QIP CD Cell Project IIT Guwahati 2009-10

QIP CD Cell Project IIT Guwahati 2009-10

QIP CD Cell Project IIT Guwahati 2009-10

NATURAL SELECTION

Daily and hourly scrutinising; throughout the world,

every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which
is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever
opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic
being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions
of life.

QIP CD Cell Project IIT Guwahati 2009-10

DARWIN'S THEORY
Darwin came to understand that any population consists of individuals
that are all slightly different from one another, those individuals
having a variation that gives them an advantage in staying alive
long enough to successfully reproduce are the ones that pass on
their traits more frequently to the next generation.
Subsequently, their traits become more common and the population
evolves.
Darwin called this descent with modification.

QIP CD Cell Project IIT Guwahati 2009-10

TELL-TALE SIGNS OF EVOLUTION

Our emotional behavior follows the pattern that are
already visible in lower animals.
The curling of lips into a sneer maybe a relic of the
snarling action designed to show the teeth to an
enemy when the teeth were still used as weapons.
Our lives are still dominated by functions imposed
on us as a result of our animal ancestors.
QIP CD Cell Project IIT Guwahati 2009-10

Our moral sense

It is a product of interaction between social instincts and
developing intelligence .
Darwin believed that groups will more socially developed social
instincts would displace others in which those instincts were
less powerful. He noted that in many primitive tribes, the
willingness to co-operate with each other is confined to the
tribal group-outsiders dont count as amoral universe.
This one was consistent with the view that the social instincts
were built up for the benefit of the group. As the size of our
societies have increased we have inevitably been learn to
generalize the moral theories designed to convince us that
respect for others is an absolute good.

Adaptation explains why our ancestors had evolved

characters that separated them from apes. The apes have
remained apes because they have retained their ancestor
lifestyle in trees, their forelimbs have thus continued to be
adapted for grasping branches. Our own ancestors moved
out of the trees, stood upright as means of getting about in
open plains.
This in turn freed their hands for exploring the environment
and for using sticks and stones as primitive tools. Therefore
our intelligence is a byproduct of unique shift in lifestyle by
our ancestors. In their new way of life, something called
natural selection favored those individuals who walked
upright and in turn promoted the increase of intelligence
within a population that now had better opportunity to exploit
that faculty.

QIP CD Cell Project IIT Guwahati 2009-10

QIP CD Cell Project IIT Guwahati 2009-10

Evolutionary Psychology

 Culture is created by the communal mind, and each mind

in turn is the product of the genetically structured human

brain. Genes and culture are therefore inseverably linked.

But the linkage is flexible, to a degree still mostly

unmeasured. The linkage is also tortuous: Genes prescribe

epigenetic (besides + genetic) rules, which are the
neural pathways and regularities in cognitive development
by which the individual mind assembles itself.

The mind grows from birth to death by absorbing parts of

the existing culture available to it, with selections guided

through epigenetic rules inherited by the individual brain.

 Evolutionary psychology is the combination of two

sciences -- evolutionary biology and cognitive

psychology
Evolutionary psychology is the approach of
explaining human behavior based on the
combination of evolutionary biology, anthropology,
cognitive science, and the neurosciences.
Evolutionary psychology is not a specific sub field of
psychology, such as the study of vision, reasoning, or
social behavior. It is a way of thinking about
psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.

 Evolutionary psychology is the science that seeks to explain

through universal mechanisms of behavior why humans act

the way they

Evolutionary psychology seeks to reconstruct problems that

our ancestors faced in their primitive environments, and the
problem-solving mechanisms they created to meet those
particular challenges.

From these reconstructed problem-solving adaptations, the

science then attempts to establish the common roots of our

ancestral behavior, and how those common behavioral roots
are manifested today in the widely scattered cultures of the
planet. The goal is to understand human behavior that is
universally aimed at the passing of one's genes into the next
generation.

 At the core of evolutionary psychology is the belief that all humans

on the planet have innate areas in their brains which have specific
knowledge that help them adapt to local environments.
These areas are highly specialized, and only activate when the

information is needed. These areas give the brain specific

algorithmic (step by step) instructions that have evolved from our
ancestral pasts to adapt to all situations, including the situations
that we face today.
But since our brains were conditioned to live in deep history i.e., our

ancestral past, and not to modern conditions, the result is a gray

area between genes and culture that drives some humans into
depressive states.

Robert Wright
"Whether burdened by an overwhelming flurry

of daily commitments or stifled by a sense of

social isolation (or, oddly, both); whether
mired for hours in a sense of lifes
pointlessness or beset for days by unresolved
anxiety; whether deprived by long workweeks
from quality time with offspring or drowning in
quantity time with them whatever the source
of stress, we at times get the feeling that
modern life isnt what we were designed for."

The functional organization of the body has been elucidated primarily by the direct
examination of morphology. A detailed analysis of the structure and composition of our
organs and tissues has resulted in an excellent understanding of their purpose.
Unfortunately, this has not been the case with the brain. The gross morphology of the brain
appears to have little connection with its functional properties. Although we have a fair
understanding of nerve cells--the primary constituents of neural tissue--the properties of
the brain clearly come from higher order assemblages of such cells, not just the cells
themselves.

This is just as true of organs like the heart as it is of the brain. Because nerve cells can
rapidly change state (e.g., their firing rate), because such state-changes involve little
energy, and because they can be well insulated from their neighbors, it is possible for a
nerve cell to be in one state, whereas some of its close neighbors may be in completely
different states. This is in marked contrast to, say, muscle cells. If one muscle cell is
involved in a contraction, then nearby cells almost certainly are as well. Neural tissue is
quite different. Even the individual states of nerve cells in a network depend critically on
the topology of the network itself. Further, assemblages that are actually distinct may have
a complex three-dimensional distribution that can be very difficult to untangle. These
properties of neural tissue make it exceedingly difficult to "see" the morphology of neural
assemblages--with few exceptions, the network topology of virtually our entire brain is
currently "invisible." It exists at a scale above the individual cell, but well below that which
can be teased apart with any imaging technology currently available. Until recent decades,
much of our immune system was similarly "invisible."

Evolutionary psychology offers one way around this technological limitation.

If researchers had a sound basis for proposing brain functions a priori, they
could then seek indirect evidence that brains in fact have these functional
properties. Philosophers and scientists had long wondered why living things
are made up of an amazing array of beautifully designed mechanisms, an
organization which non-living things completely lack. Why is it that entities
that reproduce manifest overwhelming evidence of design, but entities that
don't reproduce are utterly devoid of the same? As Darwin and Wallace first
perceived, the association of reproduction and design is not accidental.
Evolution by natural selection is currently accepted as the only process
whereby entities can acquire functional properties. Functional organization
is the consequence of the reproductive feedback that characterizes natural
selection. If a population of reproducing entities (hereafter organisms)
varies in some trait, if the variations can be passed on to offspring, and if,
as a consequence of possessing a particular variant, an organism produces
more offspring on average than organisms that lack that variant over
evolutionary time, then the population will come to consist solely of
organisms possessing the reproductively efficacious variant trait. In this
way, populations of organisms will tend to acquire traits that facilitate
reproduction and lose traits that hinder reproduction.

Over the last 200,000 years, humans regularly encountered spiders and
snakes, creatures whose toxins would have significantly impeded the
reproduction of individuals unlucky enough to get injected with them. Over
the last 100 years, humans have regularly encountered automobiles,
encounters that also can seriously impede reproduction (e.g., by getting run
over). Because 200,000 years is long enough for humans to evolve
protective mechanisms, but 100 years isn't, we can predict that humans
may well possess an innate aversion to spiders and snakes, but not to
automobiles--even though far more people are currently killed by cars than
by spiders or snakes. Once we have firmly established that avoiding spiders
and snakes would have reliably facilitated the reproduction of ancestral
humans, we can then design experiments to determine whether humans in
fact possess an innate, cognitive ability to detect and avoid these animals
(more on how to do this below). A major lesson of evolutionary psychology
is that if you want to understand the brain, look deeply at the environment
of our ancestors as focused through the lens of reproduction. If the
presumptions of evolutionary psychology are correct, the structure of our
brains should closely reflect our ancestral reproductive ecology. Thus,
evolutionary psychology provides a method for perceiving the functional
organization of the brain by studying the world--currently a far more
tractable problem than disentangling neural assemblages.

 Knowing how these areas work in relation to the

environment and the culture in which the human

organism finds itself are the other areas of research in
which evolutionary psychology shows the greatest
promise. These spheres of research aim at configuring
behavior models based on primate studies, huntergatherer research, and anthropological evidence into
the best possible problem-solving probabilities of our
ancestral behavior patterns. It is from these studies
that evolutionary psychologists build behavior
probabilities into our modern cultures and show us
why we do the things we do -- based on biology.

 The reason that evolutionary psychology is important is that,

scientists and scholars alike are finally all collaborating together

to form a consensus on how the human brain, and thus human
emotions, have evolved. Once we know how such emotions as
prejudice, hate, and anger evolved, we, as humans, can begin
to change these negative behavior mechanisms.

We do this by being self-aware of, then controlling, the emotions

that flow from our brain. It is this self-awareness and self-control

that makes us human.

We are separated from the animal within us by our higher

consciousness. We have demonstrated that we can control our

emotions and thus change our external behavior patterns. But
we all must acknowledge that we are still attached by the flesh
to our primal past.

Premises
THAT the species Homo sapiens evolved from our
primate ancestors, most likely the Old World
Primates. (Africa).
THAT our ancestors formed social groups for

protection, food gathering, and mating opportunities.

Before plant and animal domestication, these groups
were called hunter-gatherers.

THAT the forming of these social groups created the

need for group communication that evolved into

behavioral mechanisms to communicate danger, food
resources, mating signals, status, hunting, and
defensive maneuvers.

 THAT long-term adaptation to environmental and

cultural influences eventually became part of our

genetic software. Language is a perfect example; all
humans on the planet have the innate ability to learn
a language.
Listed in the next slide, in alphabetical order, are the

behavioral traits that evolutionary psychologists, so

far, have determined all humans on our planet share.
Those with question marks are in the running to be
considered as modules, but still raise question to
their validity.

Beauty Conception
Coalition Formation
Color Perception
Deception & Cheater Detection
Detecting Emotions
Face Recognition
Facial Symmetry Detection?
Food Aversions
Gender Identification?
Gossip
Humor
Incest Avoidance (Kin Recognition with Sexual Avoidance)
Infant Protectiveness? (obvious, our own children, (that's Parenting), but how about other infants outside
our family?).
Kin Recognition
Landscape Preferences
Language
Mate Preferences/Choice
Mental Maps
Object Recognition
Odor Avoidance (strong odor)
Parenting
Perception of Status/Ranking
Plant Spoilage (awareness of)
Romantic Love
Rough house play (in children)
Sexual Attraction
Sexual Orientation?
Sexual Avoidance
Self-Awareness
Social Group Reasoning

 Internal, personal, and interpersonal behavior is

influenced by genetic codes, but not imprisoned by them.

In our long evolutionary voyage, we have gone from total
reflex action in the environment (nature) to
understanding the cues from our kin and close
companions as the basis for knowing the best course of
action (nurture).
In our modern world with vast communication networks in

place, culture has the greatest influence. It is the dance

between nature and nurture with nurture as the dominant
leading partner that creates evolutionary psychology.