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PubMed2002

The cognitive functions of language.

This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is de facto the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of conscious propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for nondomain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive "quasimodules"). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate.

Cognition↗
PubMed2006

Cruelty's rewards: the gratifications of perpetrators and spectators.

Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain on other living creatures, sometimes indifferently, but often with delight. Though cruelty is an overwhelming presence in the world, there is no neurobiological or psychological explanation for its ubiquity and reward value. This target article attempts to provide such explanations by describing three stages in the development of cruelty. Stage 1 is the development of the predatory adaptation from the Palaeozoic to the ethology of predation in canids, felids, and primates. Stage 2, through palaeontological and anthropological evidence, traces the emergence of the hunting adaptation in the Pliocene, its development in early hominids, and its emotional loading in surviving forager societies. This adaptation provides an explanation for the powerful emotions - high arousal and strong affect - evoked by the pain-blood-death complex. Stage 3 is the emergence of cruelty about 1.5 million years ago as a hominid behavioural repertoire that promoted fitness through the maintenance of personal and social power. The resulting cultural elaborations of cruelty in war, in sacrificial rites, and as entertainment are examined to show the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control. Effective violence prevention must begin with perpetrators, not victims. If the upstream approaches to violence prevention advocated by the public-health model are to be effective, psychologists must be able to provide violence prevention workers with a fine-grained understanding of perpetrator gratifications. This is a distasteful task that will compel researchers to interact with torturers and abusers, and to acknowledge that their gratifications are rooted in a common human past. It is nonetheless an essential step in developing effective strategies for the primary prevention of violence.

Aggression↗
PubMed2006

The folk psychology of souls.

The present article examines how people's belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one's afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is "like" to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people's interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive "system" dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment.

Attitude to Death↗
PubMed1997

Writing Amish culture into genes: biological reductionism in a study of manic depression.

Critical realism is used to explore the problem of reductionism in a classic (the Amish Study) and widely-cited study of manic depression. Along with related ideas drawn from the works of R.C. Lewontin, Arthur Kleinman, and Byron Good, it is shown that natural and social scientists deploy atomistic and holistic reductionism; this, in turn, leads to the construction of artificially 'closed systems' through the control of variables or exogenous forces. The psychiatric genetic studies of the Amish were predicated on the assumption that Amish society is homogeneous and unchanging and, therefore, closed. We conclude by arguing that interactions between behaviors and genes, where they exist, take place only within open systems, characterized by multiple mechanisms-social and biological-that together co-determine any event. To move forward, it is argued, behavior and gene research requires recognition and resolution of the philosophical conundrums that accompany reductionism.

Bipolar Disorder↗
PubMed1994

International migrations. A framework for directing research.

Current, large-scale, cross-cultural migrations offer promising research targets for the study of human adaptations. The opportunities for such research, however, remain substantially unused in the mainstream of psychology. The purpose here is to provide a framework encompassing components of the migration experience to aid such research. Contextual factors in the sending and receiving societies impinge on the components of the migration experience: social networks, socioeconomic status, and culture. The components, treated as intertwining transitional experiences in migration, should be juxtaposed in research to examine their effects. Gender and age mediate the effects. The framework aims to benefit research that implicates, directly or heuristically, the experiences of persons exposed to rapid sociocultural change and the consequences of such changes in their lives.

Acculturation↗
PubMed1999

Evolutionary versus prototype analyses of the concept of disorder.

The harmful dysfunction (HD) analysis of the concept of disorder (J. C. Wakefield, 1992a) holds that disorders are harmful failures of internal mechanisms to perform their naturally selected functions. S. O. Lilienfeld and L. Marino (1995) proposed instead that disorder is a Roschian prototype concept without defining properties. Against the HD analysis, they argued that many disorders are not failures of naturally selected functions because they are either designed reactions (e.g., fever) or failures of functions that are not naturally selected (e.g., reading disorder). The HD analysis is defended here against these and other objections and compared with the Roschian account. It is argued that the objections are based on conceptual confusions and can be turned around to provide strong new support for the HD analysis. A series of conceptual experiments demonstrates the superior explanatory power of the HD analysis and disconfirms the Roschian account.

Biological Evolution↗
PubMed1999

Mental disorder as a black box essentialist concept.

This is a reply to commentaries on the target article (J. C. Wakefield, 1999) on the evolutionary foundations of the concept of mental disorder in defense of the harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) of disorder. The author argues that the HDA is adequate to explain disorder and nondisorder judgments and is not disconfirmed by any of the claimed counterexamples put forward by the commentators; the commentators' proposed alternatives to the HDA are inadequate to explain disorder and nondisorder judgments; and the concept of natural function is a factual, scientific concept, contrary to K. W. M. Fulford's (1999) claim that it is inherently evaluative. The foundations of the HDA are clarified by providing a black box essentialist analysis (H. Putnam, 1975; J. C. Wakefield, 1997, in press) of the concept of natural function that underlies the concept of disorder.

Biological Evolution↗
PubMed2001

Cultural variation: considerations and implications.

Cultural systems vary widely across the world. Partly this is due to different cultures' occupying different ecological and environmental niches. But partly it is due to similar circumstances giving rise to multiple stable equilibriums, each with a distinct cultural form. Using insights and examples from various fields, this article illustrates the way that multiple equilibriums can emerge and the forces that push a culture toward one equilibrium point or another. Considerations of game theory principles, mutual interdependence, historical circumstance, dependence on initial conditions, and crucial choice points are highlighted in discussing the ways humans create and re-create their culture. Cultural traits develop within physical, social, intracultural, and intercultural niches, and implications of this for how culture might be studied and the benefits of combining an "equilibrium" perspective and a "meaning" perspective are discussed.

Cultural Characteristics↗
PubMed2002

Developmental-behavioral initiation of evolutionary change.

The traditional approach to evolutionary psychology relies entirely on natural selection as the cause of the evolution of adaptations. Exclusive reliance on natural selection overlooks the fact that changes in development are a necessary prerequisite for evolutionary change. These developmental changes provide the material for natural selection to work on. In the neo-Darwinian scenario, the mechanisms of evolution are mutation or genetic recombination, selection, migration, and eventual reproductive isolation. In the spirit of evolutionary pluralism, the author describes a different 3-stage scenario in which migration (the invasion of new niches or habitats) may occur without mutation or genetic recombination and selection first initiating a change in genes or gene frequencies.

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMed2004

Evidence for cultivar adoption and emerging complexity during the mid-Holocene in the La Plata basin.

Multidisciplinary investigations at the Los Ajos archaeological mound complex in the wetlands of southeastern Uruguay challenge the traditional view that the La Plata basin was inhabited by simple groups of hunters and gatherers for much of the pre-Hispanic era. Here we report new archaeological, palaeoecological and botanical data indicating that during an increasingly drier mid-Holocene, at around 4,190 radiocarbon (14C) years before present (bp), Los Ajos became a permanent circular plaza village, and its inhabitants adopted the earliest cultivars known in southern South America. The architectural plan of Los Ajos during the following Ceramic Mound Period (around 3,000-500 14C yr bp) is similar to, but earlier than, settlement patterns demonstrated in Amazonia, revealing a new and independent architectural tradition for South America.

Agriculture↗
PubMed2006

VEGF-C is a trophic factor for neural progenitors in the vertebrate embryonic brain.

Vascular endothelial growth factor C (VEGF-C) was first identified as a regulator of the vascular system, where it is required for the development of lymphatic vessels. Here we report actions of VEGF-C in the central nervous system. We detected the expression of the VEGF-C receptor VEGFR-3 in neural progenitor cells in Xenopus laevis and mouse embryos. In Xenopus tadpole VEGF-C knockdowns and in mice lacking Vegfc, the proliferation of neural progenitors expressing VEGFR-3 was severely reduced, in the absence of intracerebral blood vessel defects. In addition, Vegfc-deficient mouse embryos showed a selective loss of oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) in the embryonic optic nerve. In vitro, VEGF-C stimulated the proliferation of OPCs expressing VEGFR-3 and nestin-positive ventricular neural cells. VEGF-C thus has a new, evolutionary conserved function as a growth factor selectively required by neural progenitor cells expressing its receptor VEGFR-3.

Animals↗