CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Schermbrucker, Ben Mathew |
|---|---|
| Title | Is the Answer Really Blowing in the Wind? Assessing the Impact of Climactic Volatility on the Evolution of the Mind |
| Summary | Evolutionary Psychology (EP) argues that our minds have been sculpted by recurrent selective pressures that our Pleistocene ancestors encountered over many thousands of generations. Conversely, critics of EP have made reference to the Variability Selection (VS) hypothesis in order to argue that climatic volatility has caused recent human evolution to be driven by erratic and generationally novel adaptive problems. These critics thus argue that we shouldn’t expect the human mind to contain the constellations of functionally specialized mechanisms predicted by EP. Rather, we should expect natural selection to have favoured general-purpose mechanisms that would have given our ancestors the cognitive plasticity to respond to unpredictable and rapidly shifting ecological conditions. This thesis will seek to resolve this dispute in two ways. Firstly, the empirical robustness of the VS hypothesis will be queried. This will involve a paleoanthropologically informed investigation of whether there is satisfactory evidence that adaptive change correlates with periods of climactic volatility, both in relation to other species and human cognitive evolution in particular. Secondly, by appealing to cumulative cultural evolution and an enzymatic approach to modular information processing, I will examine whether critics of EP are correct to suppose that domain-specific mechanisms would have been implausible candidates for selection during periods of climactic volatility. Overall, it shall be my conclusion that the VS hypothesis is ultimately unconvincing, and that the empirical and conceptual results derived from the two modes of enquiry considered above vindicate the approach to our ancestral environment favoured by EP. |
| Supervisor | Christophe Heintz |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/schermbrucker_ben.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University