Introducing Evolutionary Psychology

evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology.

When cognitive psychologists first began to investigate the mind, they thought that it would be a very simple kind of program.

When they set out to test this hypothesis, however, the cognitive psychologists found that they were wrong. They wrote some very simple programs that could solve very abstract problems, but they found that these programs were unable to do many of the things that humans do easily.

ne of these things that humans do easily is learning a language. In the late 1950s, the American linguist Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) showed that a general-purpose learning program simply could not learn a language under the same conditions as normal human children.

The technical term for this faulty data is “the poverty of the stimulus”.

One of these things that humans do easily is learning a language. In the late 1950s, the American linguist Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) showed that a general-purpose learning program simply could not learn a language under the same conditions as normal human children.

in order for children to learn a language, they must first hear adults speaking it. how’s you then you tired? … er … time for beddy-byes. but adult speech contains lots of errors, and no indication of what is correct and incorrect.
The technical term for this faulty data is “the poverty of the stimulus”. Learning a language based on this information alone would be like trying to figure out the rules of chess just by observing a few chess games in which some of the moves were illegal (but without knowing which moves were illegal). This would be impossible unless you already knew what information to look for.

Around 100,000 years ago, some of our ancestors began to emigrate out of Africa, and eventually colonized the whole world. But 100,000 years is only about 5,000 generations – too short a time for evolution to produce any major changes. Humans haven’t changed much in that time, so we can

the only program that could learn a human language is a specific one that has been pre-programmed with specific information relevant just to language learning. Chomsky concluded that there is an innate “language acquisition device” (LAD) in the mind which knows what kinds of rules human languages can have. Human languages have a limited number of structures, which are collectively known as “Universal Grammar”.

ignore it when discussing the evolution of the mind. This means that all the history of human civilization and culture, from the birth of agriculture some 10,000 years ago until the present, is irrelevant to understanding the design of the human mind.

one knows when our ancestors acquired the capacity to use language, but it must have been before they moved out of Africa, some 100,000 years ago. After that time, different human groups became separated from each other for thousands of years. If the language modules evolved after the emigration from Africa, it would mean that exactly the same mental machinery had evolved independently in all the different human groups. This is extremely unlikely.

Anatomical studies suggest that the capacity to use language evolved be