Resolving the Debate on Innate Ideas Learnability Constraints and the Evolved Interpenetration of Motivational and Conceptual Functions

In order for the study of the human mind and brain to become a successful natural science, a sufficiently large number of researchers must organize their research on the basis of theoretical commitments and methodologies that reflect, in broad outline, the realities of their object of study. Yet there has been, for over a century, enormous resistance to incorporating into the human sciences the most fundamental truth about the species they study: our functional, species-typical design is the organized product of ancestral natural selection (for discussion, see Pinker, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992; for opposing views, see Fodor, 2000; Gould, 1997a, b). The brain came into existence and acquired a functional organization to the extent that its arrangements acted as a computational system whose operations regulated the organism’s behavior to promote propagation. Studying psychology and neuroscience without the analytical tools offered by evolutionary theory is like attempting to do physics without using mathematics. It may be possible, but the rationale for inflicting needless damage on our ability to understand the world is obscure.