Download The Evolution of Functional Organization (Cosmides and Tooby)

DeGroff 5/3/2017
Classic Paper Study/Discussion Guide
Title: “Origins of Domain Specificity: The Evolution of
Functional Organization”
Author: Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
Knowledge Related to Learning Outcomes:
1.
Psychology:
a. By establishing that domain-specific machinery is necessary to explain
human cognitive performance, psychologists who advocate modular or
domain-specific approaches have found themselves in an unanticipated
situation.
2.
Darwinian Processes:
a. Rather, the reliably developing cognitive mechanisms that collectively
constitute the architecture of the human mind acquired their particular
functional organization through the process of evolution.
3.
Darwinian Processes:
a. In our evolutionary history, design changes that enhanced their own
propagation relative to other designs were selected for—that is, they
caused their own successive spread until they became universal, speciestypical features of our evolved architecture.
4.
Psychology:
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a. If it can be shown that there are essential adaptive problems that humans
must have been able to solve in order to have propagated, and that
domain-general mechanisms cannot solve them, then the domain-general
hypothesis fails.
5.
Interdisciplinary Assumption – Biology and Psychology:
a. The most important contribution that evolutionary biology can make in the
study of domain-specific mechanisms is in the development of
computational theories of adaptive information-processing problems.
6.
Language and Culture:
a. For example, a social contract has a different cost-benefit structure from a
threat; a social contract is not in effect unless both parties agree to it,
whereas a threat is a unilateral speech act; a social contract does not have a
biconditional entailment structure whereas a threat does…
Top Five Items of Interest (with titles):
1.
The Two Sides Meet:
a. As the authors’ main claim is that the two sides of cognitive research—
domain-specific psychology and evolutionary functionalism—have met
each other to create a new theory of cognition, I cannot help but feel that
my research into human consciousness is following the same path.
2.
Chance:
a. Cosmides and Tooby posit that chance and natural selection are the two
independent forces that govern evolutionary history. At first I was
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alarmed by their emphasis and possible equal standing of chance and
natural selection, instantly thinking back to Richard Dawkins who wrote
that “design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a
better alternative” (The God Delusion 121). However, the authors then
salvaged their paper by placing chance as a far inferior factor than Natural
Selection. Perhaps they should have replace chance with environment.
3.
Functionally Distinct Adaptive Specializations:
a. Distinct anatomical entities such as the heart, liver, and immune system
exist due to their design features that exploit the stable features of
evolutionally recurring situations. These specialized entities can only
arise during occurrences of evolutionary stability in a species. This is why
no “jack-of-all-trades” organs exist.
4.
Domain-General Systems:
a. Cosmides and Tooby contrast domain-general systems to domain-specific
systems. They side with domain-specific systems due to some
unavoidable problems with the domain-general system theory. For
example, domain-general systems would have to be able to handle to the
problem of determining a threat using only the information gained via
experience or observation. The problem of determining a venomous snake
to be a threat quickly becomes an issue when one has no evolutionarily
inherited response to snakes. The only way to find out if the snake is a
threat is via experience or observation--someone has to get bitten.
5.
Poker Face:
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a. If a reliable correlation existed between the movement of facial muscles
and emotional states/behavioral intentions, then specialized mechanisms
can evolve to infer the emotion or intention based on the stability of the
correlation. Neuroscientific evidence exists to back up this claim. So now
poker players have begun to adapt an even more in-depth strategy of
finding ‘tells’ in their opponents.