Evolutionary Psychology

    Matthew Yglesias, now doing what everyone has wanted him to do by combining all of his disparate blogging into one site, makes a recommendation that I must wholeheartedly endorse about the book Adapting Minds: read it. I haven't read very much of the book, but what I have read has been excellent. And if you learn anything about evolutionary pyschology, you should learn about this tricky fallacy:

You start with the notion that the mind/brain is a physical and biological system created by the process of evolution. This is what Buller calls "evolutionary psychology." But then you leap to a rather different notion -- what Buller calls "Evolutionary Psychology" -- that the mind is a massively modular system whose models are adaptations to conditions prevailing during the Pleistocene epoch, i.e. "the millenniums when humans were hunters and gathers" or the "environment of evolutionary adaptadness." Buller's argument, and it's quite convincing so far, is that while the evidence for evolutionary psychology is very strong, the evidence for Evolutionary Psychology is quite weak.

Indeed. In fact, evolutionary psychology may contribute greatly to our understanding of the mind once we divorce it from Evolutionary psychology in particular and cognitive psychology in general. To go a bit further, one of the problems with using Evolutionary Psychology ) is that the brain is remarkably plastic and it seems plausible that a relatively small physiological change in the brain (that may be an adaption that allows us to use, say, opposable thumbs or walk upright) results in a massive increase in computing power and perhaps other such goodies as self-consciousness, language, and the like. So, looking for an evolutionary basis for what are, at base, unintended outgrowths of a much more limited physiological change is a red herring.

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[exemplar of benevolence]

Milleniums? Millenia, says my highly evolved brain.