Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-5b777bbd6c-ks5gx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-06-18T11:18:15.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

41 - Beyond Intuition and Instinct Blindness: Toward an Evolutionarily Rigorous Cognitive Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Leda Cosmides  and
John Tooby
Edited by
Jonathan E. Adler  and
Lance J. Rips
Leda Cosmides
Affiliation:
University of California
John Tooby
Affiliation:
University of California
Jonathan E. Adler
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Lance J. Rips
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
Get access

Summary

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Is it not reasonable to anticipate that our understanding of the human mind would be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed?

George C. Williams

The cognitive sciences have reached a pivotal point in their development. We now have the opportunity to take our place in the far larger and more exacting scientific landscape that includes the rest of the modern biological sciences. Every day, research of immediate and direct relevance to our own is being generated in evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, developmental biology, genetics, paleontology, population biology, and neuroscience. In turn, many of these fields are finding it necessary to use concepts and research from the cognitive sciences.

But to benefit from knowledge generated in these collateral fields, we will have to learn how to use biological facts and principles in theory formation and experimental design. This means shedding certain concepts and prejudices inherited from parochial parent traditions: the obsessive search for a cognitive architecture that is general purpose and initially content-free; the excessive reliance on results derived from artificial “intellectual” tasks; the idea that the field's scope is limited to the study of “higher” mental processes; and a long list of false dichotomies reflecting premodern biological thought – evolved/learned, evolved/developed, innate/learned, genetic/environmental, biological/social, biological/cultural, emotion/cognition, animal/human. Most importantly, cognitive scientists will have to abandon the functional agnosticism that is endemic to the field (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).

Type
Chapter
Information
Reasoning
Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations
 , pp. 843 - 865
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Atran, S. (1990). The cognitive foundations of natural history. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Axelrod, R., & Hamilton, W. D. (1981). The evolution of cooperation. Science, 211, 1390–1396.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.) (1992). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?Cognition, 21, 37–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloch, M. (1977). The past and the present in the present. Man, 12, 278–292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyd, R. (1988). Is the repeated prisoner's dilemma a good model of reciprocal altruism?Ethology and Sociobiology, 9, 211–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyer, P. (1994). The naturalness of religious ideas. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Brothers, I. (1990). The social brain: A project for integrating primate behavior and neurophysiology in a new domain. Concepts in Neuroscience, 9, 27–51.Google Scholar
Brown, A. (1990). Domain-specific principles affect learning and transfer in children. Cognitive Science, 14, 107–133.Google Scholar
Brown, D. E. (1991). Human universals. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Carey, S. (1985). Constraints on semantic development. In Mehler, J. & Fox, R. (Eds.), Neonate cognition (pp. 381–398). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Carey, S., & Gelman, R. (Eds.) (1991). The epigenesis of mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Cheney, D. L., & Seyfarth, R. (1990). How monkeys see the world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cheng, P., Holyoak, K., Nisbett, R., & Oliver, L. (1986). Pragmatic versus syntactic approaches to training deductive reasoning. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 293–328.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Clutton-Brock, T. H., & Harvey, P. (1979). Comparison and adaptation. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London B, 205, 547–565.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cook, E. W., Hodes, R. L.III, & Lang, P. J. (1986). Preparedness and phobia: Effects of stimulus content on human visceral conditioning. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95, 195–207.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cook, M., & Mineka, S. (1989). Observational conditioning of fear to fear-relevant versus fear-irrelevant stimuli in rhesus monkeys. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 98, 448–459.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cosmides, L. (1985). Deduction or Darwinian algorithms? An explanation of the “elusive” content effect on the Wason selection task. Doctoral dissertation. Department of Psychology. Harvard University. University Microfilms #86-02206.
Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition, 31, 187–276.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1987). From evolution to behavior: Evolutionary psychology as the missing link. In Dupre, J. (Ed.), The latest on the best: Essays on evolution and optimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture, Part II. Case study: A computational theory of social exchange. Ethology and Sociobiology, 10, 51–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1994). Origins of domain specificity: The evolution of functional organization. In Gelman, S. & Hirschfeld, L. (Eds.). Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions of the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition, 58, 1–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1983). Sex, evolution and behavior. Boston: Wadsworth.Google Scholar
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide, Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.Google ScholarPubMed
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1994). Discriminative parental solicitude and the relevance of evolutionary models to the analysis of motivational systems. In Gazzaniga, M. (Ed.), The cognitive neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Dawkins, R. (1982). The extended phenotype. Oxford: W. H. Freeman.Google Scholar
Dawkins, R. (1986). The blind watchmaker. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Waal, F. B. M., & Luttrell, L. M. (1988). Mechanisms of social reciprocity in three primate species: Symmetrical relationship characteristics or cognition?Ethology and Sociobiology, 9, 101–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischer, E. A. (1988). Simultaneous hermaphroditism, tit-for-tat, and the evolutionary stability of social systems. Ethology and Sociobiology, 9, 119–136.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiske, A. P. (1991). Structures of social life: The four elementary forms of human relations. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Fodor, J. A. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Frith, U. (1989). Autism: Explaining the enigma. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The organization of learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gallistel, C. R., Brown, A. L., Carey, S., Gelman, R., & Keil, F. C. (1991). Lessons from animal learning for the study of cognitive development. In Carey, S. & Gelman, R. (Eds.), The epigenesis of mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Garcia, J. (1990). Learning without memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2, 287–305.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gelman, S., & Hirschfeld, L. (Eds.) (1994). Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gigerenzer, G., Hoffrage, U., & Kleinbolting, H. (1991). Probabilistic mental models: A Bruns-wikean theory of confidence. Psychological Review, 98, 506–528.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gigerenzer, G., & Hug, K. (1992). Domain-specific reasoning: Social contracts, cheating and perspective change. Cognition, 43, 127–171.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gould, J. L. (1982). Ethology: The mechanisms and evolution of behavior. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society, London B, 205, 581–598.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackendoff, R. (1992). Languages of the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Keil, F. C. (1989). Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Krebs, J. R., & Davies, N. B. (1987). An introduction to behavioural ecology. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.Google Scholar
Leslie, A. M. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind”. Psychological Review, 94, 412–426.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leslie, A. M. (1988). The necessity of illusion: Perception and thought in infancy. In Weiskrantz, L. (Ed.), Thought without language (pp. 185–210). Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Manktelow, K. I., & Evans, J. St.B. T. (1979). Facilitation of reasoning by realism: Effect or non-effect?British Journal of Psychology, 70, 477–488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manktelow, K. I., & Over, D. E. (1990). Deontic thought and the selection task. In Gilhooly, K. J., Keane, M. T. G., Logie, R. H., & Erdos, G. (Eds.), Lines of thinking (Vol. 1). Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Markman, E. M. (1989). Categorization and naming in children: Problems of induction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Markman, E. (1990). Constraints children place on word meanings. Cognitive Science, 14, 57–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marler, P. (1991). The instinct to learn. In Carey, S. & Gelman, R. (Eds.), The epigenesis of mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. San Francisco: Freeman.Google Scholar
Mayr, E. (1983). How to carry out the adaptationist program?The American Naturalist, 121, 324–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDougall, W. (1908/1916). Introduction to social psychology. Boston: John W. Luce.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mineka, S., & Cook, M. (1988). Social learning and the acquisition of snake fear in monkeys. In Zentall, T. R. & Galef, B. G. (Eds.), Social learning: Psychological and biological perspectives (pp. 51–73). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ohman, A., Dimberg, U., & Ost, L. G. (1985). Biological constraints on the fear response. In Reiss, S. & Bootsin, R. (Eds.), Theoretical issues in behavior therapy (pp. 123–175). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ohman, A., Eriksson, A., & Olofsson, A. (1975). One-trial learning and superior resistance to extinction of autonomic responses conditioned to potentially phobic stimuli. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 88, 619–627.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. New York: Morrow.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 707–727.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Profet, M. (1992). Pregnancy sickness as adaptation: A deterrent to maternal ingestion of teratogens. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pylyshyn, Z. W. (Ed.) (1987). The robot's dilemma: The frame problem in artificial intelligence, Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Real, L. A. (1991). Animal choice behavior and the evolution of cognitive architecture. Science, 253, 980–986.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rozin, P. (1976). The evolution of intelligence and access to the cognitive unconscious. In Sprague, J. M. & Epstein, A. N. (Eds.), Progress in psychobiology and physiological psychology. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Shepard, R. N. (1981). Psychophysical complementarity. In Kubovy, M. & Pomerantz, J. (Eds.), Perceptual organization. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Shepard, R. N. (1987). Evolution of a mesh between principles of the mind and regularities of the world. In Dupre, J. (Ed.), The latest on the best: Essays on evolution and optimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sherry, D. F., & Schacter, D. L. (1987). The evolution of multiple memory systems. Psychological Review, 94, 439–454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smuts, B. (1986). Sex and friendship in baboons. Hawthorne: Aldine.Google Scholar
Spelke, E. S. (1988). The origins of physical knowledge. In Weiskrantz, L. (Ed.), Thought without language (pp. 168–184). Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Spelke, E. (1990). Principles of object perception. Cognitive Science, 14, 29–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D. (1975). Rethinking symbolism, transl. Alice Morton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1982). On anthropological knowledge, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1985). Anthropology and psychology: Towards an epidemiology of representations. Man (N. S.), 20, 73–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D. (1990). The epidemiology of beliefs. In Fraser, C. & Geskell, G. (Eds.), Psychological studies of widespread beliefs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, D. (1994). The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations. In Gelman, S. & Hirschfeld, L. (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture, New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Symons, D. (1979). The evolution of human sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Symons, D. (1992). On the use and misuse of Darwinism in the study of human behavior. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of threat: Evidence for another cognitive adaptation? Paper presented at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Evanston, IL.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990a). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11, 375–424.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990b). On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of Personality, 58, 17–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tooby J., & DeVore, I. (1987). The reconstruction of hominid behavioral evolution through strategic modeling. In Kinzey, W. (Ed.), Primate models of hominid behavior. New York: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wason, P. (1966). Reasoning. In Foss, B. M. (Ed.), New horizons in psychology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Wason, P. (1983). Realism and rationality in the selection task. In Evans, J. St. B. T. (Ed.), Thinking and reasoning: Psychological approaches. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Wason, P., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1972). Psychology of reasoning: Structure and content. London: Batsford.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, G. S. (1988). Reciprocal altruism in bats and other mammals. Ethology and Sociobiology, 9, 85–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilkinson, G. S. (1990). Food sharing in vampire bats. Scientific American, February, 76–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and natural selection: A critique of some current evolutionary thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, G. C. (1985). A defense of reductionism in evolutionary biology. Oxford surveys in evolutionary biology, 2, 1–27.Google Scholar
Williams, G. C., & Nesse, R. M. (1991). The dawn of Darwinian medicine. Quarterly Review of Biology, 66, 1–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (1992). The man who mistook his wife for a chattel. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wynn, K. (1992). Addition and subtraction by human infants. Nature, 358, 749–750.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×