From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Wed 04 Feb 2004 - 02:19:22 GMT
At 02:21 PM 03/02/04 +0000, Scott wrote:
snip (amusing rant hard to take entirely seriously)
>Also, under AOB, I'd like to completely dissociate myself from the dark
>side of biology trying to _help_ explain all this, i.e. evolpsych, which
>should imho confine itself to studies of brainstem-related stuff (primal
>fear, basic pattern recognition and so on), and what effect that has on
>minds constructed of memes (the commensalistic/parasitic,
>telencephalically based us).
But if I were to take the last paragraph seriously, I would have to object
that evolutionary psychology per se does not study *anything.*
"The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and
understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an
approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary
biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It
is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is
a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.
"In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that
were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our
hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and
behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics . . . ."
Keith Henson
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed 04 Feb 2004 - 02:25:12 GMT