Get Over: Massive Modularity

Abstract

Is een book review van een boek met essays van voor- en tegenstanders van modularity. Op het einde bespreekt de auteur ook één essay dat probeert een brug te maken tussen de twee standpunten. Dit is de laatste paragraaf: "But this leaves other possibilities. One possibility opens up if we separate goals from the knowledge of how to achieve them. It is overwhelmingly likely that, over the course of our evolutionary history, selection has endowed humans with motivational goals the successful pursuit of which tends, on average, to promote reproductive success. But selection needn’t thereby have also endowed us with rich, innate bodies of knowledge about how to navigate our environs to achieve these goals. Indeed, the fact that environments have changed relatively rapidly throughout human evolution means that highly canalized procedures for achieving motivational goals would have been ineffective more often than not. Rapid environmental change typically selects for phenotypic plasticity. Thus, selection could have coupled our motivational goals to cognitive plasticity, a cognitive system that gradually acquires, through domain-general procedures applied in situ, knowledge of how to achieve its goals (see, for example, Sterelny 2003; Buller in press, chap. 4). In short, selection could have endowed us with certain wants without thereby also endowing us with knowledge about how to get what we want. If this is the case, what we want might ‘‘come online’’ in development before our knowledge of how to go about getting it (a fact to which pubescent males can attest). If this is the structure of the mind, evolutionary psychology may one day tell us a great deal about how selection has designed human utilities and brain plasticity, and these explanations will be relevant to much social behavior. Thus, the future prospects of evolutionary psychology don’t rise or fall with the fate of Evolutionary Psychology’s MMH. We can get over massive modularity while still pursuing an explanatorily robust evolutionary psychology." Dit idee is dus een beetje gelijkaardig aan hoe appraisal theories emoties bekijken: emoties zijn bedoeld om het gedrag een beetje uit te stellen, enkel een algemene motivatie aan te geven, en dus het organisme de tijd te geven om de eerste, impulsieve action tendency eventueel bij te stellen of zelfs af te breken.