I like that essay, which I hadn’t seen before. But I’m having trouble deciphering whether it endorses what I called the strong ancestral environment hypothesis.
I’d say it doesn’t endorse the strong ancestral environment hypothesis (SAEH). The most relevant part of EY’s piece is, “Anything originally computed in a brain can be expected to be recomputed, on the fly, in response to changing circumstances.” “Mainstream” evolutionary psychologists uphold the “massive modularity hypothesis,” according to which the adaptive demands of the ancestral environment gave rise to hardwired adaptations that continue to operate despite different environmental conditions. They deny that a general purpose learning mechanism is capable of solving specific adaptive problems (recomputed on the fly). The cognitive biases are one of the evidentiary mainstays of SAEH, but they are subject to alternative interpretations. The evidence of the plasticity of the brain is perhaps the strongest evidence against massive modularity.
I’d also mention that not all primate species are highly stratified. Although chimps are our closest relatives, it is far from clear that the human ancestral environment included comparable stratification. It isn’t even clear that a uniform ancestral human environment existed.
evolutionary/cognitive boundary
tl;dr: people who talk about signaling are confusing everyone.
I like that essay, which I hadn’t seen before. But I’m having trouble deciphering whether it endorses what I called the strong ancestral environment hypothesis.
I’d say it doesn’t endorse the strong ancestral environment hypothesis (SAEH). The most relevant part of EY’s piece is, “Anything originally computed in a brain can be expected to be recomputed, on the fly, in response to changing circumstances.” “Mainstream” evolutionary psychologists uphold the “massive modularity hypothesis,” according to which the adaptive demands of the ancestral environment gave rise to hardwired adaptations that continue to operate despite different environmental conditions. They deny that a general purpose learning mechanism is capable of solving specific adaptive problems (recomputed on the fly). The cognitive biases are one of the evidentiary mainstays of SAEH, but they are subject to alternative interpretations. The evidence of the plasticity of the brain is perhaps the strongest evidence against massive modularity.
I’d also mention that not all primate species are highly stratified. Although chimps are our closest relatives, it is far from clear that the human ancestral environment included comparable stratification. It isn’t even clear that a uniform ancestral human environment existed.
That’s just false, and EY really should know better.