The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology - Konrad Lorenz Institute

Scott Atrangroups of species: snake, leopard and cheetah, hawkeagle, and so forth (HAUSER 2000). Chimpanzees mayhave rudimentary hierarchical groupings of biologicalgroups within groups (BROWN/BOYSEN in press).To be sure, the world itself is neither chaos nor flux:species are often locally self-structuring entities thatare reproductively and ecologically isolated fromother species through natural selection. But there isno a priori reason for the mind to always focus oncategorizing and relating species qua species, unlessdoing so served some adaptive function (e.g., itmakes little difference which tiger could eat a personor which mango a person could eat). And the adaptivefunctions of organisms rarely, if ever, evolve or operatein nature as all-purpose mechanisms.3. Universality. Ever since the pioneering work ofBERLIN and his colleagues, evidence from ethnobiologyand experimental psychology has been accumulatingthat all human societies have similar folkbiologicalstructures (BERLIN et al. 1973; BERLIN 1992;ATRAN 1990, 1999). These striking cross-cultural similaritiessuggest that a small number of organizingprinciples universally define folkbiological systems.Basic aspects of folkbiological structure (e.g., taxonomicranking, primacy of generic-species) seem tovary little across cultures as a function of theories orbelief systems.4. Ease of Acquisition. Acquisition studies indicatea precocious emergence of essentialist folkbiologicalprinciples in early childhood that are not applied toother domains (GELMAN/WELLMAN 1991; KEIL 1994;HATANO/INAGAKI 1999; ATRAN et al. 2001).5. Independence from Perceptual Experience.Experiments on inferential processing show thatthat humans do not make biological inductions primarilyon the basis of perceptual experience or anygeneral similarity-based metric, but on the basis ofimperceptible causal expectations of a peculiar, essentialistnature (ATRAN et al. 1997; COLEY et al.1997).6. Pathology. Cerebral impairments (WILLIAMS syndrome,brain lesions caused by certain types of herpesvirus, etc.) suggest selective retention or loss offolkbiological taxonomies or of particular taxonomicranks. Neuropsychological studies have reporteda pathological performance in recognition atthe life-form and generic-species levels (e.g., recognizingan item as an animal but not as a bird orrobin), and dissociation at the life-form level (e.g.,not recognizing items as trees). Existing studies,however, do not say anything about the generic-speciesrank as the preferred level of representation forreasoning, perhaps because of methodology (linkedto averaging over items and failure to include sets ofgeneric species) (WARRINGTON/SHALLICE 1984; SAR-TORI/JOB 1988; JOB/SURIAN 1998).7. Inhibition and Hyperactivity. One characteristicof an evolved cognitive disposition is evident difficultyin inhibiting its operation (HAUSER 2000).Consider beliefs in biological essences. Such beliefsgreatly help people explore the world by proddingthem to look for regularities and to seek explanationsof variation in terms of underlying patterns.This strategy may help bring order to ordinary circumstances,including those relevant to human survival.But in other circumstances, such as wanting toknow what is correct or true for the cosmos at large,such intuitively ingrained concepts and beliefs mayhinder more than help. For example, the essentialistbias to understand variation in terms of deviance isundoubtedly a hindrance to evolutionary thinking.In some everyday matters, the tendency to essentializeor explain variation in terms of deviation fromsome essential ideal or norm (e.g., people as mentalor biological ‘deviants’) can be an effortlessly ‘natural’but wrong way to think.Because intuitive notions come to us so naturallythey may be difficult to unlearn and transcend. Evenstudents and philosophers of biology often find itdifficult to abandon commonsense notions of speciesas classes, essences or natural kinds in favor ofthe concept of species as a logical individual—a genealogicalbranch whose endpoints are somewhat arbitrarilydefined in the phyletic tree and whose statusdoes not differ in principle for that of other smaller(variety) and larger (genus) branches. Similarly, racism—theprojection of biological essences onto socialgroups—seems to be a cognitively facile and culturallyuniversal tendency (HIRSCHFELD 1996).Although science teaches that race is biologically incoherent,racial or ethnic essentialism is as notoriouslydifficult to suppress as it is easy to incite (GIL-WHITE 2001).8. Cultural Transmission. Human cultures favor arapid selection and stable distribution of those ideasthat: 1) readily help to solve relevant and recurrentenvironmental problems, 2) are easily memorizedand processed by the human brain, and 3) facilitatethe retention and understanding of ideas that aremore variable (e.g ., religion) or difficult to learnEvolution and Cognition ❘ 52 ❘ 2001, Vol. 7, No. 1