Schedule
Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason?
Dr. Leda Cosmides, UCSB, Evolutionary Psychology
Dr. John Tooby, UCSB, Anthropology Dept.
The study of the human mind has recently been moved into the
natural sciences through biology, computer science, and allied
disciplines, and the result has been the revelation of a wholly
new and surprising picture of human nature. Instead of the
human mind being a blank slate governed by a few general
purpose principles of reasoning and learning, it is full of
"reasoning instincts" and "innate knowledge" -- that is, it
resembles a network of dedicated computers each specialized to
solve a different type of problem, each running under its own
richly coded, distinctly nonstandard logic. The programs that
comprise the human mind (or brain) were selected for not
because of their generality, but because of their specialized
success in solving the actual array of problems that our
ancestors faced during their evolution, such as navigating the
social world, reasoning about macroscopic rigid objects as
tools, "computing" or perceiving beauty, foraging,
understanding the biological world, and so on. Much of this
research has taken place at UCSB, and in the talk we will show
how "logic probes" have been used to map these reasoning
instincts.
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