A modular perspective on the relationship between biological evolution and learning

Cognitivist evolutionary psychology is not well-disposed to account for the causal relationship between biological evolution and culture, because its subject matter, mental causation of behavior, belongs to a mechanistic, proximate causal category, whereas the phenotype/behavior-environment interaction of biological and cultural evolution both belong to different levels of contextual, ultimate causal categories. Thus cognitivist evolutionary psychology effectively disregards how social learning history shapes neurophysiology, and thus “mental states”, through the course of the individual’s lifetime. Nevertheless, the mental module hypothesis, central to cognitivist evolutionary psychology, though formulated in somewhat naïve, mentalist terms, holds great potential for understanding the relationship between biological evolution, learning and neurophysiology. It is reasonable to assume that that everyday behavioral responses of some complexity are composed of concerted activity in different areas of the brain, each area being involved in specific aspects of the response. These areas are later involved in responses of both dissimilar function and topographic whole, sharing perhaps only partial and topographic similiarity. Several conceptual considerations related to a behavioral understanding of modularity and some related ideas for and examples of empirical research are put forth. The over-arching goal is to seamlessly synthesize a modular domain- specific behavioral adaptation perspective with a domain-general operant selection perspective — without making S-O-R style causal categorical mistakes, and rather distinguishing between the replicating and interacting aspects of behavior.