宗教的认知科学解释

宗教认知科学从认知和进化的角度,对宗教信仰的机制提出新的解释.目前主要有认知副产物理论和社会适应理论.认知副产物理论认为,宗教信仰并不具有任何进化的适应性,而是人类自身认知倾向的副产物,是一种无害的噪音.社会适应理论认为,宗教信仰能促进群体的团结合作,是一个精巧的社会适应机制,有助于群体的自然选择.宗教认知科学发展了核心概念,建立了新的宗教理论,为宗教研究提供了新的思路和方法.     

认知偏向研究的进化心理学视角

这篇文章从进化心理学的视角阐述了认知偏向研究的方法和基本理论,进化心理学认为人类认知存在系统的偏向,这种有偏的认知通常是自然选择设计的特征.认知偏向的误差管理理论认为:如果认知在不确定条件下做出,并且错误肯定和错误否定的错误的成本在进化历史上不对称情况循环出现,自然选择偏爱犯最小成本错误的认知偏向.认知偏向研究的进化心理学方式有助于系统地产生关于领域特定化的认知偏向的预测.     

进化心理学的相关概念、理论与历史

该文概述了达尔文主义、进化生物学与心理学在中国的发展,同时也介绍了与进化心理学相关的概念与基本理论。该文内容包括,Darwin的自然选择理论,Hamilton的种系适宜理论与Trivers的父母投资理论,也包括博弈理论、生活史理论与生态位建构理论     

进化发展心理学：发展中的人类本性

进化发展心理学研究社会能力与认知能力发展背后的基因与环境机制,以及基因与环境机制在特定社会文化中的表现。进化发展心理学探讨的主要问题与设计到的主要概念包括：（1）自然选择在毕生发展的早期阶段发挥作用;（2）进化发展心理学特别重视适应在婴儿期及儿童期发展中的作用;（3）儿童期的延长有助于儿童学习人类社会的复杂性;（4）发展背景的方法可以用来理解成人外显行为的进化起源;（5）基因与环境因素相互影响约束个体发展;（6）认知能力与行为活动敏感于早期环境,但二者发展也具有可塑性     

自杀的生物学性质探索

考虑到酵母的适应性自杀、动物界的类自杀现象、人类社会普遍存在自杀的事实及目前对于自杀行为生物学机制的探索认识,提出自杀行为可能在生物界具有普遍性,并且还可能具有一定进化上的适应意义.在漫长进化中获得的人类强大自我意识对于自杀行为起消长性作用,但似乎这种强大自我意识并不能彻底压制自杀行为,也不能把人类顽固的自杀行为完全归咎于这种强大的自我意识.人类自杀行为可能具有深刻的生物学根源.     

择偶策略的影响因素

进化心理学旨在以进化的观点,如适应、自然选择,来解释人类的心理和行为,是当前时兴的一门科学。择偶对于人类生存繁衍的重要作用不容忽视,为目前进化心理学的研究热点。本文集中探讨择偶的相关影响因素,包括择偶标准在异性、不等收入人群中的差异,时间、早期经验及择偶自感价值、文化等对择偶策略的影响。     

进化心理学概览

该文认为处于萌芽状态的进化心理学作为一个新的心理学分支学科对人类心理运行机制提出了一些基本的解释与预测。该文也讨论了进化心理学研究遭受到的两种批评,其一是文化的重要性没有得到重视;其二是进化历史是“假想的故事”。同时作者认为完整地理解心理学研究课题需要进行最终水平的因果分析,只有掌握与运用自然选择理论才能从最终水平上理解研究课题     

进化论与伦理学的三层牵涉

进化伦理学把道德看作是进化的产物.进化思维在解释道德现象时有三个不同程度的涉入,这个区分是依据自然选择在塑造道德过程中所扮演的角色而言的.根据一种最弱级别的进化涉入,道德像艺术和科学一样,只是自然选择的间接产物,不受制于机体的生物性;而根据一种最强级别的进化涉入,道德完全是自然选择的直接产物,根植于机体的生物性中.这两个级别的进化涉入不能提供对道德的理想解释,一个恰当级别的进化涉入应该在这两个极端之间.     

抗进化：治愈癌症的全新方案

癌症是一种微型进化，其发生发展同样遵循着控制整个生物物种进化的突变与自然选择规律。因此，治疗肿瘤的正确途径就只能是“抗进化”：即在第一次治疗后，必须用不同属性的手段给予残留癌细胞多次间隔性打击，使残余癌细胞还未及对某种手段进化至适应前就被接连不断的、不同性质的但又致命的打击而灭绝。第二次以后的治疗剂量不必很大就可杀死余癌细胞，又不至对病人造成很大伤害。实施“抗进化”方案，人类攻克癌症的愿望就可实现     

宗教的起源:适应或偶然?

如果把宗教视作一种和生物进化类似的自然现象,那么它就应该有起源和发展的过程。近年来,探索这个意义上的宗教起源已经成为了进化心理学等认知科学领域的一个研究方向。一部分科学家认为,宗教可能是作为促进了人的生存和繁殖机会的一种适应,在自然选择的过程中进化了出来。另一部分科学家则认为宗教是意识进化的一个副产品。或者,宗教的起源是适应和副产品的综合产物。     

Evolution, Genes, and Behavior

The pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology purports to explain human behaviors by reference to an ancestral environment (essentially, a hunting-gathering way of life) in which we evolved. Contemporary human behaviors are allegedly governed directly by genes that reflect adaptation to this environment by natural selection. However, the evolutionary process is much more complex than this reductionist approach implies, and adaptation cannot involve the fine-tuning of structures or behaviors within individuals or species: natural selection can only affect entire organisms, not their components. Similarly, genetic processes are too complex to admit this simplistic view. Instead, our flexible, complex human behaviors probably represent an emergent acquisition.     

Evolutionary Psychology： How Psychological Mechanisms Shaped by Natural Selection for Ancestral Environments Produce Current Behaviours

The central purpose of this paper is to explain how Darwin′s theory of evolution by natural selection can be used in understanding current human behaviour. First, Darwin′s logic is briefly described. Development is an important issue when applying evolutionary theory to human behaviour. The notion of innate developmental organization of psychological mechanisms is introduced. The possible social and political outcomes produced when different levels of innate developmental organization are paired with differ...     

Behaviorism, private events, and the molar view of behavior

Viewing the science of behavior (behavior analysis) to be a natural science, radical behaviorism rejects any form of dualism, including subjective-objective or inner-outer dualism. Yet radical behaviorists often claim that treating private events as covert behavior and internal stimuli is necessary and important to behavior analysis. To the contrary, this paper argues that, compared with the rejection of dualism, private events constitute a trivial idea and are irrelevant to accounts of behavior. Viewed in the framework of evolutionary theory or for any practical purpose, behavior is commerce with the environment. By its very nature, behavior is extended in time. The temptation to posit private events arises when an activity is viewed in too small a time frame, obscuring what the activity does. When activities are viewed in an appropriately extended time frame, private events become irrelevant to the account. This insight provides the answer to many philosophical questions about thinking, sensing, and feeling. Confusion about private events arises in large part from failure to appreciate fully the radical implications of replacing mentalistic ideas about language with the concept of verbal behavior. Like other operant behavior, verbal behavior involves no agent and no hidden causes; like all natural events, it is caused by other natural events. In a science of behavior grounded in evolutionary theory, the same set of principles applies to verbal and nonverbal behavior and to human and nonhuman organisms.     

Toward an Evolution of Mind: Implications for the Faithful?

Ever since its inception, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has challenged assumptions about the nature of humankind and human institutions. It did not escape the notice of Darwin, sympathetic allies, or hostile contemporaries that his theory had profound implications for ethics and theology. In this paper I review some current sociobiological hypotheses about the mind that are based on the theory that the human mind is primarily a social tool. Many researchers now believe that both complex human within-group cooperation and between-group competition are the anvils that may have shaped the modules of the mind. Given this evolutionary theory of the mind, the Darwinian challenge to theism, ethics, and faith is now being relaunched with a vengeance. However, I suggest that modern physics, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science all seem to fit nicely into the atheistic and phenomenological niche defined by Buddhism.     

Four routes of cognitive evolution

Four routes of cognitive evolution are distinguished: phylogenetic construction, in which natural selection produces qualitative change to the way a cognitive mechanism operates (language); phylogenetic inflection, in which natural selection biases the input to a cognitive mechanism (imprinting and spatial memory); ontogenetic construction, in which developmental selection alters the way a cognitive mechanism operates (face recognition and theory of mind); and ontogenetic inflection, in which developmental selection changes the input to a cognitive mechanism (imitation). This framework integrates findings from evolutionary psychology (i.e., all research on the evolution of mentality and behavior). In contrast with human nativist evolutionary psychology, it recognizes the adaptive significance of developmental processes, conserves the distinction between cognitive and noncognitive mechanisms, and encompasses research on human and nonhuman animals.     

Qualitative differences between naïve and scientific theories of evolution

Philosophers of biology have long argued that Darwin's theory of evolution was qualitatively different from all earlier theories of evolution. Whereas Darwin's predecessors and contemporaries explained adaptation as the transformation of a species' "essence," Darwin explained adaptation as the selective propagation of randomly occurring mutations within a population. The present study explored the possibility of a parallel between early "transformational" theories of evolution and modern na?ve theories. Forty-two high school and college students and three evolutionary biologists were tested on their understanding of six evolutionary phenomena: variation, inheritance, adaptation, domestication, speciation, and extinction. As predicted, a plurality of participants demonstrated transformational reasoning inconsistent with natural selection. Correlational analyses revealed that participants who demonstrated transformational reasoning were as internally consistent as participants who demonstrated an understanding of natural selection, with the exception of one group of participants who appeared to have assimilated two heuristics--"survival of the fittest" and "acquired traits are not inherited"--into an otherwise transformational framework. These findings suggest that the widespread and early-developing tendency to essentialize biological kinds precludes students from conceptualizing species as populations of individuals differentially affected by the environment.     

Niche construction, biological evolution, and cultural change

We propose a conceptual model that maps the causal pathways relating biological evolution to cultural change. It builds on conventional evolutionary theory by placing emphasis on the capacity of organisms to modify sources of natural selection in their environment (niche construction) and by broadening the evolutionary dynamic to incorporate ontogenetic and cultural processes. In this model, phenotypes have a much more active role in evolution than generally conceived. This sheds light on hominid evolution, on the evolution of culture, and on altruism and cooperation. Culture amplifies the capacity of human beings to modify sources of natural selection in their environments to the point where that capacity raises some new questions about the processes of human adaptation.     

The evolution of the critical period for language acquisition

Evidence suggests that there is a critical, or at least a sensitive, period for language acquisition, which ends around puberty. The existence of this period is explained by an evolutionary model which assumes that (a) linguistic ability is in principle (if not in practice) measurable, and (b) the amount of language controlled by an individual conferred selective advantage on it. In this model, the language faculty is seen as adaptive, favoured by natural selection, while the critical period for language acquisition itself is not an adaptation, but arises from the interplay of genetic factors influencing life-history characters in relation to language acquisition. The evolutionary model is implemented on a computer and simulations of populations evolving under various plausible, if idealized, conditions result in clear critical period effects, which end around puberty.     

EVOLUTION,NATURALISM, AND THE WORTHWHILE: A CRITIQUE OF RICHARD JOYCE'S EVOLUTIONARY DEBUNKING OF MORALITY

Abstract: In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce argues there is good reason to think that the “moral sense” is a biological adaptation, and that this provides a genealogy of the moral sense that has a debunking effect, driving us to the conclusion that “our moral beliefs are products of a process that is entirely independent of their truth, … we have no grounds one way or the other for maintaining these beliefs.” I argue that Joyce's skeptical conclusion is not warranted. Even if the moral sense is a biological adaptation, developed moralities (such as Aristotelian eudaimonism) can “co‐opt” it into new roles so that the moral judgments it makes possible can come to transcend the evolutionary process that is “entirely independent of their truth.” While evolutionary theory can shed much light on our shared human nature, moral theories must still be vindicated, or debunked, by moral arguments.     

COGNITIVE AND EVOLUTIONARY FACTORS IN THE EMERGENCE OF HUMAN ALTRUISM

One of the central tenets of Christian theology is the denial of self for the benefit of another. However, many views on the evolution of altruism presume that natural selection inevitably leads to a self‐seeking human nature and that altruism is merely a façade to cover underlying selfish motives. I argue that human altruism is an emergent characteristic that cannot be reduced to any one particular evolutionary explanation. The evolutionary processes at work in the formation of human nature are not necessarily in conflict with the possibility of altruism; rather, aspects of human nature are uniquely directed toward the care and concern of others. The relationship between altruism, human nature, and evolution can be reimagined by adopting an emergent view of the hierarchy of science and a theological worldview that emphasizes self‐renunciation. The investigation of altruism necessitates an approach that analyzes several aspects of altruistic behavior at different levels in the hierarchy of sciences. This research includes the study of evolutionary adaptations, neurological systems, cognitive functions, behavioral traits, and cultural influences. No one level is able to offer a full explanation, but each piece adds a unique dimension to a much larger puzzle.