Evolutionary Psychology... The Mind is not a blank state. Pg 3

Adaptation: The mind is an adaptive solution.

Cosmides and Tooby, considered to be the “fathers of evolutionary psychology” (Kanazawa, 2004, p.512) have over the past 12 years extended Fodor's neural module and put forward the argument that the mind is comprised of thousands of these “computational” modules. These domain-specific modules not only include psychological mechanisms for provisioning the physical senses such as eyesight but also provision for other domains, some of which are uniquely associated with humans. These include the language acquisition device (Pinker 1994 in Kanazawa, 2004, p.513), cheater detection mechanism (Cosmides, 1989 in Kanazawa, 2004, p.513) and mind-reading mechanism (Evans & Zarate, 1999, p.87). Together, these thousands of domain-specific modules function within an intricate and inter-coordinated “peer-to-peer network” (also known as the mind) - to finally produce what is known as "human nature".

What is an adaptive problem?

Humans and all other animals face adaptive problems within the environments they operate in. Underlying the idea of adaptiveness is the evolutionary concept that the sole purpose of an organism is to survive within its environment and reproduce itself. (Evans & Zarate, 1999, p. 42). An environment offers an organism degrees of opportunities to survive and reproduce. However it also offers degrees of obstacles or problems that hinder its survival and reproductive ability ie. adaptive problems which an organism must 'solve' - either by using its own innate resources or via evolutionary processes - if it is to sucessfully survive and reproduce within that environment.

"An adaptive problem is something that an organism needs to solve in order to survive and reproduce”
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(Evans & Zarate, p.42).

Modules: a psychological adaptation

Evolutionary psychologists believe that the domain-specific module is a psychological adaptation (Hagen, 2002). Many of the thousand modules extant within the modern human mind are infact evolved "solutions" to common adaptive problems encountered by pre-historic humans during their time in the Pleistocene East African savannah (Evans & Zarate, p. 45). These "solutions" or adaptations have become encoded within the human mind through the evolutionary process of natural selection.

Furthermore it is believed that these individual "solutions" (or modules) to common adaptive problems posed by the savannah environment during Pleistocene, underlay the structure and design of the human mind.

Footnote: The Pleistocene Epoch:

The Pleistocene Epoch covers the period - 1.8 million to 11,000 years BP. It is characterised by the development, advance and retreat of great sheets of ice that covered the Northern Hemispheric continents down to latitude 45th parrallel.

Continued 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.