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SUMMARY:&quot\;Evolution cannot explain how minds work&quot\; - Professor 
 Johan J. Bolhuis (University of Utrecht\, The Netherlands)
DTSTART:20130325T123000Z
DTEND:20130325T133000Z
UID:TALK43613@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Diane Pearce
DESCRIPTION:Attempts to apply Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to co
 gnition have not fared well\,  mainly because questions of evolution and o
 f mechanism are fundamentally different. Evolution is concerned with a his
 torical reconstruction of brain and cognition\, while the actual underlyin
 g mechanisms are the domain of cognitive neuroscience and psychology. The 
 new discipline of Evolutionary Psychology (EP) argues that the mind of mod
 ern humans was formed as a result of selection pressures in the Stone Age.
  The empirical data are often over-interpreted\, and EP is mostly based up
 on an outdated view of evolutionary biology. It is often not clear a prior
 i whether a particular cognitive or neural trait is homologous (i.e. the o
 utcome of common descent) or the result of convergent evolution\, or indee
 d beyond the domain of natural selection. A good example is human speech a
 nd language\, where both neural and genetic homology and evolutionary conv
 ergence are involved regarding speech\, but human language has a unique co
 mbinatorial complexity. Thus\, I argue that in the study of animal  and hu
 man cognition\, questions of function and evolution and questions of mecha
 nism should be seen as logically separate. Functional and evolutionary con
 siderations may be used as clues to generate hypotheses regarding the unde
 rlying mechanisms. But these hypotheses may be false and should always be 
 tested empirically\, using methods from cognitive neuroscience\, behaviour
 al biology and experimental psychology. 
LOCATION:Library\, Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour\, Madingley
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