Review of L. Barrett, R. Dunbar and J. Lycett, Human Evolutionary Psychology.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(1): (2003).
This is an enormously rich book, summarizing and explaining just about every recent controversy in this burgeoning field. As if anticipating anthropologists’ misgivings about the whole enterprise, the authors begin by attacking the ‘over-enthusiastic application of evolutionary theory to humans in a way that seems to leave no room for cultural influences’. Thanks to language, they stress, humans have been able ‘to create and live in “virtual worlds”– worlds where intangible ideas and imaginary flights of fancy are as important and as meaningful as solid objects’ (p. 2). Culture – as Kenan Malik observes – is not a mere encrustation upon human nature, like dirt on a soiled shirt.Without culturally transmitted patterns of behaviour and belief, human nature would lack any vehicle of expression.
The authors’ stated aim is to bridge the gap between ‘evolutionary psychology’ (EP) and ‘human behavioural ecology’ (HBE). EP focuses on putatively innate cognitive mechanisms; HBE is much closer to anthropology, examining social and other behavioural strategies. While ostensibly even-handed, in practice the strongly HBE authors mount an effective demolition job on EP as promulgated in the United States. In the wellpublicized metaphor of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, the human mind is a ‘Swiss army knife’. More specifically, it is ‘a confederation of hundreds of thousands of functionally dedicated computers’ designed by natural selection during the remote Plio-Pleistocene. The linguist and philosopher Jerry Fodor – who first coined the term ‘modular mind’– dismisses this whole idea as ‘modularity gone mad’. Barrett and colleagues support Fodor in tearing it to shreds. If there is a dedicated, informationally encapsulated, hardwired module for each aspect of human behaviour, how can any of us possibly decide between alternative courses of action? Which specialized module could conceivably do the deciding? Are the cues to trigger this or that ‘module’ weighted in some way? How do the postulated modules interact with one another and engage with the real world? ‘So far’, note the authors,‘Tooby and Cosmides have not provided the answers to these questions’ (p. 273).
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Barrett, Louise, Robin Dunbar & John Lycett. Human evolutionary psychology. xiv, 434 pp., figs., tables, bibliogr. London, New York: Palgrave, 2002. £17.99 (paper)