Alas Poor Darwin by Hilary Rose

Author:Hilary Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

Notes and References

1 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, Norton, 1997; London, Allen Lane, 1997). The present essay is a revised and expanded version of an earlier review of the book. See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Is It Really a Computer?’, Times Literary Supplement (20 February 1998), pp. 3–4.

2 Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (ed.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992).

3 Pinker, How the Mind Works, pp. 77–8. Subsequent page references appear in parentheses in the text.

4 For discussion of the problems encountered by other such efforts, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 141–4.

5 Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, ‘Evolutionary Psychology and Conceptual Integration’, The Adapted Mind, p. 8.

6 Ibid.

7 The drawing of distinctions between, on the one hand, neurophysiological structures and processes and, on the other, the ‘functional properties’ of the mind is a mark of what is called, in cognitive science, functionalism: that is, the idea, developed largely by artificial-intelligence theorists and rationalist philosophers of mind, that the operations that define intelligence (or reasoning) do not depend on their embodiment in any particular physical medium, and could just as well be silicon chips in a computer as neurons in a living organism.

8 See, e.g., Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York, Basic Books, 1992), and Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York, G. P. Putnam, 1994).

9 The method is referred to as ‘evolutionary functional analysis’ in the major theoretical chapter of The Adapted Mind, ‘The Psychological Foundations of Culture’, co-authored by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides.

10 Tooby and Cosmides’s own explanations of the method are exceptionally angular and often misleading, with speculative reconstructions and hypotheses (e.g., of Upper Palaeolithic environmental conditions or specific putative mental mechanisms) referred to as ‘descriptions’ and what should, accordingly, be modal terms (if, would, were to, etc.) replaced by quasi-observational terms (‘when’, ‘did’, ‘does’, etc.). The final component of the method, which the authors refer to as a ‘performance evaluation’, is described as if it were an empirical test: ‘[It is] important . . . to see whether the proposed mechanism produces the behaviors one actually observes from [sic] real organisms in modern conditions. If it does, this suggests the research is converging on a correct description of the design of the mechanisms involved’ (The Adapted Mind, p. 74). But, of course, one cannot ‘see’, in the sense of observe, whether a hypothetical mental mechanism (e.g., a putative language-acquisition device or cheater-detection module) produces some actual behaviour; one can only assert that it does so on the basis of the assumptions, observations and speculations that led one to posit it in the first place. Indeed, as quasi-validation procedure, this component of the method appears to be a virtual prescription for self-affirming circularity.

11 See, e.g., Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Boston, D.

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