This book is about ‘evolutionary psychology in the round’, which Cecilia Heyes distinguishes from the popular program known these days as Evolutionary Psychology. The latter carries commitments to specific, contentious, theoretical assumptions: particularly, the conception of the human mind as consisting of a very large array of innate, domain-specific, cognitive devices—each one individually crafted by natural selection as a solution to an adaptive problem faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the environment of the Pleistocene. The distinction is important. Darwinizing psychology is not the same thing as embracing the particular opinions of the narrow program of Evolutionary Psychology.
The present volume arose from a workshop at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in 1998. The contributors form a distinguished group, and only a few of the papers are disappointing. But weaknesses associated with the conference origins are not altogether absent. The intention is to provide “an overview of contemporary research on the phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and cultural evolution of cognition” (ix). In reality, the volume is more a collection of snapshots of a diverse group of loosely-related projects than it is a general representation of the implications for psychology and cognitive science of an evolutionary view of mind and behavior. Most of the papers deal primarily with topics in (nonhuman) animal cognition. This is welcome. The narrow program of Evolutionary Psychology has neglected the sciences of animal cognition and behavior, perhaps to enhance the illusion that ‘Darwinian Psychology’ did not exist prior to the 1980s. However, it is not likely that this volume will do very much by itself to improve the situation. There are some very good contributors, including Bateson on imprinting; Mackintosh on abstraction in pigeons and other animals; Dickinson on causal cognition and goal-directed action in rats; and Tomasello, Dunbar, and others on primate cognition. But, a philosophical reader will likely find that whatever the intrinsic interest of the research, most of the hard work of interpretation for philosophical reward has yet to be done.
Animals are difficult subjects for psychological research. High quality experimental work (for instance, Clayton and her group on episodic memory in scrub jays; and Dickinson and Balleine on goal-representation in rats) is impressive for its technical ingenuity. But a philosophically inclined reader looking for memorable generalizations about human minds or the evolution of cognition will not find them here. This in itself is an important lesson. Some philosophers have been attracted to the narrow program of Evolutionary Psychology because of its simplicity and sweep and utility as a source of snappy ideas. There is nothing wrong with thinking about psychology in the context of evolution—how could that fail to be the appropriate context? The question is where to go from there.
Animal psychology represents a largely untapped alternative to speculative human cognitive phylogeny. In principle, if we seek biologically realistic models of human cognition, we are more likely to find them in the sciences of animal psychology than in computer science. In reality, philosophers who turn to the sciences of animal cognition and behavior, in order to ‘naturalize’ their own thinking, face a long and hard road. For a large part of the twentieth century, the field known as Comparative Psychology was committed to the search for laws of psychology that applied to all animals: Psychology was supposed to be species-neutral. The biological turn, which brought species-specific characteristics into focus, was a necessary development in more recent Comparative Psychology. One of the first lessons to take on board when ‘Darwinizing’ psychology is that species differences do make a difference. An awareness of the variety of cognitive structures and processes that have evolved within the animal kingdom can enrich one's understanding of the human mind as a specific product of specific evolutionary processes. Even if one still wants to play the game of inventing cognitive solutions to adaptive problems faced by ancestral hominids in the Pleistocene, at least one will have a better grasp of the sheer range and variety of possible solutions that evolution could provide. If an appreciation of biological diversity is the first lesson for the Darwinian psychologist to learn, perhaps the second lesson should be that the quest for principles of a universal psychology was not silly. All animals, including humans, do appear to be like-minded to an interesting degree.
One way for philosophers to contribute to science is to employ their analytic skills to critique experimental design or to identify inferential gaps between experimental data and theoretical conclusions. Some experimental projects seem, for all their ingenuity, unsuited to the larger theoretical questions they are intended to illuminate: mirror self-recognition as putative evidence for self-consciousness comes to mind. But the research on ‘theory of mind’ in nonhuman primates is much more promising. Of those few distinguished philosophers who are actively engaged in the philosophical evaluation of empirical work on animal cognition, Kim Sterelny stands out. His contribution here, “Primate Worlds,” is an exemplar of the art of philosophical commentary on empirical science. He uses the primate studies on deception, theory of mind, and so on, to identify a variety of increasingly sophisticated ways in which one subject might latch on to the mental state of another subject. The ecology of chimpanzee social life turns out to be at least as good a place to study theory of mind as the ecology of the drawing room or the dinner party.
The Evolution of Cognition is not a book for browsing. All of the papers demand close attention; nor is it a book that wears its philosophical interests on its sleeve. Perhaps its greatest value, for philosophical readers, will be in inducing the lesson that Darwinian thinking in psychology should not be an amateur sport.
