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Can behavior genetics contribute to evolutionary studies of behavior?
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Abstracts
the proposition, the error characteristics of the learning device, and the probability that the proposition is true. A quantitative model shows how these three considerations are related to each other.
Can Behavior Genetics Contribute to Evolutionary Behavior?
Studies of
Michael Bailey Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois Most socially relevant individual differences studied so far appear to be moderately heritable. These include dimensions of personality and intelligence as well as complex behavior patterns such as religiosity, divorce, political attitudes, and sexual orientation. Evolutionary behavioral scientists have cited such findings primarily to establish the plausibility that ancestral populations had sufficient additive genetic variation in relevant behaviors to allow an adaptive response to natural selection. They have tended either to ignore genetic variation in contemporary populations or to dismiss such variation as “genetic noise”-variation without adaptive significance. Other possibilities exist, including frequency-dependent selection. This talk has three main goals: (1) to discuss the historical relationship between behavioral genetics and evolutionary behavioral science; (2) to elucidate behavioral genetics methodology and evaluate some of the methodological criticisms of it; and (3) to explore ways in which behavioral genetics might contribute to evolutionary approaches.
Cognitive Adaptations
for Threat, Cooperation,
and War
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, UC Santa Barbara, California Increasing evidence supports the view that the human brain consists of a diverse collection of complexly specialized information-processing adaptations, including a series of cognitive adaptations that enable humans to engage in social exchange and to understand threats. Situations of potential or actual cooperative aggression constituted recurrent selection pressures that operated during human evolutionary history, and more effective cooperators gained resources denied to unallied individuals or less effective cooperators. We suggest that humans (and a few other species) evolved an array of specialized cognitive adaptations that make possible and regulate multi-individual cooperative aggression. These circuits allow coalitions to coalesce, function, and sustain themselves as groups of cooperating individuals. Although social exchange and threat are necessary building blocks of human coalitional psychology, we survey several additional design features of this zoologically unusual cognitive competence, discuss obstacles to its evolution, and explore reasons why its phylogenetic distribution is far rarer than the actual distribution of ecological conditions that would favor it.
Abstracts
the proposition, the error characteristics of the learning device, and the probability that the proposition is true. A quantitative model shows how these three considerations are related to each other.
Can Behavior Genetics Contribute to Evolutionary Behavior?
Studies of
Michael Bailey Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois Most socially relevant individual differences studied so far appear to be moderately heritable. These include dimensions of personality and intelligence as well as complex behavior patterns such as religiosity, divorce, political attitudes, and sexual orientation. Evolutionary behavioral scientists have cited such findings primarily to establish the plausibility that ancestral populations had sufficient additive genetic variation in relevant behaviors to allow an adaptive response to natural selection. They have tended either to ignore genetic variation in contemporary populations or to dismiss such variation as “genetic noise”-variation without adaptive significance. Other possibilities exist, including frequency-dependent selection. This talk has three main goals: (1) to discuss the historical relationship between behavioral genetics and evolutionary behavioral science; (2) to elucidate behavioral genetics methodology and evaluate some of the methodological criticisms of it; and (3) to explore ways in which behavioral genetics might contribute to evolutionary approaches.
Cognitive Adaptations
for Threat, Cooperation,
and War
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, UC Santa Barbara, California Increasing evidence supports the view that the human brain consists of a diverse collection of complexly specialized information-processing adaptations, including a series of cognitive adaptations that enable humans to engage in social exchange and to understand threats. Situations of potential or actual cooperative aggression constituted recurrent selection pressures that operated during human evolutionary history, and more effective cooperators gained resources denied to unallied individuals or less effective cooperators. We suggest that humans (and a few other species) evolved an array of specialized cognitive adaptations that make possible and regulate multi-individual cooperative aggression. These circuits allow coalitions to coalesce, function, and sustain themselves as groups of cooperating individuals. Although social exchange and threat are necessary building blocks of human coalitional psychology, we survey several additional design features of this zoologically unusual cognitive competence, discuss obstacles to its evolution, and explore reasons why its phylogenetic distribution is far rarer than the actual distribution of ecological conditions that would favor it.