Lecture 3: Evolution and Psychology

Question 1

Darwin and Psychology

Answer 1

• Darwin theorised a gradual progression from nonhuman to human minds
• Darwinian theory is the broad conceptual framework for evolutionary psychology and comparative psychology –> Animal studies can help us to understand the phylogenetic basis of human mind and behaviour
• Darwin inititated a radically new way of studying behaviour-evolutionary psychology (Ghiselin 1973)

Question 2

What makes humans ‘special’?

Answer 2

Darwin (1871) believed that the difference between human and nonhuman minds is ‘one of degree, not of kind’

Penn et al (2008)
- Darwin was mistaken

• Behind the profound biological continuinity , there’s an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds (a difference in kind)

Question 3

What is Phyogeny

Answer 3

1. The evolutionary history of kind of organism
2. The evolution of a genetically related group of organisms as distinguished from the development of the individual organism

Question 4

What is Ontogeny?

Answer 4

The development of course of development especially of an individual organism

Question 5

Evolutionary biology and psychology

Answer 5

• A conceptual framework for understanding human traits as products of natural selection during our evolutionary past
• Frameworks for theory and research include:
  –> Sociobiology
  –> Game theory
• Key ideas include:
  1. Natural selection (Darwin)
  2. Reproductive success
  3. Inclusive fitness

Question 6

What is Sociobiology

Answer 6

A branch of evolutionary biology on reproductive success as an explanation for the natural selection of particular traits

Criticism: its genetic determinism overlooks the roles of mind and culture, can’t account for the complexity of human behaviour

Question 7

What is the demographic-economic paradox?

Answer 7

• evolutionary biology predicts that successful individuals would optimise their reproduction (have more offspring )
• in modern human societies there’s a widely demonstrated inverse relationship between income and fertility at the levels of individuals and countries

Question 8

what is the game theory?

Answer 8

A branch of mathematics analysing strategies for dealing with competitive situations where the outcome of a participant’s choice depends on the actions of other participants

Evolutionary game theory

• The application of game theory model outcomes to Darwinian competition in evolving populations and biologists use mathematical modelling of Darwinian principles

Evolutionary psychologists and biologists use mathematical modelling and Darwinian principles

Question 9

Famous illustrations of game theory

Answer 9

• The prisoner’s dilema
• The diner’s dilemma
• The free-riders problem

–> Yong and choy (2021) applied evolutionary game theory to cooperation during the Covid-19 pandemic: noncompliance with saftey guidelines as a free-riding strategy

Question 10

Applying the prisoner’s dilema

Answer 10

When two males confront each other they can either/or:

• Fight until one is maimed, killed or flees (hawk)
• Posture but quit before any serious harm is done (doves)

–> A hawk supports going into war

–> A dove opposes the use of military force to resolve a dispute

Question 11

What is inclusive fitness?

Answer 11

According to evolutionary biology, altruistic traits contribute to species –> In insects, nonproductive females support the reproductive female

Humans evolved a capacity for making altruistic acts by personal choice, eg. donating to charity

The theory that cooperation and altruism increase the organism’s genetic success and therefore survival of the species

• Evolutionary biology: altruistic traits contribute to the species’ inclusive fitness
• A species with males who are exclusively either ‘hawks’ or ‘doves’ is vulnerable
• optimal strategy for inclusive fitness: the ‘bourgeois’ (males can adapt their behaviour to the given situation)

Question 12

Comparative psychology

Answer 12

The study of simularities and differences in organisms’ behaviour

• Some psychologists differentiate ‘comparative cognition’ from ‘comparative psychology’

Abramson (2015)
- psychology is the science of behaviour

• Textbook definitions disagree whether comparative psychologists restrict their work to animal studies or include also human behaviour

Chiandetti and Gerbino (2015)
- psychology is the science of mind

• Animal behaviour is studies also by biologists, what makes ‘psychology’ is the study of mental phenomena.

Question 13

Questions asked by comparative psychologists:

Answer 13

• Which cognitive traits are uniquely human?
• What inherited predispositions are typical of human minds?
• What can human minds do without certain types of direct experiences with one’s enviroment?
• What can human minds do without certain types of direct experiences with one’s enviroment
  –> Distance estimation : the goldfish had to be trained (operant conditioning) direct expereinces of its tank enviroment

Question 14

What is unique to humans?

Answer 14

• Problem solving:
  –> young children accquire problem solving skills through direct exploration of materials
  –> So chimps and cats
• Using Tools
  –> Primates, even some birds also do it
• Cultural transmission: the result of both deliberate socialisation decisions and indirect processes such as social imitation and learning
  –> Children learn by observation and participation in routine activities of their culture
  –> Simular learning was observed in Japanese macques

Question 15

Matuzawa: sweet-potato washing revisted

Answer 15

The first strong evidence of cultural behaviour demonstrated by these monkeys:

1. Emergence: started doing it by themselves
2. Propagation : behaviour spread through kinship and playmates
3. Modification : started using slaty water for a better taste

• Sweet potato washing emerged also in an unrelated troop (cooling down hot baked sweet potatoes)

Question 16

Tomasello : cooperating and collaborating

Answer 16

‘What makes us different is our ability to put our heads together and to do things that you couldn’t do alone’

However: nonhuman social animals who live in complex societies have evolved ways of collaborating and coordingating their activities

• Tomasello and his associates compared children and chimps to investigate the evolutionary origins of human cooperation and morality
  –> The children are speaking with eachother

Question 17

Does language make us ‘special’? Skinner

Answer 17

B.F Skinner:
- we learn verbal behaviour by operant conditioning
- ‘Rule-governed behaviour’ (verbal) is a subcase of contingency-shaped behaviour

Question 18

Can language be learnt in the same way as any other behaviour?

Answer 18

Skinner argued yes (1957) Verbal behaviour book

• Chomsky critised Skinner, argued that human brains have a Language Aquistition device (LAD) which makes infants receptive to common features of all languages
• Chomsky attempted in make chimps speak: 1940s raising a chimp as if it was a child. she physiologically couldn’t speak

1960s: Allen and Beatrix taught their chimp 350 signs, combinded words

1970s: Herbet Terrance attempted to challenge chomsky’s theory by teaching ASL to Nim Chimpsky: he didn’t master it

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Question 19

Animal communication

Answer 19

Bees communicate flower locations to each other using a waggle dance inside the hive: 1946 Karl Von Frisch

2000s: scientists started to query the dance’s significance: bees often ignore the dance and fly back to locations they already know

• Unlike humans, bees cannot:
  –> change how the infomation is presented
  –> elobarated on it with relfections
  –> withhold infomation
  –> change the communicative purpose

Question 20

The symbol-grounding problem

Answer 20

Vervet monkeys have different calls for warnings about snakes, eagles and leopards. This is sophistcated enough to be consdiered as a proto-language

In cognitive science it refers to how the human mind connects audio/visual stimuli to meanings

Question 21

Can nonhuman animals have a sense of self?

Answer 21

Sociologists: NO

Biologists: Maybe: the search goes on

• Dolphins communicate with eachother in whistles, clicks, buzzing and pulsing sounds
  –> There’s evidence that bluenose dolphins use distinctive whilstles the way humans use names
• Beluga whales use unique contact calls that functions like names

–> Associating individuals with particular sounds is not evidence for I/Me reflexivity

Question 22

Mirror self-recognition

Answer 22

• The rouge test- a benchmark for awareness of oneself as a seperate entity

(Reiss and Marino 2001) Dolphins
(Prior et al 2008) Birds
(Plotnik et al 2006) Elephants

Question 23

Ethics

Answer 23

Konda et al (2019) demonstrated that cleaner wrasse recognises its mirror reflection

If fish can pass the mark test, what are the implications for consciousness and self-awareness testing in animals

There could be another explanation for the behaviour of the fish

Question 24

Evolutionary psychology

Answer 24

In the late 1980s, cosmides and Tooby redefined ‘evolutionary psychology’ as a theoretical perspective integrating principles of evolutionary biology with the infomation-processing framework of cognitive psychology at the time

Core Presmise: The massive modularity hypothesis (MMH)

Question 25

The Massive Modularity hypothesis

Answer 25

The human mind consists of many innate, special-purpose infomation-processing systems that were shaped by natural selection, each dedicated to solving a restricted class of problems faced by our prehistoric ancestors

The swiss army knife metaphor of the human mind –> useful and adaptable

Current status: since the 1990s, cognitive science generally has moved away from modualarity
- Modualrity is widely criticised in the light of neuroscience although some psychologists still defend it

–> Cosmides and Tooby (2013) continue to advocate massive modularity

Question 26

Criticism of the Massive Modularity Hypothesis

Answer 26

Samuels (1998) propsed an alternative conceptual model

Ketalaar and Ellis (2000) The basic assumptions of evolutionary psychology can’t be tested by means of the scientific method.

Question 27

Samuels (1998) The libary model of cognition

Answer 27

An alternative theory to the MMH

• the mind contains relatively few specialised bodies of knowledge (mental schemas)
• Compuational mechanisms are domain-general- the same mechanisims subserve a variety of purposes (eg. reasoning, belief-fixation)

Why it’s called then library model:
A libriarian’s operation of organising books onto category-specific shelves is the same for any category

• By anology, the same domain-general computiontional mechanisms serve a variety of purposes

Question 28

Lecture 3 summary

Answer 28

• Evolutionary and comparative psychology concern continuities and discontinuities between human and other species
• Game theory helps understand the evolution of cooperation and altruism
• The use of symbols is unique ot humans