychological nature,' analogous to how evolutionary physiology identifies physical adaptations of the body.