Bullock, Seth

English

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

If Bayes’ theorem is as elegant and beau-tiful as mathematicians claim, why can’thighly paid professionals remember anduse it appropriately in the course ofdoing their jobs? If an African gray par-rot can learn rudimentary maths, why isit so hard to teach kids to count? Whydo English-speaking parents expect theirchildren to learn that the uttered word‘dog’ refers to the biological speciesCanis familiaris, whereas the utteredword ‘bird’ refers to the biological classAves? Why do children readily meetthese expectations? In the final chapterof  The Evolution of Mind, LawrenceShapiro suggests that ‘answers to ques-tions like these – questions that a ma-ture psychology should pursue – de-mand that we attend to humanevolutionary history’ (p. 253).Throughout the previous ninechapters of the book, leading thinkersat the boundaries between evolution-ary thought and cognitive science raiseand address a series of such questions,attesting that, in Shapiro’s words, ‘notonly does evolutionary theory help thepsychologist to figure out what thefunctions of psychological traits are, butit also is essential for a complete under-standing of why our psychological traitshave the characteristics that they do’(p. 253). The authors take a broad com-parative perspective throughout, tack-ling phenomena ranging from reason-ing and mathematical abilities, throughlanguage use and theory of mind, toplay behaviour. The book thus augmentsa growing literature dealing with theevolution of cognitive mechanisms1–3.What makes this book distinct fromcontemporary volumes is its strong em-phasis on human development. One ofour species’ most striking qualities is theextended period of dependence thatcharacterizes our early years. It is dur-ing this period that the sophisticatedpsychological capacities that distinguishus from other animals emerge, thus itmakes sense for evolutionary psycholo-gists to attend to developmental re-search. Consequently, many of the con-tributors to this book have no time forthe adage ‘never work with children oranimals’, believing that research intoinfant numeracy, the deceitful behav-iour of primates, or, one might add, theimpairments of clinical populations, canhelp inform theories of intact adulthuman cognition. Indeed, these writersare urging behavioural researchers towork with both children and animals –to use the same methodological toolsto explore what are ostensibly similarcognitive phenomena, in order thatcomparative questions can be answeredgermanely.For example, Marc Hauser and SusanCarey present the results of preferential-looking-time studies (used routinely toassess the cognition of pre-verbal humaninfants) that employed populations ofcaptive and free-ranging rhesus monkeysas subjects. Their success in exploringprimate numeracy opens up a cornu-copia of experimental manipulationsthat could be performed on both hu-man infants and non-human primates.Through this kind of methodologicalcross-fertilization, the authors hope tomove beyond anthropomorphic prima-tology (treating animals like children)and ‘knee-jerk behaviourism’ (treatinganimals like robots) in order to overcome‘criticism that interspecific differencesare driven by method differences andinterspecific similarities may sometimesbe spurious’ (p. 54).As one might expect, several unify-ing conceptual and methodological con-cerns percolate the book, trickling downfrom the largely empirical early chaptersto solidify in the final, more philosophi-cal ones. Biological conceptual tools,such as the distinction between homo-plasy and homology (the resemblanceof traits due either to convergent evo-lution or common descent, respectively),or the methodology of systematics (de-riving evolutionary family trees), jostlewith anthropological and ethologicalconcerns, such as the difficulties in-volved in attributing certain cognitivecapacities to species on the basis of theirbehaviour (and also, as Sober points out,on the basis of the behaviour that theyfail to display), or the problems associ-ated with rigorous study of behaviouralphenotypes, such as play.Although an evolutionary approachto cognitive science is clearly worth-while, the features that distinguish usfrom other animals have arisen over tooshort a timespan to be readily explainedby changes in our physiology alone. Toaccount for human behavioural flexi-bility, the role of cultural change in ad-dition to and in interaction with geneticchange must be entertained. The lack ofattention to this aspect of human devel-opment is the greatest weakness of thebook, and perhaps the field it represents,as it underlies a mistrust of the evolu-tionary approach to psychology. In thesame way that Haeckel’s maxim that ‘on-togeny recapitulates phylogeny’ alloweddevelopmental psychology to fuel a‘lazy man’s palaeontology’ (Ref. 4, p. 35),evolutionary theory is seen by some as supporting a lazy man’s social sci-ence, muddying genuine research with damaging evolutionary speculation.The material presented in TheEvolution of Mind remains valid andgroundbreaking, and should be readby any developmental or cognitive sci-entists keen to keep abreast of the grow-ing significance of evolutionary theoryBooks etcetera361Trends in Cognitive Sciences – Vol. 3, No. 9,  September 1999The Evolution of Mindedited by Denise Dellarosa Cummins and Colin Allen, Oxford University Press,1998. £25.00 (vii + 264 pages) ISBN 0 19 511053 6to their research. However, until theo-retical and empirical approaches to theinteraction between culture and evolu-tion (for example, Ref. 5) can be shownto be sound and made to bear fruit, thecomparative approach epitomized herewill leave some psychologists feelingshort changed, and important chunksof human psychology in the dark.Seth BullockCenter for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition,Max Planck Institute for Human Development,Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany.tel: +49 30 82406 350fax: +49 30 82406 399e-mail: bullock@mpib-berlin.mpg.deReferences1 Barkow, J.H., Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J., eds(1992)  The Adapted Mind: EvolutionaryPsychology and the Generation of Culture,Oxford University Press2 Whiten, A. and Byrne, R.W., eds (1997)Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions andEvaluations, Cambridge University Press3 Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P.M. and the ABCGroup (1999) Simple Heuristics That Make UsSmart, Oxford University Press4 Costall, A. (1985) Specious origins? Darwinismand developmental theory, in Evolution andDevelopmental Psychology (Butterworth, G.E.,Rutkowska, J.C. and Scaife, M., eds), pp. 30–41,Harvester Press5 Laland, K.N., Odling-Smee, J. and Feldman,M.W. Niche construction, biological evolutionand cultural change Behav. Brain Sci. (in press)BOOK REVIEWSPublishers: send copies of booksyou would like to be reviewed inTICS to the Editor.Readers: would you like to reviewa particular book for the journal?Contact the Editor to discuss theproject. Other types of publications (soft-ware, CD-ROMs, films, art exhi-bitions, etc) will be considered aswell. Send any ideas or proposalsfor reviews to the Editor.

and the ABC Group

Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations,

Specious origins? Darwinism and developmental theory,

The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture,

The child in time: A book review of Denise Cummins and Colin Allen's "The Evolution of Mind"

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The child in time:Book review of Denise Cummins and Colin Allen's “The Evolution of Mind”

The child in time: A book review of Denise Cummins and Colin Allen's "The Evolution of Mind"

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