Our Mind is Not a Blank Slate: Evolutionary Psychologists Leda Cosmides & John Tooby

“Human behavior is the most amazingly flexible behavior of any animal species,” says UC Santa Barbara anthropology professor John Tooby, “but you can’t unlock these potentialities unless you understand the circuit logic or the code of the programs in the head.”
Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie recently sat down with Tooby and Leda Cosmides, a professor of psychology, who co-founded and co-direct the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology. They believe their approach to examining the information-processing mechanisms that have evolved in the brain can provide greater insights into human behavior and cognition.
Tooby describes their work as being at the intersection of anthropology and primatology, evolutionary biology, and information theory and computer science. Cosmides says she starts with the idea that “behavior is generated by programs in your head, and I don’t mean it metaphorically-devices that are designed by natural selection to process information and guide your behavior. Evolutionary psychology focuses on that intermediate step of what’s the structure of those programs.”
Cosmides does not believe a true science of the mind is possible without an understanding of such structures, arguing that only such an approach makes it possible to intervene to improve people’s lives: “Just like being near-sighted doesn’t mean you can’t see-there’s glasses, contact lenses, there’s laser surgery. Why is that true? Because people bothered to figure out how the eye works.”
They push back forcefully against the criticism that an evolutionary approach is inherently racist or sexist, arguing that it deals with human universals. In fact, they believe their insights can unlock the best elements of human potential. Tooby cites as an example their success in getting people to stop implicitly categorizing others on the basis of race. The researchers hypothesized that this tendency was actually due to the modern co-opting of a cognitive program whose evolutionary function was to detect coalitions, so they crafted experiments that removed race as a predictor of coalition. “In just a few minutes-so you have a lifetime of experience, supposedly, of learning race-but people stopped categorizing by race in their memory systems and their implicit ways,” says Tooby.
Cosmides describes a series of experiments that were the first ever in psychology to demonstrate a female advantage in spatial cognition, which they accomplished by testing spatial abilities that would have benefitted a gatherer rather than a hunter in an early human environment. “It’s not because the scientists were male or female or anything like that. It’s because they were starting from a theory about the adaptive problems our ancestors faced,” states Cosmides.
The psychologists also discuss how their perspective differs dramatically from the traditional view of the mind as a blank slate that passively records and accepts what it’s exposed to. “In an evolutionary psychology model, the person is in a really strong sense inventing themselves, instead of just downloading the environment and becoming what you’re told to be,” says Tooby.
Go to reason.com/reasontv/2015/05/11... for downloadable versions. And subscribe to Reason TV's KZbin channel for daily content like this.
11:51 minutes.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Justin Monticello. Shot by Paul Detrick, Alex Manning, and Zach Weissmueller. Music by Yusuke Tsutsumi.

[@viannaventures514]

when your professor is so well known in his field that all you do to study for finals is watch his videos

[@crewcrew13]

he's your profesor!!!??! He's quoted on most books i have to study

[@AceofDlamonds]

Wow

[@tarikabaraka2251]

Leda Cosmides, es una psicóloga norteamericana, que junto a su esposo el antropólogo John Tooby, ayudó a desarrollar el campo de la psicología evolucionista. Cosmides originalmente estudió biología en la Universidad de Harvard, recibiendo su Bachelor of Arts en 1979.

[@Vorpal_Wit]

NICK! stop cutting people off to get to your next question.

[@IndyThought]

This was a fascinating interview and a topic I would love to hear more about.

[@Aaron.Reichert]

Psychology + computer programming + anthropology + history/archaeology?

[@starrychloe]

The best book on the subject is The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

[@Mastikator]

Trying to blame racism on evolutionary psychology is bizarre, it would be like blaming nuclear bombs on physics.

[@freeshaable]

it doesn't matter. I have tried to introduce a scientific worldview to people who have been fed the post modernist lies about the world and most people here (mostly women) react emotionally and start adding morals into the equation. dont they understand that evolution and for that matter, the universe is indifferent to whats PC or not?

[@Mastikator]

freeshaable People are more concerned with what feels comforting than what is true.

[@diaperdude6163]

Don't worry. Racism doesn't exist anymore. The left defined and re-defined it out of existence.

[@indigocolossus]

I feel this could've been a much longer presentation. Would love to see them back on, maybe having them talk about the slave and master dynamics as to what 'program' would be triggered for you to become a collectivist/statist or individualist/libertarian.

[@garyhubbard3459]

Well good attributes for artificial intelligence. It's like turning on a light slow but the light represents what to do with its own self knowledge.. faster and faster

[@DylanHartDerp]

everything is predetermined, predetermined to be able to change

[@m.s.r.s-9495]

sorry no. some things are fixed just that.

[@garfitosmaximo971]

​@@m.s.r.s-9495such what

[@coolidgedollar2154]

Wait, this video has come out in 2015? Steven Pinker's _The Blank Slate_ was published in 2002, saying the same thing better. Are you telling me that people (libertarians or otherwise) have been battling the feminist/progressive fringe for years without knowing these basic facts and how they apply to gender, etc.?

[@ricardomenacuevas9447]

+Coolidge Dollar Cosmides and Tooby began it all back then in the 1980s. See The Adapted Mind (Oxford University Press, 1995).

[@coolidgedollar2154]

Ricardo Mena Cuevas I shall.

[@HitomiAyumu]

The definition of gender depends on culture. Gender and sex are not the same thing.

[@ricardomenacuevas9447]

Gender is a Biological thing. Culture Reinforces this Fact.

[@HitomiAyumu]

Ricardo Mena Cuevas Look up the definition of gender; this isnt a word game. For example, the Samoan have a third gender called Fa'afafine. A recognized identity/role since at least the early 20th century.

[@watchdealer11]

The left teaches victimhood and serfdom, it takes atrocities that happened to people's ancestors hundreds of years ago and makes them victims today! More blacks were married, more blacks had jobs and less were likely to go to prison before the New Deal, more welfare and the War on Drugs started! Not surprisingly all these programs were supposed to HELP black people but did exactly the opposite. When government tries to help it hurts. Black attendance at UCLA was higher before Affirmative Action. Native Tribes who don't receive crazy amounts of support for government are much better off than Native Americans who are receiving a lot. All these facts are from the Stossel show.

[@diaperdude6163]

And in other news, water is wet.

[@tberrardy]

Diaper Dude Are you sure water is wet?

[@thepro08]

i dont understand how people dont get it, of course we have hardwired programs, in conjunction with the physics aspects of the brain.. evolved.. for survival... like everything else, the big picture is that aldo we have 3 brains, left and side part, etc the really is that it is flexible... to be wired as we use it... thats the big thing!!!

[@CHURINDOK]

I didn't know David Koch had a doctorate in Psych. Good for him. I guess that is his daughter there, playing all smart-alecki & such.

[@jaythenihilist4689]

It's been 7 years, but your comment finally got the like that it deserved. I hope you're still alive and doing well.

[@d.b.levitt]

This theory can’t explain human intuition.

[@myperfectworld3414]

The body language in this video I found very sexist.

[@cydneychappelle9012]

Why

[@NPCLivesMatter]

@@cydneychappelle9012 It's small, but noticeable. The female seems engaged and looking directly at the old man when he talks. Then, when the female talks, the old man seems to be tuned out and disconnected. The interviewer seems to interrupt the female and doesn't usually interrupt the old man. The interviewer also maintains a hunched over posture which makes it look like he's looking down and leaning which doesn't help. That may just be due to editing cuts, but it comes across as sexist. I'm not even really a feminist and I can see it.

[@rkrw576]

Their position seems logically inconsistent to me. On the one hand, they argue that certain basic capacities and cognitive modes evolved during our hunter-gatherer past that influence how the mind works. On the other hand, they say that the human mind is extremely "flexible" and can adapt. In other words, we have certain limits, but can overcome them? So how are they limits? Furthermore, they create a caricature of the "blank slate" model, i.e. that it posits merely a passive response to the environment, which is ridiculously simplistic. The whole theory of neurosis indicates that it evolves into other spheres life, a kind of misapplied response to some early trauma. That is not passive, but dynamic and highly variable. I don't see why, except in the rarified turf battles between academic departments, these models are presumed mutually exclusive. It is evident we have certain characteristics bred into us, but it is equally clear that life experience changes us.

[@viannaventures514]

Our mind is both adapted from hunter gatherer experience AND is also subject to any new adaptive problems we might face in the future. That said, our psychology is meant to solve hunter gatherer problems (the reason why we are afraid of spiders is that we deemed them poisonous in the past and the reason why we get disgusted by something is to prevent any potential sickness) BUT it is also currently always evolving with every new thing the human population learns each day. I would argue that with enough time, homo sapiens would not have the same limits as we did in the past or today. It is all a matter of natural selection and how we solve problems to adapt and reproduce.

[@menoyuno8430]

How are they limits? The same way you are limited to how much weight you can lift yet you overcome it by inventing or using a tool to lift extremely heavy objects.

[@AndrewTheRed1]

All too typical psychologists who straw man the 'blank-slate' hypothesis of Aristotle. No one is suggesting we are passive downloaders of information. Our biological natures and our will power make us active. Kant's Critique suggested we fatally distort the world; is that true? Psychologists rarely have insight on epistemology, yet it so crucially pertains to their field.

[@AndrewTheRed1]

***** Philosophy provides a basis for science. Do you think its an innocent remark when someone says that everything is a theory? Or when scientists say they can only find correlations, never causation? Or Kuhn's paradigms? These are the underlying problems that scientists take for granted (though usually they are just ignorant of them) and leave to philosophers.

[@metatron4890]

+AndrewTheRed human brains evolved. What reason is there to believe that the human brain has no innate average nature.

[@onlyslavesareequal2790]

They dont talk about Aristotle but about left wing political movement that wants to socially engineer whole society even tho their political ideals are inherently anti human as they deny human nature and psychological needs derived from it.

[@dramsaysteele]

Kant did not suggest we "fatally distort the world". A fundamental misunderstanding of Kant.

[@bobplatt5172]

Truly pathetic. Buzzwords and catchphrases trying to describe what they're talking about who they are. And, they're wrong.

[@paulvalentine4157]

that's it, there are wrong. I think you have to do better than that

[@m.s.r.s-9495]

hahaha moron

[@BonnieBlue2A]

Once again evolutionists confirm what we already know from the Bible.

[@squatch545]

Powerful straw man. No one has ever said the mind was a blank slate, except for maybe John Locke.

[@hispeed52]

of course that is not true.... many, many, many people from the enlightenment to about 1950 argued for a blank slate - though their common sense may have been telling them something else.

[@diaperdude6163]

"no one" "except someone". It's an extremely common position on the left. In fact, the position is so common that it basically acts as the prime bedrock for virtually all radical leftist and progressive proposals for societal change. If you take away the notion that people are just "reflections of their socio-economic circumstance" then a lot of left wing politics not only becomes futile and pointless, but also catastrophically dangerous.