"Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology" is a fascinating article discussing the often heard claim that "our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind". This statement comes from the field of evolutionary psychology, a field with the thesis that "genetic evolution simply could not keep pace fully with the extraordinary rate at which human technology transformed environments.".
The authors assemble an impressive collection of research that quite convincingly indicates that this thesis does not hold. Some extracts:
- "There have been substantial human genetic changes in the last 50,000 years, with possibly as much as 10% of human genes affected"
- "Events in the Holocene (the last 10,000 years) ... were a major source of selection on our species, and possibly accelerated human evolution"
- "If humans exhibit equivalent rates [than seen in other species], then significant genetic evolution would occur over the course of a few hundred years."
- "Recent trends in developmental psychology and neuroscience have ... stressed the malleability of the human brain, emphasizing how experience tunes and regulates synaptic connectivity, neural circuitry and gene expression in the brain, leading to remarkable plasticity in the brain’s structural and functional organization"
- "the human brain has too much architectural complexity for it to be plausible that genes specify its wiring in detail; therefore, developmental processes carry much of the burden of establishing neural connections"
- "there is no evidence for modularity in central systems such as those involved in learning and memory."
- "... accounts of the evolution of brain and cognition cannot in themselves explain the brain’s underlying working mechanisms"
What I find fascinating about this research is that it highlights the potential of us human. We are not driven and out into a final shape by nature, but carry potential and possibility to develop.
The article is freely available on PLOSBiology.
Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology by Johan J. Bolhuis, Gillian R. Brown, Robert C. Richardson, Kevin N. Laland
