John Tooby

You know, there's an ongoing debate.

You may know some bits of it about modularity from Fodor and, you know, how Cosmetus and Tubi once said, we think there's 78 different modules that are adapted and modules to challenges in the environment of evolution adaptation, the EEA.

And there's lots of schemes for deciding how many distinct parts of the brain there are.

And so I think the neuroscience just felt like two is too small of a number.

Who was your grad supervisor? It was

Lita Cosmides and the late John Tooby.

Fuck.

Yeah.

He was a genius.

I would say for me, the comparison was like, it was speaking like the Oracle Delphi, because you would come to him with a question and then, you know, something you'd be thinking about and you would take a second to think about it.

And then he would just, with his John Tooby sort of explain, but that was my Tooby impression with all due respect.

He would, and then he would give you this answer.

For millennia, the question was the exclusive province of philosophers and theologians who populated the head with immaterial souls, spectral essences, and ghosts in the machine.

In the 20th century, the dominant academic view, what John Tooby and Lita Cosmedes have called the Standard Social Science Model, SSSM, swapped the ghost for a different kind of magic, the blank slate, a formless clay to be molded entirely by culture.

The mind, in this telling, was little more than a general-purpose learning device, a cultural blotter.

Both views, for all their poetic appeal, are profoundly, demonstrably wrong.

And it says, in the case of evolution, you've got this optimization process selecting for maximizing fitness in some sense.

But as you know, obviously, as an evolutionary psychologist, what that gives rise to are these proxy motivations with sort of adaptationist, adaptation executors rather than fitness maximizers, as John Tooby and Leda Cosmides put it.

And what's interesting is these proxy motivations can come apart from, and indeed become misaligned from, the objective function that in some sense we evolved to maximize.

So now we want sex, but we've got contraceptive, contraceptive pills and so on.