Review of P. Carruthers and A. Chamberlain (eds), Evolution and the human mind.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(4): 805-806 (2001).
This volume is a contribution to ‘evolutionary psychology’, according to which the mind is an organ shaped by past evolutionary pressures. Human mental architecture is conceptualized as modular– that is, composed of innately channelled, domain-specific, semiautonomous subsystems. Historically, the first claimed module was Noam Chomsky’s celebrated but still controversial ‘language faculty’. More recently, theorists have posited dedicated neural circuits for music, mind-reading, facerecognition, cheat-detection, technological competence, and much else.
Accepting that the mind must be modular in some sense, which of these hypothesized subsystems can confidently be stated to exist? Following a useful editors’ introduction, Richard Samuels defends the notion of multiple computational modules which are in a sense content-free, while persuasively rejecting what he terms ‘Chomskian modules’innately specified bodies of mentally represented theory and information about the real world. Claire Hughes and Robert Plomin present a study of mind-reading performance in young twins.Among their findings are, first, that each child’s unique social experience contributes to the progressive modularization of its cognitive processes. Secondly, genetic influences on mind-reading appear largely independent of genetic influences on verbal intelligence. Dominic Murphy and Stephen Stich argue persuasively for a Darwinian restructuring of clinical psychology. They suggest that many people suffering from socalled mental disorders have nothing wrong with them at all – their minds ‘are functioning exactly as Mother Nature intended them to’. Such individuals may be diagnosed as ‘ill’ simply because they resist accommodation to the competitive stresses of modern Western industrial civilization – that is, to a lifestyle bearing little relationship to the challenges faced by our more co-operatively organized evolutionary ancestors.
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P. Carruthers and A. Chamberlain – (eds). Evolution and the human mind: modularity, language and meta-cognition. xiv, 331 pp., diagr., illus., bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 2000. £40.00 (cloth), £14.95 (paper)