Darwinism as a Decryption Key for the Human Mind
Title
Darwinism as a Decryption Key for the Human Mind
Author
Pléh, Csaba
Boross, Ottilia
Research Area
Development
Topic
Evolutionary Bases of Development
Abstract
The essay summarizes some of the key results and debated issues of Darwinian psychology over the past 150 years. Comparative psychology, psychological anthropology, research into the ontogeny of the mind, evolutionary interpretations of knowledge, and the study of individual differences are the main areas where evolutionary explanations remarkably influence traditional psychology. All five of them show up in twentieth century developments within the framework of overall selectionism, the idea that in all aspects of life—including human culture or habits—there is a certain diversity and variety not only in the form of living things but also in the form of “living‐things‐made” material, cultural or virtual, all of them being subject to natural selection. Some issues of overall selectionism, having been introduced by Karl Bühler, Karl Popper, and Donald Campbell, or by the genetic epistemology of Jean Piaget, are compared in this essay to the latest debates and ideas about the message of evolution by Daniel Dennett, to the coordination of evolutionary models, the theories about the social mind and its development, and the genesis of culture and evolution in rivaling models of human architectures, as in the one proposed by Michael Tomasello. Some of the continuously debated issues have been escorting us since the 1880s, such as the relative significance of nature or culture, the causal relations between different levels of selection, and the like. They all mean a real challenge to the unbounded and unanchored psychological and epistemological theories.