>> Hurricane Sandy sort of threw us off course a bit, because we had to reschedule some people and the one that I want to make sure that we Brought into this, into the fold is Azi Grysman. Azi was at the ground floor of this course when it was first decided that we go ahead and give this course, it was in the spring of 2010 and we had to put the course together by fall 2010. And fortunately, Azi was a graduate student at the point and he and I had talked a lot about souls and beliefs in afterlife and so he was a natural person for me to go to, Renimay to go to and say, Azi, we need your help. And we spent the summer, Azi and me, putting together the syllabus and the readings for this course. Many of which still exist and Azi was appointed as the head TA. It was something that nobody had done before for this course, but he did a fabulous job. And in the meantime was continued to be involved in the development of the course, particularly in the area of cognitive psychology. That's his specialty and he's interested particularly in memory. So Azi is going to talk to us today about the cognitive psychology and how evolutionary perspective is important for us to know about how the mind and the brain works with regards to accepting and rejecting some information. And Len has some more to say about Azi's background and perspective. >> Thank you, Dan. I'm excited to hear today's lecture on evolutionary psychology. We've spent a good bit of time in the course talking about evolution from several different perspectives and certainly, Charles Darwin as he was putting the information together had some difficulties with the brain, because he realized first of all that it couldn't be left out of evolution. And secondly, that as soon as you talk about the brain and behavior, itâs going to cause some difficulties with the acceptance by the general population. So he actually spent about 17 years before he was willing to publish Origin of Species in large part, because of his concerns about the reaction to the brain and behavior being a part of this. And even when he finally did publish it, he only mentions psychology right near the very end of the book with one very prescient sentence, psychology will be securely based on the requirement for the acquisition of mental powers and concepts, so that evolution became an important part of behavior, but I think even then Charles Darwin only had a glimmer of how important behavior was going to be in the process of evolution. I think if he were around today and had the possibility of knowing what had gone on in the 150 years since that publication, he would be very excited to hear Azi's lecture today. Azi? >> One other thing first. Azi is no longer just Azi, he got his degree. Now, it's Dr. Azi Grysman. >> Thank you very much. [COUGH] It's certainly a pleasure to be back in the Soul Beliefs course, if not in person this year, then at least in spirit. We're going to be discussing the role of evolutionary psychology. The lecture will be split into approximately two sections. The first section dealing primarily with going through the reading, or going through the concepts that are from the reading of just laying the foundations of evolutionary psychology for those who are less familiar with it. In the second half of the lecture, we'll delve into looking at how we can apply evolutionary psychology to the soul. So we begin with what we know about evolution, we know that behaviors that benefit our survival are more likely to appear in future generations. And the way we approach studying evolution and using it to understand current behaviors are that we imagine the timeframe in which evolution occurred, we know that the process of evolution is not one that we can attribute changes in our species to the advent of iPhones or computers or even trains, but it really stretches much farther back. And we think about how the brain in our species developed thousands and millions of years in the past and we form hypotheses about how our traits developed. So the example that is often used is the one of the peppered moths in England and this is a really unique case, because fast change in society led to similarly fast changes in a species of animals, specifically the moths in England. So the story of the moths is that the industrial revolution comes along in England and there's lots of pollution. So the moths that would camouflage themselves by living on trees, they'd be camouflaged by the fact that their wings that were gray or black or white, there was a spectrum kind of from white to black, their wings would camouflage into the tree. And as pollution began, as there was more pollution from the industrial revolution the trees began to get darker. And suddenly, there was this selection for darker moss. There used to be that the moss that matched the tree would survive the most, they'd be less vulnerable to predators. Well, now the trees changed, so different moths now have an evolutionary advantage. Then some reform comes in and the pollution slows down and the trees start to shift color back to a lighter hue. And now lighter moths are becoming more common, as they're less susceptible to predators. So we need to imagine human beings, in what Cosmides and Tooby referred to as the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, which is approximately 10 million years ago up to 10,000 years ago. So this is humanity as it is taking shape in the pre-agriculture society, egalitarian societies in the terms of societies that are living in groups with equal members or members that all need each other in the groups and groups that are largely surviving through hunting and gathering. And we need to ask ourselves, what was our most important tool for our survival? We can say that the cheetah's most important survival capacity is its speed and that fast cheetahs are more likely to survive than the slow cheetahs. We can see that certain animals survive on their strength or on their ability to conceal themselves, but our strength, our real evolutionary tool for survival is our brains. It's our brains. We are not the largest animal, we are not the strongest animal. But we are by far the smartest animal, and the way we compensate for any lacking that we have in strength and speed, right. Compare us to a bear or to a lion. We don't have the strength or the speed of these animals. And we compensate for that by social living and a number of other species do that as well. We live in groups, in small groups, in slightly larger groups especially back in that era. And we survived based on our teamwork, and the teamwork requires certain mental capacities. And that lead to an evolutionary pressure on brain development. So let's take a look at an example of an evolutionary psychology approach to our history, to our brains. So we might ask the question of why is childhood so much longer for humans than other species. One of the things we know many other species, childhood lasts a couple months, a couple years. We know, horses they're born, they start running right away. But, human beings, our children take close to a year to walk or sometimes more. So, why would it be that childhood is so much longer for humans than for other species? So we would look at something of an evolutionary time course. We see that, first of all, large brains are really important to human beings. As we said before, social living is important. It applies evolutionary pressure, meaning that the people who are good at interacting in the social environment, the people who are good at negotiating social situations, those are the people who are selected for and large brains really support that. But we also have a fact of life that the large, the head of a baby as it's being born needs to fit thru the mothers pelvis. Now another evolutionary advantage, something that has shaped our development as a species would be the fact that we walk up right. And we need to, the mother needs to walk upright which limits the size of the pelvis. So we've got pressure on larger brains, but at the same time we have a limit to how large those brains can get because once the brains get too large The baby's not going to fit outside the mother's pelvis, and that can lead to death and not moving the species forward. So the evolutionary solution, so to speak, is that more brain development occurs after birth. Because at birth, the brain needs to be, has a maximum size, and so over time there was pressure that lead our brains to develop more after birth as a solution to this. We still have large brains yet the mother is still able to give birth and walk on two feet. So the end result is that childhood is very different from most other species. This is an example of an evolutionary psychology explanation. We'd be applying evolution to understand how different forces are at play in leading to a psychology that is a certain way in today's society. Now we have to stress that we don't know that this is exactly how this happened, we weren't around to watch it happen and it happened over thousands, millions of years, and generations and generations of our species. But given what we know about the brain, given what we know about all these other parts of the development of our species, this is really the best hypothesis we can craft for understanding childhood nowadays. Cosmides and Tooby, an article that was read in some years of the course but not others, write about five principles of evolutionary psychology. And so I'm just going to walk through those five principles as a way of introducing the concept of evolutionary psychology. Principle number 1 is that the brain is a physical system. It functions like a computer, it is not to say the brain is a computer but there are many, many similarities in terms of how we process information. The circuits so to speak of this computer are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to the environmental circumstances. So the brain is constantly adapting to the environment in the way that it processes information. We'll get to some examples after we walk through these principles. Principle number 2 is that our neural circuits were designed, quote/unquote by natural selection, right? They were influenced by the forces of natural selection, and the way these were developed was through the problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history. So if there was a problem, a challenge that was faced by our species, let's say noticing a fruit on a tree from outside the leaves that surround it, then we are going to develop solutions. So color vision is a way that we distinguish the fruit from the tree. It's a way we distinguish the color of the fruit from the green leaves. And so because finding those fruit was important to our ancestors, those who were able to find it better were more likely to survive and they developed more acute color vision. [COUGH] Principle 3 is that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. That most of what we are aware of in our minds, is not the stuff that is being most influenced. The stuff that is being most influenced are the automatic things that we're sensing in the world around us. I don't make a decision to decide that my shirt is purple, I just see it as purple automatically because my color vision has developed outside of conscious awareness and the majority of cognition, the majority of the mental processes that are involved in information processing are processes that are outside of conscious awareness. Principle number 4 is that different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems, and so we might experience thought as having some form of unity to it. We might experience our own thoughts as it feels like there's a stream of consciousness, it feels like everything that I think is part of my brain, and everything that's part of my brain is something that I think, but that's not actually the case. The case is that there are different specialized areas of the brain that are specialized towards solving certain problems. And I might not be aware of them. They might not all fit into that stream of consciousness. And finally, principle number 5, an organizing principle, is that our modern skulls house a stone age mind, and that is to say, as I mentioned earlier on, that the changes brought about by modernity, the changes brought about by technological innovation, are not changes that our brains are adapted for. And so that skill of moving your fingers quickly while you text. That's not something that is going to be, that is not something that your brain is going to respond to. Yeah, of course, your brain will respond to the practice but our brains developed in an era that did not have the technologies that we have. And so our brains developed for the technologies of that time and the technologies of that time would include things like tool use and hunting and gathering and the challenges that we faced in that environment such as social living. But not a number of the challenges that we have nowadays. [COUGH] So let's look at some examples. Here is a classic experiment called the Wason Selection Task. And, there are four cards, and so if you're watching this on video, and I get to the answer before you finish it, pause the video and try to answer the riddle yourself. So here are the rules, there are four cards in front of you on the table, each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. The rule that I'm establishing for this riddle is that if a card has a vowel on one side then it must have an even number on the other side. And the challenge that you are posed with is, which of these cards do you have to turn over to figure out if they're all following the rule. So I'm saying to you I need to make sure that all four of these cards are following the rule. How many of them do you have to turn over? Obviously you could just turn over all of them. But you don't need to turn over all of them. Or do you? So that's the question in front of you. So take a minute, think about which cards you would turn over and at this point pause the screen if you're still thinking about it. So the answer in front of us. Let's look at each one individually. So card A, does card a need to be turned over? Well the rule states that if the card has a vowel on one side, it must have an even number on the other side. So if I turned over card A and there was an odd number there it wouldn't be following the rules. So I need to turn it over and check. Now most people get this one right. Most people definitely agree that we must turn over card A. But that's where the success generally stops. The question then is, is card B. Card B the question is do we have to turn it over? And the answer is well the rule only pertains to cards with vowels on them. And so if we turned over card B, and it had an even number on it, well we would say well the rule doesn't say anything about consonants and if had an odd number on it, we'll also say well, the rule doesn't say anything about consonants. So we don't have to turn over card B because that's always irrelevant. Now the number 10 is the number that most people get wrong because most people say well, we've gotta turn over 10 because we need to make sure that there's a vowel on the other side. But the fact of the matter is, that if there was a vowel on the other side then 10 would be following the rule. Because a vowel has to have an even number. And if there was a consonant the rule wouldn't be relevant because the rule is only about cards with vowels on them. And then finally card number 5. If you haven't figured it out by this point in the explanation, card number 5 must be turned over because if it had a vowel on the other side, it would be violating the rule, and so we need to turn over number 5 to make sure there isn't a vowel on the other side. Now surprisingly, 90% of people get this question wrong when it's first presented to them. So don't feel bad about yourself. I myself got this wrong the first two or three times that it was presented to me. And the point where this becomes relevant to evolutionary psychology is when we move to another example. So I'm going to show you another example of a similar question. Here's the question you work as a waiter in a bar. You've got people in the room and it's a bar in a college campus that in order to make money it has to let underage people in but can't serve alcohol to them so they put these bracelets on their arm etc etc. So the rule is, if you want to be drinking beer you have to be 21. And you're the waiter, you need to make sure. So you've got four people sitting at your table. One of them's drinking beer, one of them's 24. One of them's drinking Pepsi and one of them is 17. So who do you have to check for ID, or who do you have to check what they're drinking. So everybody would know that yeah, you would have to check the person drinking the beer, make sure they're 21. And the person who's 24, you don't have to check because no matter what, they're allowed to drink whatever they want. The person who's drinking Pepsi also doesn't matter because it's only a problem if they are drinking right because anybody's allowed to drink Pepsi and the person who's 17 you have to check because if they're drinking beer you gotta kick them out of the bar. So, what you see here is a problem that is logically the same structure as the previous problem, the AB510 problem. The rules are exactly the same, the solution is exactly the same, but everybody gets this question right, or a large overwhelming majority get this question right. And so one of the questions psychologist asked, particularly Leda Cosmides, asks why is this question answered correctly and not the other one? They're the same logical structure if the mind is functioning as a computer, right, as an information processing unit as many theories in cognition hold. If the mind is functioning in such a way we've got logical information in question one. We've got logical information in question two. I should be able to derive the same logical answer for each question. The explanation that Leda Cosmides gives, despite the fact that these two questions are logically identical, the second question is priming our cheater detection system. It's activating something in our minds that's making us extra good at this. Generally, human beings are not great at logic problems. Logic takes a lot of training, it takes us years of schooling to get good at math, and many of us don't even get there. But we're able to learn it through training, but when we ask the question in such a way that activates our cheater detection system, suddenly, I can engage my evolutionarily designed system that solves problems. Now, cheating is a really important problem for people living in social groups because the best solution for the group to survive, is if everybody pulls their weight, right? So, if we're a band of 10, 100 gatherers living in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. If we are living in that environment and we need to survive as a group, so everybody's gotta pull their share. And we're going to survive better if three of us go out and hunt together and one time we're successful and we bring back game and everybody gets to eat. And then the next time three other people go out and bring back game and the rest of us get to rest. Or we gather and through division of labor we can be stronger. But the best strategy for an individual living in that group, especially for spreading that individual's genes is to be lazy, reap the fruits of other people's labor. And when everybody else goes out to hunt, go impregnate all the women in the group. Or if it's a woman, go get pregnant from all the men in the group, and your genes will be more likely to be propagated in the group. So it is very important for groups to prevent this kind of cheating. It is very important that groups learn how to identify cheaters and how to punish them. So that a person doesn't go on and cheat and get ahead on the backs of the rest of our labor. So, a good example of cheater detection comes from vampire bats. If anybody's familiar, vampire bats are another social species. They live in groups just like we do. And vampire bats go out and hunt at night, right that's why they're called vampire bats. They go out, they find some cow in the field, find some other animal somewhere else, take a bite of that animal, suck the blood and come back to the home base. Now the way vampire bats work is if one bat is unsuccessful on the hunt, then another bat, then it makes some kind of motion to the other bat. And another bat will regurgitate, vomit up, what it ate that night and feed the other bat. Yes, you might think that's disgusting, but it's part of nature and there's a reciprocal altruism at play here in the vampire bat. So let's say on one night, we've got two bats, let's call them Joe and Sam. Joe goes out and has a big feast. Sam is unsuccessful, can't find anything that night. So they come back to the home base, Sam turns to Joe, makes the noise and Joe says nuh-uh, I'm not sharing. I'm full, I'm happy, and I'm not giving you any of my blood. Well night number two comes along and this time Sam is successful and Joe is not successful. So Joe goes over Sam and asks him, hey, can I have some blood? And Sam will not give back to Joe. So Sam has the ability to remember, the vampire bat has the ability to remember who gave blood and who didn't. And that way, cheaters can't get away with it in the vampire bat groups. And we have similar systems in our societies, where if somebody cheats us out something we remember it and we have this strong desire to get them back and not let them benefit off, of it.
