Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Massive Modularity, Gene Concepts, and the Feasibility of Strong Evolutionary Psychology
Mehmet Elgin, Mugla University
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning

Abstract: David Buller (2005) argues in his influential book Adapting Minds (as opposed to Adapted Minds) that Evolutionary Psychology (EP) does not get off the ground because of the evidence from developmental neuroscience against it. He understands EP as a paradigm whose central thesis is the idea that mind consists of hundreds and thousands domain specific modules each of which evolved as a response to a certain selection pressure in ancestral human populations and he distinguishes it from the evolutionary approach to explaining human behavior in general. In this talk, I will present an argument against Buller’s claim that evidence from developmental neuroscience undermines EP’s central thesis.