The Evolutionary Psychology of Cosmides & Tooby
Leaders in Explaining Human Nature as a Result of Natural Selection
Nov 14, 2009
George Cosmides, one of the first psychopharmacologists, believed that mental disorders should be treated with drugs instead of more traditional talk therapies. Cosmides claimed that interdisciplinary approaches were vital to the future of science. With a father who held such opinions, Leda Cosmides understood that biology and psychology could coexist peacefully. When she read B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two at the age of 14, young Cosmides was shocked that his theory of human learning (i.e. that the mind is a result of purely environmental influences) was ignorant of biology.
The Meeting of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Cosmides was a student of both biology, where she was advised by none other than Robert Trivers, and psychology, where she ironically worked in the Skinner pigeon labs.
While attending the “Simian Seminar,” an attempt to marry biology with psychology, Cosmides became part of another marriage because it was here that she met her husband and long-time collaborator, John Tooby, another Harvard student studying experimental psychology. Both Cosmides and Tooby entered Harvard’s graduate program in 1979, Cosmides pursuing a PhD in cognitive psychology and Tooby pursuing one in biological anthropology.
Together the two developed evolutionary psychology as a distinct approach to understanding psychology. At first, they attempted to apply evolutionary thinking to direct, observable behavior but later turned to a more cognitive approach. Instead, Cosmides and Tooby modeled the brain as an information-processing system that made sense of environmental stimuli. Once this idea was in place, they were ready to shape the evolutionary psychology movement.
The Evolution of Culture and the Foundation of Evolutionary Psychology
In 1987, the duo published their landmark paper regarding the evolution of culture. In it, they claimed, “Culture is the ongoing product of the evolved psyches of individual humans living in groups.” This implies, they argued, that scientists (anthropologists, specifically) could not fully understand the existence of culture without first discovering the evolved mechanisms underlying human cognition.
Among the paper’s crowning achievements is its clear attempt to define evolutionary psychology as a method. The duo outlined the five elements that must be considered for a successful psychological research paradigm.
Briefly, they acknowledged (1) that the mind is comprised of function-specific mechanisms, (2) that research in psychology must focus on the functions of mental processes, (3) that emphasis must be placed on discovering psychological mechanisms rather than on simple behavioral descriptions, (4) that mental processes must be expressed algorithmically or procedurally, and (5) that evolution seamlessly ties the previous four elements together. They noted that real progress could only be achieved through an integration of those five concepts.
The Most Important Book in Evolutionary Psychology
Their most lasting influence on the field has been their 1992 book, The Adapted Mind. As the book itself states, it was written to both “introduce…evolutionary psychology to a wider scientific audience” and “clarify how this new field….supplies the necessary connection between evolutionary biology and the complex, irreducible social and cultural phenomena studied by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and historians.”
They collected 18 essays about evolutionary psychology as it related cooperation, sex, parental care, and other topics. Some of the essays were written by Cosmides and Tooby themselves while others were written by other influential evolutionary psychologists like the aforementioned Donald Symons and David Buss. The text became the ultimate resource for evolutionary psychology and has since been referred to as an integral publication for the field.
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