Extended evolutionary psychology
Article by Stotz (referenced in the last post), Frontiers in Psychology, 20 August 2014. This one is a bit more like Thompson’s approach. The abstract:
“What kind mechanisms one deems central for the evolutionary process deeply influences one’s understanding of the nature of organisms, including cognition. Reversely, adopting a certain approach to the nature of life and cognition and the relationship between them or between the organism and its environment should affect one’s view of evolutionary theory. This paper explores this reciprocal relationship in more detail. In particular it argues that the view of living and cognitive systems, especially humans, as deeply integrated beings embedded in and transformed by their genetic, epigenetic (molecular and cellular), behavioral, ecological, socio-cultural and cognitive-symbolic legacies calls for an extended evolutionary synthesis that goes beyond either a theory of genes juxtaposed against a theory of cultural evolution and or even more sophisticated theories of gene-culture coevolution and niche construction. Environments, particularly in the form of developmental environments, do not just select for variation, they also create new variation by influencing development through the reliable transmission of non-genetic but heritable information. This paper stresses particularly views of embodied, embedded, enacted and extended cognition, and their relationship to those aspects of extended inheritance that lie between genetic and cultural inheritance, the still gray area of epigenetic and behavioral inheritance systems that play a role in parental effect. These are the processes that can be regarded as transgenerational developmental plasticity and that I think can most fruitfully contribute to, and be investigated by, developmental psychology.”
“There exist two quite different stances toward the evolution of human cognitive capacities. The nativist stance, favored for instance by Evolutionary Psychologists (EP), attributes the origin of behavioral, social and cognitive capacities such as folk psychology, mind-reading and general reasoning capacities to the sudden appearance of genetically determined mental modules or representational systems. This approach, which subscribes to the computational theory of mind, has been polemically dubbed the “Rational Bubble stance (which) confounds cultural symbolic achievements with individual cognitive competences” and belongs to a class of views that have in recent years come under increasing criticism as a quite unrealistic… Read more »
This article obviously challenges the computational model in favor of the 4E model. The section on Experience is akin to Thompson’s notion of enaction, even using some of the same references as Thompson.
I also like the following quote from the article, as it highlights developmental psychology more generally and Piaget’s genetic epistemology more specifically. “In painstaking psychogenetic studies, Piaget established that organisms are not passive achievers of knowledge or reactors to external conditions; to the contrary, the system seeks its own experience and reacts to stimuli with active and creative changes in itself and in the environment. Piaget’s genetic epistemology gave a plausible explanation for the relation between cognition and action (as the Santiago School of Maturana and Varela put it: no cognition without action, and no action without cognition). Piaget emphasized… Read more »
I’m also reminded of this* article on the development of altruism by Hing Keung Ma, Frontiers in Public Health, 12 October 2017. It puts the evolution of altruism in a developmental context, using empirical evidence from Maslow, Kohhberg and Ma. The 10-stages of altruism go from egoism up to natural. Each stage extends altruism to larger and larger groups and cites empirical studies to support each stage. The statistical data is beyond my knowledge base but there for those so inclined. One can also see the evolutionary development from egoism to kin selection to reciprocal altruism to larger and larger… Read more »