Adaptationism and Psychological Explanation

Abstract

(from the chapter) The research program of narrow evolutionary psychology is most closely associated with the work of Cosmides, Tooby, and Pinker (e.g., Cosmides and Tooby, 1992, 1994, 1997). In this chapter, I focus on the Cosmides-Tooby program initially, since one of my themes is the relation of adaptationism to cognitive architecture and this shows up most clearly in their work. I will ask what adaptationism can tell us about out psychology, and conclude that even though it can be of at least heuristic value when it comes to uncovering behavior, it cannot license conclusions about cognitive architecture. In section 2 of this paper, I defend the distinction between forward-looking and backward-looking adaptationism and give an example of testable forward-looking adaptationism. In section 3, I argue against the picture: evolutionary considerations tell us very little about cognitive architecture. To really do serious evolutionary psychology, we need to integrate developmental psychology into the picture. Only through the study of development can we find out about cognitive architecture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved)