Innovations Leading to Evolutionary Psychology

Leda Cosmides introduces the topic with several innovations such as the cognitive revolution, the advances in paleoanthropology, research in animal behavior and evolutionary biology, that eventually led her and other scientists to evolutionary psychology. The aim of this field is to map human nature; Leda describes the 5 step research program that scientists follow in this particular approach to psychology. Then, talks about the causal connections between the 4 developments mentioned before and analyzes the way that our hunter-gatherer ancestors would live. Our ancestors had to solve many different kinds of problems well, this requires different evolved programs (...) the same principle applies to mechanisms that solve adaptive information processes and problems”. - Leda Cosmides Later Leda describes the architecture of human mind, that’s composed of many different programs, and how specialization and the division of labor have improved problem solving by the mind. We have specialized our reasoning, and evolutionary psychologists are studying the programs that cause inferences, Cosmides explains. Instincts are often thought of as the opposite of reasoning (...) but they are not, some of them, cause reasoning”. - Leda Cosmides Finally she concludes that if you want to understand human culture and society, you need to understand these domain specific programs. John Tooby continues the lecture talking about the importance of entropy in science and explains that the only order that can be found in the brain of a living organism is that produced by natural selection. Then discusses ideas on the centerpiece of the traditional Standard Social Science Model. Finally Tooby explains the new theory of culture and social phenomena. The old theory is that culture is essentially everything and is poured into you and that’s our evolutionary history”. - John Tooby Understand with Leda and John how human behavior works and evolves through natural selection and how the way that society works can be studied from evolutionary psychology.