The Evolution of Moral Cognition

<p>Many modern approaches to the evolution of mind have claimed that the fundamental drivers of our cognitive capacities and cultures are genetically specified psychological adaptations, which evolved in response to evolutionary pressures deep within our lineage's history. Many of our cognitive capacities are innate. Recent approaches to moral cognition have similarly argued that moral cognition is innate. In this thesis, I argue that even though our capacity for moral cognising is an adaptation, it is a learned adaptation. Moral cognition is not innate. In arguing this thesis I will question many of the assumptions of traditional cognitive science and evolutionary approaches to the mind. By incorporating theory and evidence from cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, I apply the explanatory frameworks of embodied and extended cognition to the domain of morality: moral cognition is both embodied and extended cognition. This places particular importance on the role of our bodies and world in the fundamental structuring and scaffolding of the development and execution of moral cognition. Putting this in an evolutionary framework, I develop a dual inheritance model of the non-nativist evolution of moral cognition focusing on the roles of niche construction, biased learning and active learning in the transfer of moral phenotypes between generations. Morality is a learned adaptation that evolved through the dynamic and reciprocal interaction between genes and culture.</p>

The Evolution of Moral Cognition

<p>Many modern approaches to the evolution of mind have claimed that the fundamental drivers of our cognitive capacities and cultures are genetically specified psychological adaptations, which evolved in response to evolutionary pressures deep within our lineage's history. Many of our cognitive capacities are innate. Recent approaches to moral cognition have similarly argued that moral cognition is innate. In this thesis, I argue that even though our capacity for moral cognising is an adaptation, it is a learned adaptation. Moral cognition is not innate. In arguing this thesis I will question many of the assumptions of traditional cognitive science and evolutionary approaches to the mind. By incorporating theory and evidence from cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, I apply the explanatory frameworks of embodied and extended cognition to the domain of morality: moral cognition is both embodied and extended cognition. This places particular importance on the role of our bodies and world in the fundamental structuring and scaffolding of the development and execution of moral cognition. Putting this in an evolutionary framework, I develop a dual inheritance model of the non-nativist evolution of moral cognition focusing on the roles of niche construction, biased learning and active learning in the transfer of moral phenotypes between generations. Morality is a learned adaptation that evolved through the dynamic and reciprocal interaction between genes and culture.</p>

Is a non-evolutionary psychology possible?

The last thirty years has seen the emergence of a self-styled ‘evolutionary’ paradigm within psychology (henceforth, EP). EP is often presented and critiqued as a distinctive, contentious paradigm, to be contrasted with other accounts of human psychology. However, little attention has been paid to the sense in which those other accounts are not evolutionary, or at least evolutionalizable. We distinguish between a commitment to evolution, and a more specific commitment to adaptationism. We argue that all formulable accounts of human psychology are evolutionary in a real sense: non-evolutionary psychology is impossible. Not all psychologies are explicitly adaptationist, but those that are not still draw on informal notions of organismal function, and thus implicitly require at least a weak version of adaptationism. We argue that the really distinctive and contentious feature of EP is not its commitment to evolution, or even adaptationism. It is the commitment to domain-specificity and the associated multiplicity of innately specialized psychological mechanisms. This commitment entails a narrow parsing of what an adaptive problem is, and has the consequence that the science of psychology ends up consisting of many narrow proximal explanations, rather than a few broad ones. We illustrate this thesis by examining a range of paradigms that can be seen as competitors to canonical EP: social role theory; cultural evolutionary psychology and dual inheritance theory; Bayesian cognitive science; and Giddens’ social theory. Narrow versus broad functional specialization emerges as the central locus of difference between the different psychologies we review.

The Cradle of Humankind

This chapter explores the relationship between parenting and technology from an evolutionary perspective. The exploration is organized around the “three styles” framework for understanding and differentiating between the three major evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior: evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, and dual inheritance theory. For each of these evolutionary approaches, the chapter provides two examples of the relationship between parenting and technology, one related to childbearing and the other related to childrearing. Is the evolutionary approach a useful one to understand this relationship? First, although each has as its focus the application of evolutionary theory to the study of human behavior, each of the three styles brings a different set of assumptions and priorities. Second, an evolutionary perspective points to specific, and theoretically justified, behavioral concomitants of technological change.

Towards a Pricean foundation for cultural evolutionary theory

The Price equation is currently considered one of the fundamental equations – or even the fundamental equation – of evolution. In this article, we explore the role of this equation within cultural evolutionary theory. More specifically, we use it to account for the explanatory power and the theoretical structure of a certain generalised version of dual-inheritance theory. First, we argue that, in spite of not having a definite empirical content, the Price equation offers a suitable formalisation of the processes of cultural evolution, and provides a powerful heuristic device for discovering the actual causes of cultural change and accumulation. Second, we argue that, as a consequence of this, a certain version of the Price equation is the fundamental law of cultural evolutionary theory. In order to support this claim, we sketch the ideal structure of dual-inheritance theory and we stress the unificatory role that the Price equation plays in it.

Complex Modes of Inheritance in Hereditary Red Blood Cell Disorders: A Case Series Study of 155 Patients

Hereditary erythrocytes disorders include a large group of conditions with heterogeneous molecular bases and phenotypes. We analyzed here a case series of 155 consecutive patients with clinical suspicion of hereditary erythrocyte defects referred to the Medical Genetics Unit from 2018 to 2020. All of the cases followed a diagnostic workflow based on a targeted next-generation sequencing panel of 86 genes causative of hereditary red blood cell defects. We obtained an overall diagnostic yield of 84% of the tested patients. Monogenic inheritance was seen for 69% (107/155), and multi-locus inheritance for 15% (23/155). PIEZO1 and SPTA1 were the most mutated loci. Accordingly, 16/23 patients with multi-locus inheritance showed dual molecular diagnosis of dehydrated hereditary stomatocytosis/xerocytosis and hereditary spherocytosis. These dual inheritance cases were fully characterized and were clinically indistinguishable from patients with hereditary spherocytosis. Additionally, their ektacytometry curves highlighted alterations of dual inheritance patients compared to both dehydrated hereditary stomatocytosis and hereditary spherocytosis. Our findings expand the genotypic spectrum of red blood cell disorders and indicate that multi-locus inheritance should be considered for analysis and counseling of these patients. Of note, the genetic testing was crucial for diagnosis of patients with a complex mode of inheritance.

Beyond the Church and the Poor: Expanding the Subject of Ethnographic Theology

The use of ethnography for theological inquiry is no longer novel. Yet, as the introduction to this special issue indicates, the ethnographic turn in Christian theology is animated by distinct postliberal and liberationist trajectories, each with their own theological presumptions and methodological aims. Should the future development of this turn favour one trajectory over another? This paper explores this question in conversation with Todd Whitmore’s Imitating Christ in Magwi: An Anthropological Theology. Through a sustained engagement with Imitating Christ in Magwi, I unearth both postliberal and liberationist inheritances to show that Whitmore’s text exceeds a postliberal-liberationist binary. I then ask what the dual inheritance of his work signifies for the future of the ethnographic turn. Drawing from cultural anthropology’s mode of ‘studying up,’ I suggest that the turn should orient itself more broadly to the care of our common life by expanding attention to subjects with power.

The Origins of Religious Disbelief: A Dual Inheritance Approach

Widespread religious disbelief represents a key testing ground for theories of religion. We evaluated the predictions of three prominent theoretical approaches—secularization, cognitive byproduct, and dual inheritance—in a nationally representative (United States, N = 1,417) data set with preregistered analyses and found considerable support for the dual inheritance perspective. Of key predictors of religious disbelief, witnessing fewer credible cultural cues of religious commitment was the most potent, β = .28, followed distantly by reflective cognitive style, β = .13, and less advanced mentalizing, β = .05. Low cultural exposure predicted about 90% higher odds of atheism than did peak cognitive reflection, and cognitive reflection only predicted disbelief among those relatively low in cultural exposure to religion. This highlights the utility of considering both evolved intuitions and transmitted culture and emphasizes the dual roles of content- and context-biased social learning in the cultural transmission of disbelief (preprint https://psyarxiv.com/e29rt/ ).

Proper understanding of grounded procedures of separation needs a dual inheritance approach

Grounded procedures of separation are conceptualized as a learned concept. The simultaneous cultural universality of the general idea and immense diversity of its implementations might be better understood through the lens of dual inheritance theories. By drawing on examples from developmental psychology and emotion theorizing, we argue that an innate blueprint might underlie learned implementations of cleansing that vary widely.