The Debated Mind by Harvey Whitehouse

The Debated Mind by Harvey Whitehouse

Author:Harvey Whitehouse [Whitehouse, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781859734322
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1234113
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2001-04-01T00:00:00+00:00


The evolution of cognition

According to a now well-established scenario, it was during the Pleistocene era, while living as hunters and gatherers, that human beings evolved to be the kinds of creatures they are today. Since natural selection, as a rule, adapts organisms to their prevailing conditions of life, we can expect that the properties or 'design features' of the human mind, just as much as those of the body, would have evolved as solutions to the particular problems and challenges that would have been faced by ancestral populations of hunter-gatherers in Pleistocene environments. Moreover there is good reason to believe that a cognitive architecture consisting of a collection of relatively discrete modules, each specialized in a particular domain of problem-solving, would have a selective advantage over a more general-purpose design. A specialized module that already knows, in a sense, what the problem is and how to deal with it, can deliver a more rapid and effective response, causing minimal interference to other cognitive tasks that may be going on at the same time. Thus there might be one module for navigation and orientation in the environment, another for handling social co-operation with conspecifics, another for the recognition and classification of animals and plants, another for language acquisition, another for tool-use, and so on (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994).

The environments of ancestral hunter-gatherers, however, were very different from those encountered by the majority of the world's inhabitants today. Many of the challenges they faced have all but disappeared, while others have arisen that they could not have anticipated. Thus cognitive modules designed by natural selection for one purpose have, throughout history, been turned to account in other ways. Anyone can learn to drive a car, Sperber speculates (1996: 93), because the skills of driving call for computations of space and movement that the brain is innately pre-equipped to carry out. The requisite processing devices would have evolved in what Sperber calls their proper domain, that is, in the solution of cognitive tasks faced by hunter-gatherers in moving around in the terrain. But in driving a car they are mobilized in the actual domain of the motorist who has to make his way on the road. Though the circumstances could not be more different, the underlying cognitive operations are much the same. Indeed the implication of Sperber's argument is that any mode of locomotion that could not draw upon evolved cognitive capacities of one kind or another would probably be unlearnable, and could never become a part of culture.

More generally, while the natural environment of human beings has been largely replaced or overlain by a cultural one – that is, by an environment consisting of 'all the public productions . . . that are causes and effects of mental representations' (Sperber 1996: 115) – the various domains of culture in which human cognition actually operates have been shaped by a selective bias in favour of representations that mimic the inputs of evolved cognitive modules in their original, proper domains. To rephrase the point



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