JOHN TOOBY & LEDA COSMIDES
Co-Directors
Center for Evolutionary Psychology
University of California, Santa Barbara
FROM ENTROPY TO ANGER AND KINSHIP: TOWARDS A UNIFIED PARADIGM FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
John Tooby, Ph.D.
Post-Talk Commentary
5:00 PM Wednesday, 8 November (Reception at 4:30)
Austin Hall, Room 111
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the social and behavioral sciences made a foundational error that severely crippled their development ever since: We embraced a blank slate model of the human mind as the moralized centerpiece of our consensus social theory. We used this model as the rationale for institutionally separating the social sciences from the natural sciences, and treating biology as a sinister contaminant that needed to be excluded from the study of human mental content and social phenomena. In the last few decades, however, large bodies of data from neuroscience, psychology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and the developmental sciences have decisively falsified the blank slate viewpoint, and the theoretical superstructure built on it. Instead, starting from first principles in physics, information theory, and replicator dynamics, one can derive an alternative paradigm for the study of mind, brain, and behavior which has a robust, non-optional, predominantly deductive theoretical core. Over evolutionary time, recurrent adaptive problems in behavior regulation selected for neural programs whose computational architectures are specialized to solve them. Human nature is the species-typical set of these evolved programs. Insights into the structure of ancestral adaptive problems illuminate the likely design features of functional programs that evolved to solve them, supercharging their empirical mapping. Moreover, the functional circuit logics of our evolved programs even provide the building blocks out of which social interactions and cultural phenomena are built, provoking a reformulation of the foundations of the social sciences, including the recognition that the traditional conception of culture as an independent process of intergenerational transmission as inadequate and incomplete. Using kinship, anger, and shame as case studies, I will outline how one can start with physics and replicator dynamics, and proceed, step by logical step, to resulting models of the cognitive, emotional, and motivational programs involved, and finally to how the architectures of these programs predict and explain associated patterns of cross-cultural variation.
WHEN CAN RACE BE "ERASED"? EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, ALLIANCE DETECTION, AND CULTURE
Leda Cosmides, Ph.D.
Post-Talk Commentary
5:00 PM Thursday, 9 November (Reception at 6:15)
Austin Hall, Room 100
Humans in all societies form and participate in cooperative alliances. To successfully navigate an alliance-laced world, the human mind needs to detect new coalitions and alliances as they emerge, and predict which of many potential alliance categories are currently organizing an interaction. My colleagues and I have proposed that evolution has equipped the mind with cognitive machinery that is specialized for performing these functions: an alliance detection system. In this view, racial categories do not exist because skin color is perceptually salient; they are constructed and regulated by the alliance system in environments where race predicts social alliances and divisions. I will present evidence that racial categorization is a (reversible) byproduct of mechanisms that evolved for detecting social alliances. The mind uses patterns of cooperation and competition to infer who is allied with whom, and assigns the individuals involved to (implicit) alliance categories. When race does not predict these coalitional alliances, but other cues do, race fades in relevance. The same alliance cues that up-regulate categorization by coalition also down-regulate categorization by race—sometimes eliminating it. But these cues have no effect on categorization by sex or age, which remain high. This dissociation in category retrieval is expected if the mind treats race as an alliance category, but not gender or age. Our studies also illustrate how a universal evolved psychology can explain cross-cultural variation: Results from the Western US and seven states in Brazil indicate that racial categorization varies systematically with patterns of social alliance.