Dual inheritance theory: Difference between revisions

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===Human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology===

Evolutionary psychologists study the evolved architecture of the human mind. They see it as composed of many different programs that process information, each with assumptions and procedures that were specialized by natural selection to solve a different adaptive problem faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors (e.g., choosing mates, hunting, avoiding predators, cooperating, using aggression).<ref>Barkow, J., Cosmides, L, & Tooby, J. (1992) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford University Press.</ref> These evolved programs contain content-rich assumptions about how the world and other people work. AsWhen ideas are passed from mind to mind, they are changed by these evolved inference systems (much like messages get changed in a game of telephone). But the changes are not usually random. Evolved programs add and subtract information, reshaping the ideas in ways that make them more "intuitive", more memorable, and more attention-grabbing. In other words, "memes" (ideas) are not precisely like genes. Genes are normally copied faithfully as they are replicated, but ideas normally are not. It's not just that ideas mutate every once in a while, like genes do. Ideas are transformed every time they are passed from mind to mind, because the sender's message is being interpreted by evolved inference systems in the receiver.<ref>Boyer, P. (2001) Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books.</ref><ref>Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Blackwell.</ref> ThereIt is nouseful necessaryfor contradictionsome betweenapplications evolutionaryto psychologynote, and DIThowever, but evolutionary psychologists argue that thethere psychologyare implicit in many DIT models is too simple; evolved programs have a rich inferential structure not captured by the idea of a "content bias". They also argue that some of the phenomena DIT models attributeways to culturalpass evolution are cases of "evoked culture"—situations inideas which different evolved programs are activatedmore inresilient differentand places,involve insubstantially responseless to cues in the environment.<ref>Toobymutation, J.such &as Cosmides,by L.,mass (1992) Psychological foundationsdistribution of culturebooks. In The Adapted Mind.</ref>

There is no necessary contradiction between evolutionary psychology and DIT, but evolutionary psychologists argue that the psychology implicit in many DIT models is too simple; evolved programs have a rich inferential structure not captured by the idea of a "content bias". They also argue that some of the phenomena DIT models attribute to cultural evolution are cases of "evoked culture"—situations in which different evolved programs are activated in different places, in response to cues in the environment.<ref>Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L., (1992) Psychological foundations of culture. In The Adapted Mind.</ref>

Human [[sociobiology|sociobiologists]] try to understand how maximizing genetic fitness, in either the modern era or past environments, can explain human behavior. When faced with a trait that seems maladaptive, some sociobiologists try to determine how the trait actually increases genetic fitness (maybe through kin selection or by speculating about early evolutionary environments). Dual inheritance theorists, in contrast, will consider a variety of genetic and cultural processes in addition to natural selection on genes.

Human [[sociobiology|sociobiologistsSociobiologists]] try to understand how maximizing genetic fitness, in either the modern era or past environments, can explain human behavior. When faced with a trait that seems maladaptive, some sociobiologists try to determine how the trait actually increases genetic fitness (maybe through kin selection or by speculating about early evolutionary environments). Dual inheritance theorists, in contrast, will consider a variety of genetic and cultural processes in addition to natural selection on genes.

===Human behavioral ecology===