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Evolutionary Psychology: Counting Babies or Studying Information‐Processing Mechanisms
Author(s) -
CRAWFORD CHARLES
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2000.tb06613.x
Subject(s) - credence , adaptation (eye) , evolutionary psychology , psychology , naturalism , selection (genetic algorithm) , cognitive psychology , information processing , psychological research , evolutionary theory , cognitive science , social psychology , developmental psychology , epistemology , computer science , artificial intelligence , philosophy , neuroscience , machine learning
A bstract : Evolutionary psychology focuses on the study of adaptations. Its practitioners put little credence in the study of reproductive success in recent and current environments, and argue for an information‐processing, cost‐benefit conception of adaptation. Because ancestral and current environments differ, it is necessary to distinguish between innate and operational adaptations and between concurrently contingent and developmentally contingent behaviors. These distinctions lead to an evolutionary classification of behaviors into true pathologies, pseudopathologies, quasinormal behaviors, and adaptive‐culturally‐variable behaviors. I argue that a complete study of the functioning of a behavioral adaptation involves modeling ancestral selection pressures, cross‐cultural research, experimental studies of mental processes, and studies of the proximate biological correlates of information‐processing adaptations. Finally, I claim that evolutionary psychology can help us avoid making both naturalistic and moralistic fallacies.