7b. Cauchoix, M., & Chaine, A. S. (2016). How can we study the evolution of animal minds? Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 358.
During the last 50 years, comparative cognition and neurosciences have improved our understanding of animal minds while evolutionary ecology has revealed how selection acts on traits through evolutionary time. We describe how cognition can be subject to natural selection like any other biological trait and how this evolutionary approach can be used to understand the evolution of animal cognition. We recount how comparative and fitness methods have been used to understand the evolution of cognition and outline how these approaches could extend our understanding of cognition. The fitness approach, in particular, offers unprecedented opportunities to study the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for variation in cognition within species and could allow us to investigate both proximate (i.e., neural and developmental) and ultimate (i.e., ecological and evolutionary) underpinnings of animal cognition together. We highlight recent studies that have successfully shown that cognitive traits can be under selection, in particular by linking individual variation in cognition to fitness. To bridge the gap between cognitive variation and fitness consequences and to better understand why and how selection can occur on cognition, we end this review by proposing a more integrative approach to study contemporary selection on cognitive traits combining socio-ecological data, minimally invasive neuroscience methods and measurement of ecologically relevant behaviors linked to fitness. Our overall goal in this review is to build a bridge between cognitive neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists, illustrate how their research could be complementary, and encourage evolutionary ecologists to include explicit attention to cognitive processes in their studies of behavior.
During the last 50 years, comparative cognition and neurosciences have improved our understanding of animal minds while evolutionary ecology has revealed how selection acts on traits through evolutionary time. We describe how cognition can be subject to natural selection like any other biological trait and how this evolutionary approach can be used to understand the evolution of animal cognition. We recount how comparative and fitness methods have been used to understand the evolution of cognition and outline how these approaches could extend our understanding of cognition. The fitness approach, in particular, offers unprecedented opportunities to study the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for variation in cognition within species and could allow us to investigate both proximate (i.e., neural and developmental) and ultimate (i.e., ecological and evolutionary) underpinnings of animal cognition together. We highlight recent studies that have successfully shown that cognitive traits can be under selection, in particular by linking individual variation in cognition to fitness. To bridge the gap between cognitive variation and fitness consequences and to better understand why and how selection can occur on cognition, we end this review by proposing a more integrative approach to study contemporary selection on cognitive traits combining socio-ecological data, minimally invasive neuroscience methods and measurement of ecologically relevant behaviors linked to fitness. Our overall goal in this review is to build a bridge between cognitive neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists, illustrate how their research could be complementary, and encourage evolutionary ecologists to include explicit attention to cognitive processes in their studies of behavior.
This article gave me reason to reflect on my last post a little bit more critically. After the Lewis et al. piece from the beginning of the week, I had the general impression that while evolutionary psychology has a good grasp on the “why” part of the easy problem, there was no outlining of specific mechanisms that indicate “how” cognition happens. This seemed to me to be a little underwhelming.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this last piece, however, I get the impression that evolutionary psychology may not even be concerned with reverse engineering. Maybe evolutionary psychology is less concerned with “how” than cognitive science is. Perhaps pairing “how” and “why” together in the first place isn’t necessary. Maybe, a discipline can investigate one and not the other and still make valuable contributions to cognitive science.
You are right on all your points.
DeleteEvopsyc does not, and cannot, reverse-engineer cogsci's "how."
But the evolutionary explanation of "why" continues to be cogsci's task. It's just much harder for learning and language than for spiders and sex...
Upon first reading these two comments, I think I was having difficulty with the notion of "how." When I first read this piece, I think I glazed over the author's idea that evolutionary approaches can be used to understand the evolution of animal cognition, inappropriately equating the understanding of how animal cognition has evolved with actually understanding how animal cognition works. From my understanding, these two are not the same. I think you could understand how evolution has taken place over time, but this does not address the question of how animals cognize. If I have gotten this distinction, I am now seeing why evolutionary psychology "does not, and cannot, reverse-engineer cogsci's "how.""
DeleteThat's right. Explaining "how" calls for reverse-engineering of causal mechanisms. Evolution can only (sometimes) explain "why" -- what was the adaptive advantage provided by the cognitive capacity and how did it evolve? -- but not how the genes or the brain actually produce the capacity. (However, explaining both how and why is part of cogsci's 'easy" problem.)
DeleteI think this reading made me take a step back and think about the similarities and differences we can derive from evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. Correlation does not always mean causation and I think while evolutionary psychology lends important findings towards cognitive science, they’re largely parallel. As Bronwen mentioned, there’s the “why” of the easy problem without particularly rise to “how”. Cognitive science and cognition in general pertains to so much more than spiders and sex, and while the findings from evolutionary psychology can help answer some questions for cognitive science, the ultimate goals between the two are not necessarily aligned. Which, I think completely makes sense since they are separate disciplines, but the questions that drive cognitive science are broader than those that drive evolutionary psychology and so they can only advance cogsci so far.
DeleteI’m a bit confused on the fitness approach. From my understanding, the fitness approach focuses on the fitness costs and benefits of specific abilities that can be linked to cognitive traits, which determines which cognitive traits evolve through natural selection. However, the article states that the first example study using the fitness approach (the study on the evolutionary ecology of spatial memory) lacks measures of fitness. What does “measures of fitness” refer to? I would think that the capacity to adapt spatial memory for food hoarding would be beneficial to survival and reproduction because the individuals that have better capacity for adapting memory could get more food, and thus, increase their chance at survival and reproduction. The authors found that the data“ strongly argues for a role of natural selection in shaping local adaptation for spatial memory, neural density, and neurogenesis in the hippocampus “. Therefore, wouldn’t neural density, for example, be a measure of fitness? Is it not a measure of fitness because it’s not directly connected to survival and reproductive success?
ReplyDeleteMelody, I think neural density would be considered a measure of cognitive capacity, and the authors are looking for a direct measure of fitness (ie reproductive success) to be linked to this. There are certainly ways in which we can imagine cognitive capacity could lead to enhanced fitness, as you noted, but to gain proof for these hypothesized connections there needs to be a demonstration that the cognitive measures (such as neural density) are in fact leading to greater fitness (reproductive success or, as a proxy, survival of an individual). This is related to a concern I had with the last paper for this week - that it seemed like it wasn’t demanding that a proposed adaptive characteristic actually be linked to fitness, but simply taking the presence of a capacity that might be adaptive to show that that capacity exists because it is adaptive. I appreciate that this paper showed how the dual task of (1) identifying a certain cognitive capacity and (2) determining that this capacity is in fact related to the relevant fitness estimate is needed to really investigate evolutionary hypotheses.
Delete“Comparing species that differ in their degree of sociality, Amici et al. (2008) have shown that species with fission-fusion social organization outperform species with very stable social groups in cognitive tasks requiring inhibitory control and/or flexibility.”
ReplyDeleteWhen reading this passage on page 6, I was driven to compare present-day Western society’s organization and its cognitive performance to that of other cultures. I researched what a fission-fusion social organization is (it wasn’t described in the text), and it designates a social group that changes in size and composition through time and space. I would argue that Western society is stable, as it is sedentary and people usually keep the same social circles. I am not sure if nomadic indigenous societies could be classified as perfect fission-fusion societies, but the idea that these groups have better cognitive inhibitory control and flexibility than Western cultures would go against how they are perceived by the West. Western society has historically looked down on these cultures under the false pretext that they are “primitive”. Although it makes sense from an adaptive perspective for fission-fusion societies to have higher cognitive inhibitory control and flexibility due to the complexities of their social organization, this contradicts the assumptions that Westerners have greater self-control and a greater ability to adapt to new norms and structures. This is a bit of a tangent on course materials, but I am very curious about how present-day social structures in different cultures select for specific cognitive skills and facilitate their development.
Camille, I agree that it would be really interesting to look at how present-day social structures tie into ideas of the evolutionarily development of cognition! A question prof. Harnad briefly brought up last class which I find interesting and I think you might too goes something like the following. The development of society as we know it was possible because of our cognitive abilities (in particular learning and language). Looking at this society, though, what have we done with our cognitive abilities? Even just focusing on actions associated with climate change, we seem set to destroy ourselves and much of the world around us. If an alien were to come study us in two hundred years, would our cognitive abilities have turned out to be a stable evolutionary strategy, or will we all be dead? I know it’s a bit dark for a Monday afternoon to think abut being in the midst our inevitable demise caused by a once-adaptive ability that has outlived it usefulness, but it’s a interesting thought. Often I find, when considering evolution (or, similarly, human history), we think about it as something that happened in the past, rather than as something that is ongoing, happening to us right now. And remembering that this thing we’re talking about is something we’re currently living through can bring a bit of a different perspective, so I like your question which connects understandings of evolutionary history to currently existing societies :)
DeleteI think it is important to note that in the text, the author was talking about evolutionary difference between species. A fusion-fission organization refers to the mechanism of being able to split temporarily in small groups, then come back. This process just creates more diversity in the small groups (number,composition,etc.), and flexibility for what the members of the specie considers "in-group".
DeleteThis characteristic exists across all humans. Just as much in a city than in the wild. I don't believe it's useful to look at evolutionary/biology processes to try to compare cognitive capacities of different cultural groups of humans; this can (and has in the past)easily backfire and lead to more racism.
-Elyass A.
Caroline, you brought up a really interesting thought about whether our cognitive abilities are evolutionarily strategic or not. It made me think of one example, where we clearly do not act in the most beneficial way. In the case I am thinking of, each hemisphere of a participant was tested on a sorting task. The subjects were told the probability of being correct when sorting an item into a given category prior to the experiment. The results were that the right hemisphere used the given information to maximize correct answers while the left hemisphere did not. This seems to show that our interpretation of reality is not always rational, and it questions how certain traits might be seen as advantageous anymore. I was also thinking of how this might apply to a Turing machine because generally, I think of machines producing answers based on hard calculations, not something like intuition. However, this could not be the case for a T3 robot. I wonder how a robot might be able to know the most beneficial course of action but act in a different way. Is it just a matter of prioritizing a different set of information more?
DeleteUpon reading your skywriting, what I found quite interesting was your proposal of whether cognitive abilities are evolutionarily strategic or not. This reminded me of the term bounded rationality. Bounded rationality is identified as decision making processes that are limited by the amount of information that is available to the subject. In regard to the question of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary cognition, I think the question would be, are there boundaries on cognitive abilities and if so, where do they come from? In cases where something is less efficient than it could be, the question could become is the limitation inherited, what allows us to see this potential weakness, and what is the missing link between understanding that something is less efficient and correction
DeleteGoing back to the point brough up by Caroline where she mentioned a brief idea talked about by professor Harnad, i think that he brough up a great question regarding our cognitive abilities now. All the decisions that seem to be taken by people in positions of power are directly impacting the world that we live in, in mostly negative ways, regardless of all the data showing us that we are inevitably “digging our own grave” per say, we seem to continue in our same behaviours. Personally, to answer the question posed by this statement, I would argue that humans cognitive abilities are not a stable evolutionary strategy but rather I’m not sure we will be around in the next few hundred year (or less even…).
DeleteEvolutionary psychology examines why certain cognitive abilities have aided the survival and reproduction of our ancestors. The fitness approach “provides opportunities to integrate our proximate understanding of cognition with new findings on the ultimate causes of cognitive evolution” which is interesting as it looks at evolution and fitness from a contemporary perspective. This triangulation of approach will help to address the limitations of both approaches, in order to get a better and more holistic attempt to answer the ‘why’ question; ‘why we do what we can do’ of both the easy and hard problem. Nonetheless both fitness approach and evolutionary psychology don’t address ‘how’ of cognition, how we can do what we can do (reverse engineering). We already have attempted to look at the how and reached multiple obstacles; mirror neurons, Turing test, Searle’s Chinese room, computationalism…. Could looking at the “why” through both of these approaches help us to begin understanding cognition, providing us a pathway to begin looking at understanding the how?
ReplyDeleteHey Lola! I had some similar takeaways from the article. From the beginning, this quote stood out in my mind: “The evolutionary history of species can help reveal how different cognitive functions or neural structures come about and can reveal constraints in the evolution of more complex cognition. Furthermore, understanding how selection in a natural setting acts on cognition and neural structures could reveal why specific abilities or mechanisms arise in some systems but not others.” This quote helped me understand the interplay between cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. I understand that evolution alone will not provide all the answers, but I agree that having more interdisciplinary research may be beneficial. There may be different ways of thinking about the hard problem through evolutionary research that could inform the work of cognitive science. From some of the earlier comments in this thread I’ve come to understand that in order to answer the easy problem, we must reverse-engineer causal mechanisms in order to fully answer the question, which is an issue of cognitive science, not evolution. We can understand the question of “why” partially through evolutionary research (sometimes), which is beneficial to a certain point. My question then becomes, could cognitive science and evolutionary research work together on a proposal for cognitive science’s hard problem (why we feel things)? Is there a benefit to cognitive science in keeping these disciplines separate?
DeleteMadelaine, I just want to elaborate on my previous reply to you in 7a. First, I don't think the focus of this paper is Evolutionary Psychology but rather evolution on neural structures which in turn affects cogntition. As the authors stated in the paper, many experiments examinging the relation between brain sizes and cognitive abilities are significant, especially put in the evolutionary context. Although we have invalidate the correlation approach in Week 4 through Fodor's argument, correlation is so far the best we can attain, so we have no choice but to use it. Of course, better approaches (if any) should be adopted.
DeleteI agree with Madelaine that an integrative approach is worth investigating. Bringing up "fitness" seemed a little off, because it's used in explaining ultimate causes and cognitive science explanations don't come with that tag. But my initial impression may speak to the authors' point that they see the "establishment of entirely independent lines of research". It is not to say that we can mix up explanations for distal and proximal causes; however, the premise that cognition is subject to natural selection makes sense to me, and its role in evolution could show interesting interplay. At this point, I can't help be a pessimist about solving the hard problem whether or not cognitive science and evolutionary research work together.
DeleteIn reading the three major hypotheses explaining neurocognitive evolution, ecological intelligence, social intelligence, and change buffer, I could not help but feel like all three could be condensed into the last hypothesis. The author explains that cognition evolved to buffer individuals from ecological and social changes, thus, wouldn’t this ability to change according to the situation also be considered environmental and social intelligence, or more generally intelligence? This idea brought to mind a paper I had read recently about wolf spider mating communication. Essentially, wolf spiders communicate courtship behavior through visual signals and seismic signals. When the substrate they try to send seismic signals through is not conducive to vibration, they can change their behavior to the environmental condition, exhibiting more visual signals. They can also adapt these signals to the interest of their mate, exhibiting the more compelling seismic signals when the potential mate does not express sexual interest. The cognitive mechanisms required for such modality switching communication requires both environmental and social intelligence. Would both environmental and social intelligence be necessary for general intelligence in machines? I feel like this could be comparative analyzed to the socially intelligent T2 and environmentally intelligent T3. A machine would require both elemental capacities for change to be considered intelligent. For me this ultimately begs the question, how do we know what is novel behavioral change to a environmental or social setting against what is a preexisting adaptation? Put more simply, is the evolution of cognition the ability to create new behaviors for any set of new circumstances, or are all animals already genetically predisposed to act in a specific way to each specific environmental instance?
ReplyDeleteI think, in answering your last question, we can look back on the idea of “lazy evolution” that some people discussed in their posts last week. I think Harnad’s point last week is that there is a tension between what is an innate, genetically coded “doing capacity” and what learned behaviors from the environment contribute natural selection. For questioning how the evolution of cognition occurred as a whole, I don’t know if either of these methods could provide a singular answer. As with smaller processes, it seems more likely it was a combination of the two. Even to think of the evolution of the process of “learning”, and how that process then allowed other traits and functions to evolve.
DeleteThis reading argues for what it calls the “fitness approach” to studying cognitive and evolutionary mechanisms together. This approach seeks to find the underlying cognitive abilities that allow for certain behaviours to the evolutionary selection process. This is a departure from most previous research, that would rather study specific behaviours, rather than their underlying cognitive capacities. This approach is interesting in that it seeks to find the underlying structures of behaviour, as well as how we collect and store information in order to be able to produce certain types of behaviour. However, I can’t help but think that this approach is still too utilitarian -- reading this quote gave me a little inkling of doubt as to the ability of even the fitness model for evolutionary study of cognitive processes to explain all of cognition:
ReplyDelete“understanding why cognition evolves will also require us to directly link cognitive performance to ecological challenges that the animals face in their natural environment”
I can’t help but think that not all of our capacities are linked to the kinds of challenges that we face/behaviours that we are required to produce in order to continue our own species. Where much of our behaviour in actuality contradicts the idea that everything we do/are able to do has an evolutionary purpose. Some of the most rewarding or pleasurable things run counter to our own survival. Think nonreproductive sex, smoking cigarettes, feeling the right kind of melancholy after a breakup--or even the harder instantiations of these same kinds of drives, in the form of sadomasochism, murder, suicide. I can’t help but think that this utility or species-continuation theory of fitness leaves something to be desired.
Hi Sofia, I think that you make a very interesting point! You’re right that we often participate in activities that we are consciously aware will decrease our fitness and pose issues to our health (such as smoking). Activities like smoking also do not increase sexual selection, so this article does not describe how or why we would indulge in counter-fitness behaviours such as this. I think that evolutionary psychology explains a lot of our basic tendencies and is definitely quite valuable, but it also cannot explain all of human behaviours and in particular, the vast variation we see in human behaviour and deviance. I wonder if perhaps this theory would be useful to form a baseline of more innate human tendencies and behaviours, and could be layered with other approaches and theories to explain more specific or varied human behaviours?
DeleteI agree with both of your analyses of evolutionary psychology. I would also like to add that I perceive evolutionary psychology and the “Fitness approach" as useful in identifying and explaining the foundational commonalities within humans, but doesn’t necessarily contain room for explanation surrounding our intra-species variations in traits or behaviour. Like both of you mentioned, humans engage in a variety of behaviours that do not aline with promoting fitness, and can be considered deviant from a species continuation perspective.
DeleteAdditionally, It may be possible that there is no paradigm that can account for all the variation within humans. From the sentence “Perception … contributes to the process by which mental representations are built from environmental stimulation. Most behaviors that are at least partially triggered by external stimuli rely on perception” gives us an interesting way to examine this. Since it is the interaction of stimuli with our “perception (i.e., vision, olfaction, audition, gustation, and somesthesia)” that allows us to directly ground words, and hence imbue meaning to language and learn new things; And since, perception is also influencing our representations that are built from external stimuli, then would we not need to have identical perception (which is not yet accurately testable) to result in identical representations and thus, behaviour (in the evolutionary sense)?
Hi Sophia! I loved reading your points because I had some similar thoughts too. To the point of smoking though, I wonder if because it has not yet evolved to be avoided, it is enjoyable because our brains have evolved to seek pleasure. Because nicotine is experienced as pleasurable and can provide an energy boost, perhaps our brains have evolved to favor these benefits over the explicit knowledge that this behavior is harmful for our health. I see this as stronger evidence for evolution being the mechanism in this specific behavior rather than the other way around; it has not evolved to be avoided yet because it is a relatively new environmental threat. To your other points, I do wonder why other behaviors that seemingly decrease our environmental fitness, like suicide or homicide still occur. Could this be taken to mean that while evolution can explain some behaviors, it is not always the largest driving factor in a given behavior?
DeleteHi Sofia, I enjoyed your comment but thinks it leaves something to be desired. While it is true that we partake in behaviors that seem non-adaptive, I don't believe this is any evidence against the idea that our cognition comes from animal-environment relationships.
DeleteAs an example, murder might actually have adaptive value in the animal kingdom. If we look at chimps, who group in tribes, they will often venture away to find and kill other chimps who aren't a part of their tribes. This is adaptive because having less tribal competition for limited resources gives a better chance for their tribe to survive more. So while murder may not be as adaptive for human civilization today, if we look further back in our evolutionary history, it may be fair to say that murder has had more of an evolutionary benefit for a longer time for our species than the negative impact we are trying to deal with today.
There are more explanations for some of the things you mentioned using this animal-environment model of cognition.
The problem with suggesting that there could be other factors to explain cognition is that you would have to identify what they are, and "ecological challenges in their natural environment" encompasses a lot already.
To add to what others have said, it is also very possible that a lot of the "unexplained" behaviors are simply due to the fact that our environment is changing at an increasing rate. We might smoke cigarettes even if they are dangerous because we don't have the cognitive tools to understand the long term effect of smoking. This is where the flexibility of our cognition coupled with the ability to talk/write (share knowledge) comes in play; we see a decrease of smoking as we understand and integrate the concepts of why smoking is bad for us. We humans are facing new challenges that require adaptation that evolution cannot provide (too slow); smoking is one of them, addressing climate change is another big one. Those are novel challenges that humans need to tackle without relying on previously solidified mechanisms. -Elyass Asmar
DeleteI had similar thoughts while reading this article, Sofia. I truly do not believe that all behaviours are necessarily useful in a neo-Darwinian sense. Specifically, I thought of this essay by David Graeber: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun (to tell the truth, this essay is one of the best and most influential pieces of writing that I’ve read at McGill). While the essay is on the philosophical side, it makes some great points. A purely utilitarian view of animal behaviour and cognition doesn’t tell the whole story. Yes, animals have an innate drive to proliferate their genes. This quote from Graeber captures some my thoughts: “ethologists have boxed themselves into a world where to be scientific means to offer an explanation of behaviour in rational terms”. What he is getting at is that many animal behaviours are irrational from an evolutionary point of view. “Evolutionary psychologists claim they can explain why sex is fun. But they can’t explain why fun is fun.” A major example of this is play: doing things just for the fun of it. Life as an end instead of a means. As Graeber puts it, “Evolutionary psychologists claim they can explain why sex is fun. But they can’t explain why fun is fun.” While macroscopic forces such as evolution play a huge role in the continued existence of life, must they encompass everything about life? Evolution may only be one of many forces at play. Even if play may have some positive consequences, namely social, it still should not just be seen as a means to genetic proliferation. The same goes for most aspects of life, other than survival functions such as eating, sleeping, reproductive sex, and excretion. I don’t have fun or consume art because I want to proliferate my genes; I do these things because they are enjoyable. When survival is taken care of, life is meant to be enjoyed.
DeleteThese points are all very interesting, and made me think more deeply about my comment in 7a, particularly in terms of a “fitness approach” lens. Most of the actions and activities we undertake for the purpose of pleasure are, in fact, relatively new. As Madelaine mentioned, cigarettes as we know them today have only recently appeared — in the grand scheme of evolution, which happens on the level of millennia, the specific behaviour itself cannot be accounted for; rather, it’s this pleasure seeking, which relies on neurotransmitter actions in our brains and the pleasurable effects (or simply habits & addictions) it creates; and seeking pleasure, regardless of the means to get it, has always been a human drive.
DeleteCigarettes were only found to be harmful in the past century, and so were other substances with an abuse-potential. Thus, humans’ tendency to abuse these has not necessarily been despite the knowledge that doing so will reduce their fitness. Often times, and until relatively recently, using these substances of abuse (and doing other activities that may reduce fitness) was not known to actually be harmful. And because of the high abuse-potential of many drugs, the drive to keep using them is stronger than anything else — and definitely stronger than some evolutionary drive to maintain our fitness. This is also the case for the drive for homicide or suicide, which are both, to some extent, ruled by intense emotion (and in some cases pleasure or relief).
Keeping with the example of substances of abuse, we know that if used by a pregnant mother this the fetus in utero, and we also know that children’s likelihood of developing a dependence is increased if drugs are abused by siblings or parents in the home. These are not fitness-increasing outcomes, and yet, they happen, regardless of the person’s overall fitness or potential to successfully procreate prior to their developing a dependence. Therefore, the fitness approach does not seem to apply to certain drives and instincts that are learned and emerge through exposure.
To touch on Milo’s comment, I agree with the value of Graeber’s essay (which many of us have probably read at some point in our Cognitive Science studies) in demonstrating the limitations of a purely evolutionary perspective, and showing us that the trivial everyday behaviours we engage in, or observe in other species, don’t necessarily have some ulterior evolutionary/procreative/fitness-increasing motive. Animals don’t play to be more fit; they just play to play. Take the example of squirrels, who seem to be incredibly playful animals; their playtime seems completely random, where even the presence of other squirrels to play with is unnecessary. I often see squirrels playing by themselves in my backyard, jumping up and down, or playing with leaves. They seem to be so focused on playing, that I often wonder whether they would notice if my neighbour’s cat jumped towards them to attack them. In this sense, play might interfere with their fitness, and yet, they keep playing. I think this essay is great especially in the context of trying to merge different fields of study in order to reverse-engineer cognition. And while something like play may not seem to directly relate to cognitive science’s main project, it is, after all, a sensorimotor behaviour, and may be interesting to look at to potentially shed light on the less traditional aspects of cognition.
DeleteI really enjoyed reading the discussions above and they definitely resonated with me -- Why do we do what we do -- is it only because of the need for survival? As others suggested, sometimes we appreciate the seemingly "useless" things without necessarily linking them to survival -- the pure enjoyment of arts, the curiosity of learning random knowledge... What are their evolutionary advantages?
DeleteIn response to Madelaine, I agree that things such as smoking are "new environmental threats" that we have not evolved to avoid yet, because the pleasure we gain from the nicotine is likely an accidental byproduct of other evolutionary incentives of pleasure to push us to reproduce. However, I believe that while suicide is a difficult concept to rationalize evolutionarily, murder/homicide is definitely a deep rooted aspect of evolution in terms of 'survival of the fittest'.
DeletePerhaps in another few thousand years, our cognitive processes will have continued to evolve and limit the unanticipated negative habits of humans... or perhaps we will be extinct, or technology will have continued to evolve so quickly to a point where we cannot even imagine yet.
This article made me think about how the evolution of cognition differs quite a bit among different species. For instance, this article discusses how different cognitive functions evolved since they had a critical advantage in the natural environment. This makes me wonder how humans evolved to have different cognition than other animals, such as language, and why other, similar species did not evolve to have multiple, sophisticated languages like humans did. I think that this article is interesting to study the evolution of wild animals in their environmental context, but it makes me wonder what specific context early humans were in to evolve language. Furthermore, I wonder how our current world with technologies could effect any future evolution as it is a quite different environmental and social context.
ReplyDeleteHi Evelyn! I really enjoyed reading your points. I wonder if humans evolved language capacity due to our nomadic tendencies. Perhaps it is because there is no one “natural” environment for humans that evolved our capacity for language; we need to communicate about more things than we would if we had one native habitat. Or perhaps it was evolved to communicate with people we had not encountered before, but must work together with in order to survive and reproduce? I don’t have the answers to these questions but it is interesting to consider the fact that there must be some uniquely human purpose for the evolution of sophisticated language capacity.
DeleteThis is an interesting thought to consider! Another idea I had was that humans may have evolved sophisticated language capacity to make up for our relatively un-intimidating physical build. We aren't very large, we don't have fangs or claws or much else to protect ourselves with. Maybe language evolved to assist in the creation of tools or social organization to offset our shortcomings elsewhere.
DeleteI think all three of you bring up some very interesting points! Did cognition (or a more specific faculty like language) evolve in us due to specific physical characteristics we have? For example, our throats and vocal cords are able to produce the phonemes that make up human languages — did these come before language, or were they adapted to fit the human need for language? Like Madelaine says, human nomadic tendencies could have something to do with it. However, how does the theory that we want to keep resources within our kin have fit in with that explanation? If we are hardwired to not want to share with those not related to us, do we draw the line after humankind, or just family or the people we live with? Lucie’s point about language being a tool to “offset our shortcomings” is definitely something to consider. Then, though, I would argue that almost anything can be considered an adaptive advantage if it is framed correctly. A mouse being small does not seem like an advantage, since it would not be intimidating to other animals, but perhaps this shortcoming is in fact an advantage since it helps the mouse run away from predators undetected.
DeleteHi evelyn, your question about "how humans evolved to have different cognition than other animals, and why other similar species did not evolve to have multiple, sophisticated languages like humans did." immediately made me think of something I learned in my 410 class where we're investigating the reason why humans have such different and more vast cognitive capabilities than other species. One theory for this is that the human brain develops on a much slower scale in relation to other species, which is consistent with the view that that the more delayed the general development process, the larger the volume of later developing structures such as the frontal cortex in humans. I'm sure this doesn't answer the question entirely but maybe its partially due to the fact our brains develop much more slowly.
DeleteTo had another point to this discussion, we talked in another of my class about the evolution of cognition and particularly social cognition, and one theory that was brought up was the theory of allomothers. The question that this theory tries to answer is specifically, why did humans developed mind-reading abilities, cooperation and language, and not great apes (who share many, many similarities with us, are also very sociable, etc etc). This theory said that the key difference was the fact that while great apes mothers raise their offspring by themselves and are very protective of their babies, human mothers (in hunter-gatherer society) tend to rely much more on the help of other people around them (allomothers) to help raise their child. This means that young kids needed to develop way to communicate their needs to any adults, and adults needed to be able to read the emotions of kids. Of course this theory doesn't cover everything and is just a theory, but I thought I would just add this.
DeleteI spent my whole skywriting for 7A saying that evolutionary psychology is not useful (aka: trashing) so I want to focus my skywriting for 7B on thinking more deeply on the methodology of evolutionary psychology and what it has to offer.
ReplyDeleteUntil now, the course has focused a lot on the “how” part of the easy problem, so my mindset is very much geared towards explaining the causal mechanisms. So much so that other disciplines that do not offer a causal explanation gets disregarded in a way. But it seems that evolutionary psychology is the only available mechanism we have in studying the “why” part of both the easy problem and hard problem. But unlike the Turing Test, which is an empirical method and has a strict criterion of what is successful reverse-engineering of cognition’s doing-capacities, indistinguishability, there isn’t a “one size fits all” method/explanation for the “why” part of cognition, especially with the addition of highly complex cognition such as language.
In my opinion, there are different problems in the approaches illustrated in the article to study cognitive selection: 1) socio-ecological context 2) measures of brain and cognition 3) behaviors 4) fitness and life history.
This may be the Fodorian scoffing but the empirical evidence given by [#2] and [#3] such as [phylogenetic comparative studies telling us how the brain changed at which part of the evolutionary branch] or [case studies looking at behaviors like parental care, foraging, mating choice] are again, mere correlations of cognition.
[#4] Assessing the fitness benefit through reproductive success is too simplistic (as I mentioned in 7A as well). “Selection on cognitive abilities will occur if there are fitness benefits [survival & reproduction] to particular cognitive phenotypes under a given set of environmental conditions (page 5).” There must be some other form of evolutionary theory (other than Darwinian evolution) that doesn’t only have [survival & reproduction] reasoning when explaining adaptive advantages in evolution.
As for [#1], the concept of “agents of selection” in article 7B is also mentioned in article 7A in different terminology, “EEA” or environment of evolutionary adaptedness. “Identifying agents of selection on a cognitive ability allows us to understand under what ecological or social conditions you would expect the evolution of specific capacities”. I believe this approach provides the most valuable information CURRENT evolutionary psychology has to offer because they allow us to picture the ancestral environment.
However, theorizing just based on “agents of selection” are “just-so” stories. In my opinion, the value of identifying “agents of selection” is when we actually test out these environmental conditions through computer simulation. Because we cannot directly test what happened in the past, re-simulating those conditions through computer simulation is the best method we have got and to model the ancestral environment, we need to know exactly what the “agents of selection” were in that environment.
A major topic in evolutionary psychology is how and why things evolved. It's true that evolutionary psychology offers an intriguing take on the "why" components, but as others have noted, I'm not sure if it's gotten us anywhere in terms of identifying a mechanism for the "how." The fitness approach is noteworthy because it investigates the fitness of a characteristic in a modern context. For example, the article discusses brood parasites, and this case study appears to answer the 'why' but fails to describe how it occurs or what the mechanism of detection is (how).
ReplyDeleteNo other theory we've studied so far in the course has offered us a specific answer to the question of "why can we do what we do," besides evolutionary psychology. Firstly, we've seen that categorization is a significant part of our overall cognitive capacities. Secondly, we've seen that Turing gave us a way to verify if we've sufficiently answered the “how” question (Turing Test). Finally, Fodor demonstrated that cognition cannot be all computation because it cannot result in understanding; however, no one has really looked at the question of “why” except evolutionary psychology, which claims that we have certain cognitive capacities in order to address specific evolutionary problems. It's likely that knowing the “why” can be a useful starting point for understanding “how”, but it's unclear if evolutionary psychology can draw those connections and answer the question of "how we do what we do?" (reverse engineering).
I completely agree with you, Melissa. I appreciate how this article gives explanations for why we have the different cognitive capacities (memory, attention, etc.) that we do in the context of evolution. While these explanations are important for an understanding of cognition, they don’t explain everything. They do not even fully answer the easy problem of cognitive science (how and why cognizing beings do what they do), because they don’t explain the ‘how’ part.
DeleteBut maybe that is not the task that evolutionary psychology set out for. It poses a problem for cognitive scientists, who try to reverse-engineer the ‘how’, as well as the ‘why’, but not necessarily to evolutionary psychologists. To fully understand cognition, therefore, I believe a collaboration is needed at various levels in different fields, for different areas of specialization answer different questions, but together the answers can lead to more holistic and complete explanations.
I agree with Shandra, that in order to fully understand how we cognize, we have to look beyond what evolutionary psychology has to offer because although evolution is behind every "how" explanation (how natural selection shaped every trait over time), we cannot reproduce evolution from the start in order to follow each incremental step in the development of the physical structures involved in producing our cognitive capacities. That being said, even if we could reproduce evolution, we would probably still be stuck with the hard problem because we wouldn't be able to tell at what step of the process that sentience starts to occur, which is why solving the hard problem is pretty much completely outside the scope of evolutionary psychology.
DeleteThere were a few things about this reading that piqued my interest. For starters, it’s fascinating that human brains evolved to have many different cognitive faculties than other animals and we’ve been evolved to be able to do things like communicate with language and a capacity to reason/rationalize. I found it interesting to connect this to what I’m learning in my neuropsychology class which also investigates how it is that we were able to develop so many more cognitive capacities, and how this could be related to the fact that our brains develop at a significantly slower rate.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, reading about the fitness approach brought me back to the ideas I had about the 7a reading which is that the answer to the “why” question of cognition can be linked to evolutionary purposes, such as the fact that feeling allows us to solve problems effectively. Similarly, the fitness approach talks about how one of the main advantages of this approach is that it considers how species will only need a subset of all cognitive skills depending on their environment. From my understanding this means that species develop cognitive skills partially by virtue of the different problems they need to solve in their surroundings, and perhaps feelings are a crucial factor in driving the desire to resolve these problems.
“Cognition is also sometimes divided according to the nature of the representation; one can for instance talk about spatial or social cognition. Homing or food caching relies on spatial cognition while discovery of new food patches or new foraging technics by observing conspecifics implies a certain level of social cognition.”
ReplyDeleteIn reading this I thought about how evolutionary psychology definitely lends answers to some areas of cognitive science/ cognition more than others. Through this, I wonder which areas are more effected by the degree of understanding “why” of the easy problem. For example, the why behind spatial cognition is likely less relevant to advancing the hard problem than social cognition may be.
I am interested in learning how researchers manage external validity in regards to cognitive behavioural studies. For example, all environments are not equal for species. In light of evolutionary biology, the environment of the animal is highly influential on certain behaviours. If we are to translate behaviours to cognitive processes in order to make assumptions about the brain and cognition as a whole, it would be hard to control for environment. Environment in a naturalistic study would be more valid and perhaps the common traits can then be attributed to the behaviours and in turn the cognitive processes behind them. Then, you would have a linkage between the effects of environment on cognitive processes. In a very simplistic and hypothetical example, imagine penguin hunting behaviour. Reluctance in Adelie penguins has been observed when going into the water. They jostle each other until one falls in and then they wait to see if there are any predators to go after that first penguin. However, imagine if on the other side of Antarctica the presence of penguin predators was very low. The penguins may not demonstrate this behaviour then as it is not necessary for survival. Thus, this example of social learning would not be present in one population and we would be unable to attribute the behaviour to a cognitive capacity. Essentially, my point is there are external factors that determine the initiation of a behaviour, and if that behaviour is not present, how do we know whether it is purely learned or innate but dormant?
ReplyDeleteThis paper by Cauchoix and Chaine proposed the “fitness approach” to understand the evolution of cognition. Continuing from my skywriting for 7a about psychiatric traits, and thin about very interesting comments above about pleasurable (but unhealthy) behavior like smoking people have today. I think the contradiction arises because, 1. The smoking behavior is not directly inherited (i.e. it is not coded by genes), however, many psychiatric disorder is; 2. The addiction for cigarettes is results in the change in brain chemistry, to some extent, it is not a purely voluntary behavior. Combine this two, I’m not sure if we can apply evolutionary perspective to explain smoking behavior, but rather, if evolution could explain why some people (or certain genes) are more vulnerable to substance addiction.
ReplyDeleteConsidering the study of comparative cognition, another question of my interest is that, can we find similar behavior that is “pleasurable but unhealthy” in animals? If yes, how we explain it by Tinbergen’s questions?
After reading these two articles about evolutionary psychology, I want to discuss a bit about the word 'natural,' which nearly became a 'weasel-word' for me when I was reading this article. In both readings, the term 'natural' refers to something that occurred almost accidentally because in an environment in which certain pressure creates a certain type of object or attributes of an object. However, I want to argue that there are so many categories of human behavior that are created by humans which are not actually 'natural' were studied under the framework of 'natural selection.' When I was reading the part of 'Integrating Ecological and Socio-Ecological Contexts of Selection,' I felt like this is the part where the author talks about this potential problem. From my understanding, what the author proposes is to measure possible social and ecological contexts of selection to understand when and where specific traits will evolve. In this paragraph, the author demonstrates his point by giving an example of studying memory in food hoarding birds. However, if we are studying human minds under such a framework, the main obstacle I could see is how to depict the social context for a population that shares the same traits that we are interested in. I wonder if the best way to answer questions about whether something is a truly basic evolved aspect of human nature is to study as many groups of people as possible we want to apply such a method to investigate some human behavior.
ReplyDeleteFYI, female hyaenas came to dominate males not because they are physically stronger, but rather because they receive greater social support than males. According to Oliver Hoener, "When two hyaenas squabble, the one that can rely on greater social support wins, irrespective of sex, body mass or aggressiveness". Since in the hyaenas clan, males are often immigrants, naturally, females (which are natives of the clan) would receive more social supports and thus could win. Hence, when there are many native males in a clan, the clan would be co-dominated by males and females.
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