The Adaptive System of Aggressiveness

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In our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, it was really good to eat berries and things that were sweet. And so we developed this a madule that found sweet things tasty. 200 thousand years past, we still have this madule for the sweet tooth. But now it's like german chocolate cake and basket robins chocolate chip ice cream and all this stuff that's not good for you. Like with the visual illusion, where we can't, like, even though we know it’s not good for us, it still tastes good. This episode is sponsored by one of my favorite sponsors, just dot com.

David and Tamler talk about the often rancorous debate among cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists over whether the mind is modular -- composed of discrete systems responsible for vision, reasoning, cheater detection, sexual jealousy, and so on. David and Tamler (mostly David) describe the history of the debate, then dive into a recent paper (Pietraszewski & Wertz, 2021) arguing that virtually all the disagreement is the product of a conceptual and methodological confusion â€“ that the two sides are operating with different levels of analysis and talking past each other as a result.

Plus, we REALLY tried not to talk about the University of Austin thing for the whole opening segment. We had another topic lined up and everything. It just didnâ€™t work out. Cicero would understand. Bari Weiss stans might wanna skip to the main segment.