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→Human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Some language was so absolutist as to be inaccurate and confusing. "But the changes are not random" to "But the changes are not usually random" (noise can induce random changes, whether that is literal noise in the case of spoken words or copying errors in the case of physical media) Another example is "Memes are not like genes" to "Memes are not precisely like genes" and "Genes are copied faithfully" to "Genes are normally copied faithfully". |
m →Human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Changed "books" to "printed media" |
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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. When 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> It is useful for some applications to note, however, that there are ways to pass ideas which are more resilient and involve substantially less mutation, such as by mass distribution of
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>
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