Cognitive Evolutionary Psychology Without Representational Nativism
Robert Cummins
University of California-Davis
A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific
cognitive capacities be (i) heritable and (ii) “quasi-independent” from other
heritable traits. They must be heritable, because there can be no selection
for traits that are not. They must quasi-independent from other heritable
traits, since adaptive variations in a specific cognitive capacity could have
no distinctive consequences for fitness if effecting those variations required
widespread changes in other unrelated traits and capacities as well.
These requirements would be satisfied by innate cognitive modules, and
this is what the dominant paradigm in evolutionary cognitive psychology assumes.
But it seems plausible that those requirements would also be satisfied by
heritable learning biases, perhaps in the form of architectural or chronotopic
constraints, that operated to increase the canalization of specific cognitive
capacities in the ancestral environment (Cummins and Cummins, 1999). As an
organism develops, cognitive capacities that are highly canalized as the result
of heritable learning biases might result in an organism that is behaviorally
quite similar to an organism whose innate modules come on line as the result
of various environmental triggers. Taking this possibility seriously is increasingly
important as the case against innate cognitive modules becomes increasingly
strong.