368:': the psychological faculties which according to the SSSM comprise the human mind. These are general-purpose mechanisms, devoid of situational content, and function equally well regardless of behavioral domain. For example the so-called 'problem-solving methods' with which cognitive psychologists have traditionally busied themselves are abstract rational strategies (e.g. break the problem into smaller parts or start working backwards from the desired end to the present state) that supposedly work the same regardless of if one wants to play a game of chess, order a pizza or find a sexual partner. This academic preoccupation with domain-general mechanisms, they suggest, stems directly from the folk notion of man as a rational being that has largely lost or suppressed its animalesque instincts and now operates primarily according to reason.
353:'The assumption that only the genes are evolved reflects a widespread misconception about the way natural selection acts. Genes are the so-called units of selection, which are inherited, selected, or eliminated, and so they are indeed something that evolves. But every time one gene is selected over another, one design for a developmental program is selected over another as well; by virtue of its structure, this developmental program interacts with some aspects of the environment rather than others, rendering certain environmental features causally relevant to development. So, step by step, as natural selection constructs the species' gene set (chosen from the available mutations), it constructs in tandem the species' developmentally relevant environment (selected from the set of all properties of the world). Thus,
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in their manifest form depending on the input they receive during development. Some psychological mechanisms (e.g. our visual faculties) will normally assume the same manifest form regardless of the environments they encounter during development (closed developmental programs), while others (e.g. our language faculties) will vary in their manifest form in accordance to the environmental input they receive during development (open developmental mechanisms). However, they argue, whether a mechanism is closed or open, as well as the range of forms it can assume if it is open, is something that is encoded in genetic instructions that have been fine-tuned through millions of years of evolution.
342:', short for 'Standard Social Science Model'. The term refers to a metatheory that the authors claim has dominated the behavioral and social sciences throughout the twentieth century, blending radical environmentalism with blind empiricism. The SSSM has retained and reified the nature/nurture dichotomy, and its practitioners have meticulously amassed evidence over the years which 'proves' that the overwhelming majority of psychological phenomena fall in the 'nurture' category. Only some instinctive and primitive biological drives like hunger and thirst have been retained in the 'nature' category.
376:, on the other hand, come with content that is specialized for their domain (e.g. mating, foraging, theory of mind etc.) and can therefore immediately dismiss a staggering number of plausible courses of action (which by definition a domain-general mechanism would have to examine one by one) for one or a few favoured alternatives. For this reason domain-specific mechanisms are faster and more effective than their domain-general counterparts and we should expect natural selection to have favoured them.
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where man has become competent in an unprecedented number of domains, and can therefore usually employ some motley assortment of these specialized mechanisms for his own novel needs (e.g. he has combined lingual, visual and motor skills to invent the written word, for which no specialized psychological mechanism exists).
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The authors conclude that the flexible and highly intelligent appearance of human behaviour is not the result of domain-general mechanisms having taken over from older domain-specific mechanisms (or 'instincts'), but the exact opposite; human domain-specific mechanisms have proliferated to the point
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With both our genes and our environment "biological" in nature, the nature/nurture dichotomy lacks any meaning. In its place Tooby and
Cosmides propose a distinction between "open" and "closed" developmental programs, which refers to the extent to which our various psychological mechanisms can vary
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In the section entitled 'Selection regulates how environments shape organisms' (pp. 82–87), Tooby and
Cosmides argue that this view of nature/nurture is deeply flawed. They begin with the statement that natural selection is necessarily responsible for complex biological adaptations, including
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Tooby and
Cosmides devote the larger part of their essay to establishing that the human mind cannot consist exclusively or even primarily, of domain-general mechanisms. The argument may be summarised as follows: since domain-general mechanisms come without innate content, they must work out the
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Most commonly, they continue, evidence for such a preponderance of nurture over nature is drawn from the ethnographic record. A phenomenon (e.g. marriage, religion, reciprocity etc.) is taken to be of purely environmental or cultural origin if it can be shown to manifest in different forms in
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The theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology are discussed in the introduction, by
Cosmides, Tooby and Barkow, in an essay by Tooby and Cosmides on "The Psychological Foundations of Culture", and an essay by anthropologist
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Critics argue that
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different cultures or locales. However, this reflects an assumption that biological phenomena are instinctive and inflexible - incapable of taking on different forms.
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43:Please help
38:verification
35:
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1151:Dan Sperber
1126:Nancy Segal
966:Martin Daly
916:John Bowlby
798:Robert Boyd
513:(1): 1–37.
329:Martin Daly
1432:Categories
1277:David Hume
1219:Ernst Fehr
1111:Paul Rozin
1016:Peter Gray
971:Paul Ekman
936:Josep Call
931:David Buss
911:Paul Bloom
896:Jay Belsky
858:John Tooby
823:Mark Flinn
667:John Crook
475:John Tooby
451:References
325:David Buss
317:perceptual
286:research.
260:John Tooby
153:John Tooby
101:April 2013
71:newspapers
996:Uta Frith
838:Ruth Mace
574:6 October
384:Reception
221:Paperback
217:Hardcover
177:Publisher
1234:Gad Saad
527:83429932
427:See also
412:May 2016
159:Language
569:1929648
290:Summary
215:Print (
194: (
167:Subject
162:English
141:Editors
85:scholar
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331:, and
315:, and
309:social
305:mating
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1200:Other
565:S2CID
545:(PDF)
523:S2CID
228:Pages
92:JSTOR
78:books
576:2014
485:ISBN
340:SSSM
311:and
278:and
258:and
237:ISBN
219:and
196:1992
192:1992
64:news
557:doi
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