Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. 1992. "The Psychological Foundations of Culture," in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, 19-136. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

"Introduction: The Unity of Science" (19-24)—Argues that the physical, life, and cognitive sciences have developed a reliable and interconnected base of knowledge that renders disciplinary boundaries largely arbitrary. Proposes a single unbroken chain of causality from the Big Bang to cultural phenonema such as incest avoidance. [Question from p.21-is race an example of phenotype, or synonymous with it?] "To break this seamless matrix of causation—to attempt to dismember the individual into "biological" versus "nonbiological" aspects—is to embrace and perpetuate an ancient dualism endemic to the Western cultural tradition: material/spiritual, body/mind, physical/mental, natural/human, animal/human, biological/social, biological/cultural" (21). Acknowledges the radical challenge to established ways of thought that Darwinism has posed, and sees the continuing separation of natural from human sciences as evidence that resistance to the full implications of evolutionary theory are still strong. "To many scholarly communities, conceptual unification became an enemy, and the relevance of other fields a menace to their freedom to interpret human reality in any way they chose" (21). Maintains that intellectual isolationism has grown more extreme with time, and that social scientists' rejection of scientific knowledge disqualifies them from any claims of knowing what is true and what is not. Takes a polemically dim view of the accomplishments of the social sciences in the last 100 years or more (23). They invent a name for the real villain in their tale: the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), that which they recommend that social science scholars discard. In its place is recommended the "Integrated Causal Model" (ICM) which seeks to connect the natural and human sciences into one enterprise. Outlines four major points to be argued: (1) that there is a SSSM, a set of assumptions about "humans, minds, and their collective interaction" that has prevented an integrated approach to inquiry; (2) that these assumptions that comprise the SSSM hold grains of truth but have ultimately steered social science off course; (3) that new findings in various fields from evolutionary biology to cognitive science to social anthropology point the way to an integrated model, their ICM; and (4) how the ICM connects the social sciences to the other sciences via eight points enumerated on p. 24. "On this view, culture is the manufactured product of evolved psychological mechanisms situated in individuals living in groups" (24).

"The Standard Social Science Model" (24-34)—Question to myself going in: is this a straw man? Begins with quote from Durkheim's The rules of sociological method (1895) that expresses an essentially tabula rasa theory of human nature. Outlines the content of the SSSM in ten "steps," which are in fact more like layers of ideology built up from a base. "Step" 1 is the "psychic unity of humankind," the finding (which authors endorse) that genetic differences among different races are insignificant, that infants everywhere are born with the same biological endowment."Step 2" is the observation that, while all infants are alike, adults differ profoundly according to the society and culture in which they developed, therefore human mental organization does not explain culture. "Step 3" says that since infants' abilities differ so radically from adults, they must acquire it from external sources. "Step 4" identifies those external sources as the local social environment. Cites Geertz's argument (from his "Evolution of Mind" essay?) that a mind developed without culture would be an incoherent mess. In "Step 5," sociocultural elements precede the individual and thus "the individual is the creation of the social world" (26) and not vice versa. This image of the all-powerful society and the hapless individual is one of the authors' weakest generalizations with respect to current scholarship. "Step 6" builds on step 5 by saying that since culture is the causal factor that shapes individuals, then culture (and other collective phenomena) is what is worth studying. Even thinking is considered a cultural phenomenon in this view. These first six steps trace the enculturation process that turns infants into adults.

If culture "creates" the individual, then what creates culture? Since "human life is complexly and richly ordered.... what is the generator of complex and significant organization in human affairs" (27, original emphasis)? Step 7 says, "the individual" is not the answer, since the infant's skills are so meager. Rather, step 8 says, organization is the result of "emergent processes" at the level of group interaction, even the organization of phenomena such as emotions, which can be explained as social constructions. In step 9, human nature is seen as nothing more than the capacity for culture, a blank slate or, later, a general-purpose computer programmed by environmental input. Thus, in step 10, the role of psychology is to explain how the content of culture is learned using the content-independent processes of the human mind. As with the behaviorists, "in mainstream cognitive psychology, it is assumed that the machine is free of content-specialized processes and that it consists primarily of general-purpose mechanisms" (30). Psychologists advocating for modular intelligences therefore represent a critique of the mainstream view. I would add that Rosch's color work got shunted into the special-exception content category, thus blunting her work as a critique of Whorf since color then was not an example of general-purpose processing. This exposition is followed by an eloquent apologia for overgeneralization (31). Eleven "propositions" are offered that are supposed to comprise "standard views of culture" (31-32); they deal with the relationships of human groups to cultures, the transmission of cultures across generations, assumptions about the nature of learning and socialization, the social construction of knowledge, emergent group processes, and the rejection of a biological contribution to cultural content. Section concludes with three defects of the SSSM: (1) outmoded theory of human development, in which everything that appears after birth is attributed to environmental causes without consideration for biologically-determined features of development such as teeth, breasts, and (by extension) some aspects of mental organization; (2) a faulty dichotomization of biological and environmental factors as if the two were mutually exclusive; and (3) the general-purpose, content-free model of mind is insufficient to explain human psychology.

"The World Built by the Standard Social Science Model" (34-49)—The point of this section is to anticipate and address the negative ramifications posed if one were to abandon the SSSM. These ramifications fall under two general types of authority that the SSSM commands, the moral and the empirical. Moral objections to "nativism" (i.e., evolutionary explanations of cultural phenomena) are of three types: a conflation of all biological arguments into one (objectionable) category; a "biophobia" in which biological explanations are to be avoided by hook or crook, even at the expense of "coherence"; and a resistance to "constraints and limits on human aspirations" (38). "Environmentalism," the opposite of "nativism," holds the moral higher ground because it implies the perfectability of human endeavor and an equality among all peoples, whereas certain forms of nativism (esp. "behavior genetics") have been used to justify all manner of atrocities against targeted groups of people. Subsequently, all nativist explanations have been tarred with the same brush, and likewise many an opposition parallel to the nativist/environmentalist one, including rationalism/empiricism, heredity/environment, instinct/learning, nature/nurture, human universal vs. cultural relativism, human nature vs. human culture, innate vs. acquired behavior, Chomsky/Piaget, biological vs. social determinism, essentialism vs. social construction, modularity vs. domain-generality. Under "biophobia," they note a preference for environmentalist (i.e., "particularistic") explanations and how these may, and in practice are, always substituted for nativist ones no matter how well-supported the latter. Of these environmentalist alternatives, the "coherent" ones share with their nativist opponents both innate and learned elements, but differ in postulating general mechanisms (e.g. behaviorism) instead of content-specific ones (e.g., Chomsky's language faculty). "Incoherent" environmentalist arguments are expressed solely in terms of environmental factors, without reference to the cognitive apparatus necessary for those factors to have an effect. The last sort of objection, which casts nativist explanations as gloomy reinforcements of the negative status quo in human behavior, suffer from the fallacy of assuming a lack of structure leads to freedom. "Evolved structure does not constrain; it creates or enables" (39). They liken their model of the mind with many content-specific competencies to a complex computer program with millions of lines of code and many specialized subroutines. The more structured the program, the more (not less) it is able to accomplish. The moral objection to constraints confuses two kinds of constraints: those on the means (i.e., cognitive structure) and those on the outcomes (i.e., events in the world). It is the latter to which the moral objections actually pertain, not the former. Moreover, they argue, if there are cognitive structures that do cause negative outcomes, it is morally imperative that we discover what they are so that we can address them. Remaining in ignorance will not help.

Regarding the "empirical authority" of the SSSM, authors reject the claim that overwhelming support for a content-free psychology and a content-ful anthropology results from the data collected by researchers. They charge that these are assumptions built into the working definitions of these disciplines, self-fulfilling prophecies reinforced by rhetorical and methodological practices. Anthropologists have gone to extraordinary lengths to explain all of human behavior in terms of the particular (e.g., Mead on males and females), have made a fetish of the exotic, and have thereby eviscerated the concept of human nature to the point of meaninglessness. Authors maintain instead that what should be developed is a theory of universal mechanism that allows for variable behavior as output, not unlike the distinction in genetics between genotype and phenotype. They promote this distinction in terms of evolved vs. manifest phenomena (45). They reject the distinction in SSSM between biologically and socially determined phenomena, and instead recast them as closed and open behavior programs, respectively, e.g., Ekman's facial expressions vs. language acquisition. Instead of looking to emergent group-level processes to explain the origins of culture, authors look to the mind, "where there is sufficient anti-entropic computational power to explain the rich patterning of human life" (48). They acknowledge, however, that the SSSM as ideology has spread far beyond social science circles to become "the common sense and common decency of our age" (48), and that biologists themselves (such as Gould) have gone along with it because it allows them to conduct their research "without having to fear that they might accidentally stumble into or run afoul of highly charged social or political issues."

"The Evolutionary Contribution to Integrated Explanation" (49-73)—Promises to discuss contributions of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and the integration of the two that point to three major problems with the SSSM: (1) misconception of the "nature/nurture debate"; (2) general-purpose psychological mechanism could not have been produced by natural selection; and (3) general-purpose processing cannot explain the things that people are able to do. But do they come back to these problems? Similarly, they outline that an argument for an evolved human cognitive apparatus must (1) follow principles of evolutionary process; (2) draw from designs of ancestral species; and (3) account for ancestral environments and events in evolutionary history—but do they ever come back to these? The next long chunk (50-63) gives a definition of life (that which reproduces itself), a summary of how evolution works, a definition of adaptation, criteria for how adaptations are determined using the eye and visual scene analysis as an example of an information-processing adaptation. Distinguishes adaptations from by-products and random effects. Compares and contrasts the processes and results of human engineering with that of natural selection, and characterizes evolutionary biology as a sort of "reverse engineering" (61). Where should we look for the "functional organization" that nature has engineered through evolutionary process? Authors rule out human behavior as too variable, as anthropologists have often pointed out. Neurobiology is too low-level, its mechanisms often have no apparent adaptational function. It is the level of information processing, used in the sense "to refer to a language or level of analysis that can be used to precisely describe any psychological process: Reasoning, emotion, motivation, and motor control can all be described in cognitive terms, whether the process that give rise to them are conscious or unconscious, simple or complex" (65). They argue that information processing capability can make a huge difference to an organism's ability to survive, and that mechanisms of evolutionary biology can be usefully expressed in terms of information processing, such as Hamilton's rule for deciding when to help a relative (67-68). The environment in which humans evolved (both external and internal) should provide important clues as to why we evolved the way we did, hence the importance to psychology of studying paleoanthropology, hunter-gatherer societies, behavioral ecology, botany, medicine, nutrition, etc.

"The Central Elements of Evolutionary Functional Analysis" (73-77)—Authors identify five components to their "reverse engineering" analysis, aka "evolutionary functional analysis": (1) an "adaptive target" or biologically successful outcome in a given situation; (2) background conditions relevant to the situation; (3) a design (i.e., a phenotypic structure) for an information-processing mechanism that achieves the outcome; (4) a "performance examination," essentially a modelling of how the design would perform under various sets of background conditions; and (5) a "performance evaluation," essentially a scorecard in how the design fared in its exam. They respond to Gould & Lewontin's charge of "post hoc storytelling" by pointing to cases where the five parts of such an analysis were fleshed out, not in post hoc fashion, but through predictions that then turned out to be true. One may begin at any step in the analysis and work one's way forward or back to the others.

"Toward a Post-Standard Model View of Development" (77-93)— Basic point here is that adaptations consist not only of functional parts of a biological organism as "finished product," but also the developmental pathways that lead to the end result. Therefore the end result is not predetermined, as intervention in its development will have effects. But also it is the case that development is not an arbitrary function of environment, as we are evolutionarily programmed to develop in certain ways in response to environmental stimuli that are relatively invariant over time and place. Adaptations need not be universal: "Not all features of evolved human design are or can be present at any one time in one individual.... Adaptations need not be expressed in every individual. They only neeed to have been expressed often enough in our evolutionary history to have been targets of selection, and hence, to have been organized by selection so that they reliably develop under appropriate circumstances" (82). When talking about environment, it is important to be specific about what is the "genetically relevant environment," that is what are those environmental cues to which human developmental mechanisms have been selected to respond. This corresponds in their thought experiment to the one stable cushion on the environmental billiard table, which through selection biology seeks to use instead of the other cushions which are always moving. "Social scientists need to recognize that humans have evolved to expect, rely on, and take advantage of the richly structured participation of the environment—including the human social and cultural environment—in the task of adaptive development" (87). They thus reject the traditional divide between the biological and the cultural. They use the example of autism to show that most of us are born with a "theory of mind" that appears at a very early age; to this along with other phenomena like the understanding of emotions, taxonomies, whole objects, etc. they apply the label "metaculture," not unlike Chomsky's "universal grammar" for language. They claim that anthropologists themselves, like fish in water, might deny the existence of metaculture but could not function themselves without it, for they would never be able to understand or interpret a culture other than their own.

"The Transition to Post-Standard Model Psychology" (93-114)—traces how the general-purpose computer model of mind has lost credibility since Chomsky's work in linguistics, supplanted (in their view) by a large array of content-specific mechanisms working in conjunction with some general ones. Although they still put it in quotes, they write of a "universal grammar" as if it does really exist. Claim that SSSM-style work in psychology never really provided strong support for domain-general mechanisms, in part due to the lack of ecological validity of the experimental designs (95-96). Ethologists, on the other hand, studied animals in more natural habitats and were able to gain valuable insights on how humans behave that could never have come from tightly controlled psychology experiments. They cite a plethora of other work on perception, motivation, and emotion to support their point that "the central tenets of Standard Model psychology are contradicted by results from a large and rapidly growing body of research" (100). They go on to try to dismantle logically the SSSM notion that general-purpose computing is the sign of a more evolved species. They argue that a general-purpose mind would not be well-equipped for survival compared to one with a large number of narrower but more efficient special-purpose mechanisms. General-purpose processing cannot meet the challenge of combinatorial explosion, i.e., the "frame problem" in AI: without a suitably rich frame of background information on the problem to be solved, AI programs have shown themselves inadequate to tasks that humans find simple. Content-specific processors in the brain supply the frame that is otherwise lacking. Furthermore, authors argue that rather than contraining human behavior, special-purpose mechanisms actually enable the ability to adjust behavior to changes in environment. I find a certain parallel in this argument to musical improvisation and composition which also find a productivity amidst a set of rules and which tend to fall apart under conditions of total freedom. "The solution to the paradox of how to create an architecture that is at the same time both powerful and more general is to bundle larger numbers of specialized mechanisms together so that in aggregate, rather than individually, they address a large range of problems" (113). Also, the recognition of more content-specific mechanisms does not imply a reduction in the power or extent of general cognitive capabilities, although they never elaborate on how the two might work together.

"Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture" (114-123)—attempts to dissect culture as a monolithic concept into multiple phenomena with respect to their evolutionary basis. They identify this monolith as "a unitary entity that expresses itself in a trinity of aspects" (115): (1) socially learned, transmitted information; (2) contains most or all adult mental organization and content; and (3) provides basis for within-group similarities and between-group differences among people. Unlike SSSM advocates, they believe mechanisms underlying culture can be explained—some as part of "metaculture," some as "evoked culture" (mechanisms triggered by local circumstances that lead to group similarities and differences), and some as "epidemiological culture" ("a dynamically changing distribution of elements among individuals living in populations over time" (120)) (see 121 for a summary). They conclude by comparing concept of "learning" with the old biological theory of "protoplasm," a meaningless construct that was a placeholder for all of the microbiology that was not yet understood. They lump "culture," "rationality," and "intelligence" in this same category: they are to the social sciences as protoplasm was to biology: placeholders for what will one day be more persuasively explained by uncovering the intricate workings of the mind.

Notes and Bibliography (123-136).
BF711.A33 1992.