Table Of ContentCHARACTERIZING
HUMAN
PSYCHOLOGICAL
ADAPTATIONS
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Ciba Foundation Symposium 208
CHARACTERIZING
HUMAN
PSYCHOLOGICAL
ADAPTATIONS
1997
JOHN WILEY & SONS
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Ciba Foundation Symposium 208
viii+295 pages, 35 figures, 7 tables
LibraTy .f Congress Catafaging-in-P ubIicatian Data
Characterizing human psychological adaptations.
p. cm.-(Ciba Foundation symposium ; 208)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-97767-5( alk. paper)
1. Genetic psychology 2. Adaptability (Psychology) 1. Series.
UF701.C49 1997
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Contents
Jjwzposium on Cbaracteri.ying ha~anps_ychologicaladaptationhse, ld at the Ciba Foundation on 2%31
October 1996
Editors: Gregory R. Bock (Organixed and Gail Cardew
M. Daly Introduction 1
R. Thornhill The concept of an evolved adaptation 4
Discassion 13
R. N. Shepard The genetic basis of human scientific knowledge 23
Discassion 31
A. P. Msller Evolutionary conflicts and adapted psychologies 39
Discassion 4 6
A. Kacelnik Normative and descriptive models of decision making: time
discounting and risk sensitivity 51
Discassion 67
G. F. Miller Mate choice: from sexual cues to cognitive adaptations 71
Discussion 82
General discussion I 88
M. D. Hauser Tinkering with minds from the past 95
Discussion 126
L, Cosmides and J. Tooby Dissecting the computational architecture of social
inference mechanisms 132
Discussion 156
S. Pinker Language as a psychological adaptation 162
Discussion 172
D. F. Sherry Cross-species comparisons 181
Discussion 189
V
vi CONTENTS
S. J. C. Gaulin Cross-cultural patterns and the search for evolved psychological
mechanisms 195
Discmsion 207
S. W. Gangestad Evolutionary psychology and genetic variation: non-adaptive,
fitness-related and adaptive 212
Discussion 223
A. R. Rogers Evolution and human choice over time 231
DiscMsson 249
M.Wilson and M. Daly Relationship-specific social psychological
adaptations 253
Discussion 263
M. D. Beecher, S. E. Campbell and J. C. Nordby Bird song learning as
an adaptive strategy 269
Discussion 279
Final general discussion 282
Index of contributors 286
Subject index 287
Participants
M. D. Beecher Departments of Psychology and Zoology, Animal Behavior
Program, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
T. Bouchard Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research, Department of
Psychology, University of Minnesota, Elliott Hall, 75 East River Road,
MN 554550344, USA
D. Buss Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin,TX 78712, USA
L. Cosmides Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Psychology,
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
H. Cronin Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences,The London
School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE,
UK
M. Daly (Chairman) Department of Psychology, McMaster University,
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4K1
R. Dawkins Oxford University Museum, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PW, UK
S. W. Gangestad Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA
S. J. C. Gaulin Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh,
PA 15260, USA
G. Gigerenzer Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max-Planck-Institute
for Psychological Research, Leopoldstrasse 24, D-80802 Munich, Germany
M. D. Hauser Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, Program in
Neuroscience, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
A. Kacelnik Department of Zoology, South Parks Road, Oxford University, Oxford
OX1 3PS, UK
vii
...
Vlll PARTICIPANTS
J. Maynard Smith School of Biological Sciences, Biology Building, University of
Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN19QG, UK
L. Mealey Department of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072,
Australia
G. F. Miller Economic and Social Research Council Research Centre for Economic
Learning and Social Evolution, University College London, Gower Street, London
WClE 6BT, UK
A. P. Msller Laboratoire d'Ecologie, CNRS URA 258, Universitk Pierre et Marie
Curie, Bit. A,76me ktage,7 quai St. Bernard, Case 237, F-75252 Paris Cedex 5, France
R. Nesse The University of Michigan, 5057 ISR, PO Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI
48106-1248. USA
R. Nisbett Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
48109, USA
S. Pinker Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
A. R. Rogers Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City,
UT 84112, USA
J. Scheib (Bxrsar) Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis,
CA 95616, USA
R. N. Shepard Department of Psychology, Building 420, Stanford University,
Stanford, CA 943052130, USA
D. F. Sherry Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London,
Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2
D. Sperber CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, 1 Rue Descartes, 75005 Paris, France
R. Thornhill Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,
NM 87131, USA
J.Tooby Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Psychology, University
of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
M. Wilson Department of Psychology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada L8S 4K1
Novartis Foundation Symposium
Edited by GregoIy R. Bock, Gail Cardew
Copyright 0 1997 by Ciba Foundation
Introduction
Martin Daly
Department of Pgchology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4 K 1
‘Is it not reasonable to anticipate that our understanding of the human mind would
be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed?’
(Williams 1966, p 16)
‘Evolutionary psychology’ has enjoyed a recent vogue, at least in the popular press.
For most psychologists, however, the case that they should invest the effort to become
sophisticated evolutionists still has to be made.
The workings of the psyche are obviously organized to achieve various ends, and
effective psychological scientists have always been adaptationists, partitioning the
psyche into component processes with putative functions. This is perhaps clearest in
the study of perception, where proposed mechanisms and processes are labelled in
terms of the information-processing tasks that they address: movement detection,
sound localization, face recognition and so forth. There is greater uncertainty and
controversy about the best way to subdivide ‘central’ (or ‘higher’) processing, but
cognitive psychologists are also adaptationists, concerning themselves with how the
mind achieves such tasks as memory encoding and retrieval, categorization and
selective attention. Even social psychologists often characterize hypothesized mental
processes in terms of what they achieve, although proposed functions in this field (the
maintenance of Heiderian balance, the minimization of cognitive dissonance, etc.)
often seem arbitrary. Moreover, recent advances in neuroscience and artificial
intelligence have reinforced the view of psyches as bundles of modules dedicated to
distinct tasks.
But if psychologists are already adaptationists, they are seldom selectionists:
psychological science has made scant use of the Darwinian insight that the ultimate
criterion of adaptive functional organization is not health or happiness or
homeostasis, but contribution to fitness. Over 30 years have passed since George
Williams made the rather wistful suggestion that I quoted above, but many
psychologists have been slow to grasp the point.
Evolutionary approaches in psychology and other social sciences encounter not just
apathy, but also antipathy, founded in ignorance and false dichotomies. An
unfortunate side-effect is that Darwinists are often tempted to wave off more serious
sceptical challenges, dismissing them as more of the same old hostility, ignorance and
foolishness. The challenges to which I refer are to some extent challenges not simply to
1
2 DALY
evolutionary psychologists, but also to the scientific pretensions and aspirations of
psychology as a whole. Is the concept of ‘mental organs’ a stretched metaphor, for
example, and the concept of discrete mental adaptations an excessive reification of
processes? Must we be neurological reductionists to justify such materialistic
language as psychological ‘mechanisms’? Can algorithmic/procedural characteriza-
tions of mental adaptations be made sufficiently rigorous and testable that they will
command consensus and become the foundations of further discovery?
Evolutionary psychologists have generally adopted the stance that psychology is an
ordinary branch of biology and that our task in identifying and studying psychological
adaptations is essentially like that facing anatomists or physiologists. But psychology is
tricky because its objects of study are ephemeral processes, less tangible than bones and
muscles whose functional designs an adaptationist anatomist strives to understand. It
may also be especially tricky because the workings of the mind are in some sense more
holistic and less amenable to componential analysis than the ‘mental organ’ metaphor
would imply. In any event, for whatever reason, the history of psychology seems to
indicate that the recognition of adaptations in this branch of biology is, at the least,
peculiarly difficult. Consider Freudian theory, for example. Many intelligent people
were once persuaded that its constructs (id, ego and superego, parricidal motives,
thanatos and all the rest) constituted a valid dissection of the human psyche, while
others were convinced that they were fantastic. The latter view has prevailed,
although the former lingers in pop psychology and literary criticism. It is difficult
even to imagine an analogous case arising in functional morphology, that is, a theory
that attracts many adherents by partitioning the body into components which are
eventually seen to be non-existent when the theory is discredited! Must we conclude
that psychologists are simply parroting the language of materialistic science while
unable to deliver its substance?
There is another, more hopeful view, and it is the one to which I subscribe. The
reason why psychologists have wandered down so many garden paths is not that
their subject is resistant to the scientific method, but that it has been inadequately
informed by selectionist thought. Had Freud better understood Darwin, for
example, the world would have been spared such fantastic dead-end notions as
Oedipal desires and death instincts. And why has social psychology been in large
measure a succession of fads without cumulative progress? Could it be because social
psychologists have repeatedly postulated shallow intrapsychic functions, such as the
defence of one or another sort of mental ‘balance’, which are unrelated to the basic
social information-processing tasks around which any Darwinian would organize the
subject? While mainstream social psychology has gone around in circles, theory and
research on nonhuman animal social psychology and behaviour have achieved real
progress, and I believe the main reason for this difference is not that human beings
are particularly mysterious. Behavioural ecologists and sociobiologists have built
cumulative understandings because they have partitioned the subject along the lines
of discrete, real-world problems of social information processing, such as kin
recognition, maintenance of reciprocity balance sheets, allocation of parental
