"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (9) —— Evolution and Rationality

Lecture 10:Evolution and Rationality

The problems of Creationism:

1. it pushes back the question.
2. there's always been evidence for evolution:fossils,vestigial characteristics, continuity with other animals
   
3. there is occasional poor design.

3 components to natural selection:

1. variation
2. variation which gives rise to different degrees of survival and reproduction gets passed on from generation to generation
3. adaptations

2 misconceptions to apply evolutionary theory to psychology.

1. Natural selection will cause animals to want to spread their genes. It's wrong because it fails to make a distinction between ultimate causation and proximate causation.
• Ultimate causation is the reason why something is there in the first place, over millions of years of history.
  
• Proximate causation is why you're doing it now.
2. Natural selection entails that everything is adaptive, that everything we do, everything we think is adaptive. It's wrong because there's all sorts of things a body will do that have no adaptive value, rather just accidents. Natural selection and evolution, more generally, distinguish between adaptations and byproducts and accidents.

3 ways to reject evolutionary psychology:

• the mind is not subject to the same physical laws as the rest of the physical world.
• accept that the mind is a physical thing but then argue that all of these instincts and these hard-wired facets of human nature might exist for other animals but they don't exist for people.
• the study of evolution can't inform and enlighten us about the mind as it is

What can evolutionary theory say about:

1. it can tell us what can be innate and what cannot.
2. a focus on evolution could help discipline us to make coherent claims about what is built-in and what isn't built-in.
3. evolutionary theory can help us say intelligent things about what sort of group differences you should expect because evolutionary theory predicts that some populations should evolve in different ways than others.

Human are not always logical thinkers, who think in accord with the axioms of logic and mathematics and rationality, they actually have sort of rough and ready heuristics. Several examples of heuristics permeating our reasoning:

• framing effect: you could respond differently to a situation depending on how the options are framed.this combines with "loss aversion".
• ignorance of base rates: Base rates are very difficult to think about, tendency to neglect the overall frequency of an event when predictiing its likelihood.
• availability bias: tendency to form a judgment on the basis of information is readily brought to mind.
• Confirmation bias:when we have a hypothesis we look for confirmations.