A mutually supportive theoretical enlargement

The three tenets of standard evolutionary psychology are: 1) Inclusive fitness

2) Computational theory of mind 3) Slow evolution

As the name suggests, enlarged evolutionary psychology enlarges each of these tenets to include:

4) Niche construction and mutualism 5) Self-adaptive software

6) Feminist evolutionary theory and biological leverage

I take the EEP to be providing a theoretical enlargement of SEP. But with regard to some of EEP’s theoretical tenets, “enlargement” does not only imply extending SEP’s meta- theory. EEP’s enlargement also requires rejecting some of SEP’s deeply held befliefs. No element of the enlarged theoretical framework of SEP necessarily implies the falsity of the original three tenets of SEP. But all elements of the enlarged theoretical framework imply that the three tenets of SEP’s original framework cannot be maintained

exclusively. For example, SEP can no longer hold that evolution is always very slow given the recent empirical evidence from feminist evolutionists and the theoretical support from biological leverage. The tenet that evolution is very slow cannot be maintained to the exclusion that evolution can occur over much smaller time scales. To take another example, the inclusion of niche construction theory does not imply that we do not sometimes (or often) behave in ways that favour the reproductive success of targets with whom we share the most genes. However, it does allow us to form different hypotheses about why some of our behaviour often conforms to inclusive fitness theory. It may turn out that in many cases we have constructed our environment in ways that directs our behaviour according to the predictions of inclusive fitness theory. That the

majority of parents in North America live together with their children in shelters that territorially exclude other parents and other children is not merely because our

psychological mechanisms aim towards the maximization of inclusive fitness. Rather, it is because, in North America, we have constructed and continue to construct our shelters and our family relationships in such ways. Different shelters and family arrangements have been the norm in North American history and continue to exist elsewhere in the world.Humans, like other organisms, have constantly modified their environments. And, in turn, we have constantly adapted to our modified environments. If we had not, then we would likely not have survived to the present today.

We construct our environment, and our environment influences our behaviour. But our environment also influences the evolution of our psychology. More specifically, the creativity and variety of our environmental modifications and the fact that we have adapted to environmental modifications are reasons to believe the mind is more like a self-adaptive computer than a computer whose program has been fixed for a very long time. The inclusion of niche construction theory into the theoretical framework of

evolutionary psychology both supports and is supported by a self-adaptive computational theory of mind. This theory states that the flexibility of human behaviour is made possible by the flexibility of human mental structures. Throughout life, the human mind, like a self-adaptive computer, effects changes to its goals and internal psychological algorithms or processes as a function of the adaptive problems it faces in its environment. This again is not to deny that certain fixed structures of the mind continue to be selected because they contributed to the solution of recurring adaptive problems in the past (as would follow from SEP’s tenet that the mind is like a classical computer with fixed algorithms). Natural selection continues to select for certain fixed structures that play a role in the processes of visual perception. But this does not imply that vision is and always has been the same. EEP denies the claim that all of our psychological processes have been

developmentally fixed since the Pleistocene. Clearly, the mind’s processes of visual perception are self-modified throughout one human lifetime. An infant does not see in the same way as an adult. Furthermore, a painter may not see in the same way as before they began to paint. I think this provides some reason to believe that even the processes of

visual perception have evolved throughout human history. Humans today may perceive some elements of the environment in the same way as humans who lived during the Pleistocene. But if the mind is like a self-adaptive computer and not a pre-adapted computer, it seems increasingly likely that we see differently from humans who lived in the distant past.

But for now, this is an aside. The important point is that, when taken together, niche construction theory and self-adaptive software provide us with a new ways of describing how human minds evolve. Specifically, they evolve in virtue of the natural selection of processes enabling sensitivity to and modification of environments (including the mind’s own psychological architecture or environment). Such a description urges us to accept that evolution by natural selection operates much faster than we previously thought. And if we accept that evolution is rapid and ongoing, then this supports the inclusion of both feminist evolutionary theory and biological leverage theory. The former integrates social and historical factors into our evolutionary explanations, whereas the latter enables us to describe regulative interactions that are otherwise difficult to formalize, such as

mutualism, mimicry, deception, and manipulation.

The three enlarged tenets of EEP are mutually supportive in a way that makes holding SEP’s three tenets to the exclusion EEP’s enlarged tenets inconsistent. And EEP like SEP, provides a unified theoretical framework for explaining human behaviour as a function of biological processes; some of which were selected in the past, and some of which are subject to ongoing evolution by natural selection. But this new and enlarged framework also adds a lot of complexity to evolutionary psychological explanations. While, as mentioned, this added complexity does not necessarily negate any of the previously held tenets of SEP, it does present important challenges to its methodological assumptions.

Figure 5: Mutually supportive tenets of EEP

In the next section I elaborate these challenges, and present a revision of SEP’s

explanatory method that accords with the enlarged theoretical framework of EEP. I then conclude the paper by generating a hypothesis about the evolution of empathy from this revised method.