Toward a Developmental Evolutionary Psychology: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of the Human Cognitive Architecture

After a century of intermittent dialogue between psychology and evolutionary biology, the outline of a synthesis between the two disciplines now appears to be emerging. The current form of this synthesis, known as narrow evolutionary psychology (Barkow et al., 1992; Buss, 1999), is the union of two specific frameworks from evolutionary biology and psychology. Specifically, narrow evolutionary psychology brings together the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology, which views evolutionary change primarily in terms of changes in gene frequency, with a nativist cognitive psychology, which views the mind as a collection of relatively autonomous, specialized processors, or modules (Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994). As I outline in more detail below, both strands of evolutionary psychology are largely adevelopmental. There is accumulating evidence, however, that both evolutionary and psychological theory must incorporate a developmental perspective in order to construct successful theory. For example, it is now well established that a major route to evolutionary change is via alterations in developmental programs. If this is indeed the case, then evolutionary change must act in accordance with the range of possible changes to these programs, which in the case of behavior and cognition involves alterations to the development of the brain. From a psychological perspective, it is increasingly clear that ontogeny plays a far more central role in shaping behavior and cognition than its marginalization in nativist cognitive psychology allows (Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997). Any evolutionary psychology integrative framework must therefore take development seriously. In recent years, new evolutionary and psychological frameworks have emerged that are thoroughly developmental in perspective. In evolutionary theory, this developmental perspective is known as evolutionary developmental biology 3 To date, evolutionary developmental biology and developmental cognitive neuroscience have not been brought together to construct an alternative evolutionary psychology framework that places development at its center to explicitly account for the evolution of cognition in terms of developmental alterations to neural structures. In this chapter, I present the preliminary outlines of such a view, which I refer to as " developmental evolutionary psychology. " From this perspective, I will suggest that failing to take into account how evolution acts on developmental programs to regulate alterations in brain structure and function has resulted in a seriously distorted view of the evolution of cognition and the resulting human cognitive architecture; it has also contributed to a mischaracterization of the role of culture in human development and evolution. In contrast, I will suggest that …