“Human behavior is the most amazingly flexible behavior of any animal species,” says UC Santa Barbara anthropology professor John Tooby, “but you can’t unlock these potentialities unless you understand the circuit logic or the code of the programs in the head.”

Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie recently sat down with Tooby and Leda Cosmides, a professor of psychology, who co-founded and co-direct the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology. They believe their approach to examining the information-processing mechanisms that have evolved in the brain can provide greater insights into human behavior and cognition.

Tooby describes their work as being at the intersection of anthropology and primatology, evolutionary biology, and information theory and computer science. Cosmides says she starts with the idea that “behavior is generated by programs in your head, and I don’t mean it metaphorically—devices that are designed by natural selection to process information and guide your behavior. Evolutionary psychology focuses on that intermediate step of what’s the structure of those programs.”

Cosmides does not believe a true science of the mind is possible without an understanding of such structures, arguing that only such an approach makes it possible to intervene to improve people’s lives: “Just like being near-sighted doesn’t mean you can’t see—there’s glasses, contact lenses, there’s laser surgery. Why is that true? Because people bothered to figure out how the eye works.”

They push back forcefully against the criticism that an evolutionary approach is inherently racist or sexist, arguing that it deals with human universals. In fact, they believe their insights can unlock the best elements of human potential. Tooby cites as an example their success in getting people to stop implicitly categorizing others on the basis of race. The researchers hypothesized that this tendency was actually due to the modern co-opting of a cognitive program whose evolutionary function was to detect coalitions, so they crafted experiments that removed race as a predictor of coalition. “In just a few minutes—so you have a lifetime of experience, supposedly, of learning race—but people stopped categorizing by race in their memory systems and their implicit ways,” says Tooby.

Cosmides describes a series of experiments that were the first ever in psychology to demonstrate a female advantage in spatial cognition, which they accomplished by testing spatial abilities that would have benefitted a gatherer rather than a hunter in an early human environment. “It’s not because the scientists were male or female or anything like that. It’s because they were starting from a theory about the adaptive problems our ancestors faced,” states Cosmides.

We think of it [emotion] as a super-ordinate program. ... [The brain has] situation detectors, parts of the systems that says "are we in this kind of [recurrent, evolutionary stable] situation”.

Let's take the simplest case: it's dark, you're alone and there are creepy noises outside. You don't know if somebody's going to break into your house or not. Lots of things change. Your hearing gets more acute. You notice sounds that you haven't noticed before. Differential processes get turned on. Was that a random set of noises or was that footsteps? You retrieve all kinds of information from memory which is relevant for determining if you are under threat or not under threat, and what to do. 

You can think of it as a super-ordinate program that coordinate a lot of sub-programs in a way that is particularly efficient for solving that adaptive problem. But it doesn't have to be something as simple as the predator situation.  There are a lot of interesting social emotions that have to be there to regulate the kind of complicated social iterations that we have

[A]nger is triggered by the perception that somebody's putting much too little weight on your welfare. They're not talking your welfare into account to the extent that they should be given the nature of your relationship. ... Anger is a bargaining system, that operates in both cooperative and aggressive situations. If it's a cooperator you need to communicate to them that: you don't like what they did; that it imposed costs on you for very little benefit to yourself; and that's not okay. It activates all kinds of desires to argue with and to talk with the person. To bargain for better treatment in the future.

[A]nger in cooperative relationships [where someone gets angry at you]... is the external signal that they think that you haven't put enough weight on their welfare. 

Just came out today. This year's question was:

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

There were a lot of cool/interesting people polled. Here are some of my favorites:

David Buss: Sexual Selection

John Tooby: Nexus causality, moral warfare and misattribution arbitrage.

Helen Fisher: Temperament Dimensions

Jonathan Haidt: Contingent Superorganism

Steven Pinker: Positive Sum Games

Martin Seligman: PERMA