A lecture on Evolutionary Psychology, with specific examples from language research.

2. What is the ecology of the human mind?

4. Evolutionary Psychology To a first approximation: our modern skulls house a stone age mind.

5. Animal and human behavior are biological phenomena that have evolved. Ignorance of evolutionary theory can lead some psychologists to appear to view humans as having progressed to be above apes and other 'lower' animals on a 'scale of nature' or scala naturae . Animal behavior is controlled by their biology. Human behavior is determined by culture and experience. Animal behavior is more appropriately studied by biologists. Biology is a natural science. Biology is built upon the rock of evolutionary theory. Psychology is a branch of biology. Psychology is a social science. Social sciences are concerned with how culture and experience produce wide variation in human behavior. Therefore social sciences do not need to consider the role of evolution in the development of behavioral variability. All science is a single coherent entity consisting of many disciplines e.g. physics, biology, psychology, sociology etc. - all characterized by adoption of the scientific method. There are several types of scientific Endeavour e.g. natural sciences (biology, botany, zoology etc.); social sciences (sociology, psychology, politics etc.) Body structure (e.g. hands, kidneys, eyes) has evolved Body structure (e.g. hands, kidneys, eyes) has evolved According to EP: According to the SSSM:

6. The human mind consists of specialized modules that are innate and have evolved via natural and sexual selection to cope with adaptive problems. Modules resemble debugged computer programs designed for a particular process e.g. word processor, spreadsheet, database. Fodor (1998) writes that e volutionary psychologists view "..the mind as computational system; the mind is massively modular; a lot of mental structure, including a lot of cognitive structure, is innate; a lot of mental structure, including a lot of cognitive structure, is an evolutionary adaptation - in particular, the function of a creature's nervous system is to abet the propagation of its genome (its selfish gene, as one says)." Humans are born with a few reflexes and the ability to learn. Essentially we are 'empty computers' or 'blank slates' at birth, written on by the hand of culture and experience. Fodor (1998) expresses this idea as follows: "Most cognitive scientists still work in a tradition of empiricism and associationism whose main tenets haven't changed much since Locke and Hume. The human mind is a blank slate at birth. Experience writes on the slate, and association extracts and extrapolates whatever trends there are in the record that experience leaves. The structure of the mind is thus an image, made a posteriori, of the statistical regularities in the world in which it finds itself. I would guess that quite a substantial majority of cognitive scientists believe something of this sort; so deeply, indeed, that many hardly notice that they do."

7. Many of the reasons for our behavior are unconscious We can arrive at a conscious decision about the best solution to many everyday problems. Culture is a product of specialized modules. For example a page of text is the product of a word processing program. Culture determines what is learnt. Modules are inherited from ancestors who adapted to the EEA. The individual's internal and external environment plays a role in the expression of modules. Rather like setting the preferences for a computer program. Human behavior is acquired during the lifetime of the individual. Modules are specialized to solve particular adaptive problems: For example, mate selection, language, social co-operation. Human behavior is controlled by a general purpose systems which rely on imitation, general intelligence, culture, reward and punishment. These systems are content-independent or domain-general.

28. Chomsky said: You learn a specific language from data, but there is a lot about Language that you know when you’re born.

34. Universal Grammar: the basic idea Input (data) Output (grammar) “ An engineer faced with the problem of designing a device for meeting the given input-output conditions would naturally conclude that the basic properties of the output are a consequence of the design of the device. Nor is there any plausible alternative to this assumption” Chomsky (1967) Acquisition device

48. A parameter space polysynthesis head directionality subject side verb attraction subject placement serial verb null subject yes no Mohawk, Warlpiri final initial Japanese, Turkish initial final Malagasy, Tzotzil yes no no yes English Edo, Khmer high low Welsh, Zapotec no yes French Spanish, Romanian