Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction to evolutionary psychology: A Darwinian approach to human behavior and cognition
- 2 The evolution of general fluid intelligence
- 3 The role of a general cognitive factor in the evolution of human intelligence
- 4 Where there is an adaptation, there is a domain: The form-function fit in information processing
- 5 Invention and community in the emergence of language: Insights from new sign languages
- 6 Origins of the language: Correlation between brain evolution and language development
- 7 The evolutionary cognitive neuropsychology of face preferences
- 8 Sex differences in the neural correlates of jealousy
- Index
3 - The role of a general cognitive factor in the evolution of human intelligence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction to evolutionary psychology: A Darwinian approach to human behavior and cognition
- 2 The evolution of general fluid intelligence
- 3 The role of a general cognitive factor in the evolution of human intelligence
- 4 Where there is an adaptation, there is a domain: The form-function fit in information processing
- 5 Invention and community in the emergence of language: Insights from new sign languages
- 6 Origins of the language: Correlation between brain evolution and language development
- 7 The evolutionary cognitive neuropsychology of face preferences
- 8 Sex differences in the neural correlates of jealousy
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The evolution of human intelligence is one of the outstanding problems in the sciences of life and mind. It is a problem that so struck Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer of natural selection, that he categorically ruled out evolutionary hypotheses and invoked divine infusion as the source of higher cognition in humans. This turn by Wallace has become a paradigmatic illustration of the difficulty and fascination that attends the scientific investigation into the genesis of our extraordinary cognitive powers (Gould, 1980).
Although in many ways as daunted as their great predecessor, few psychologists and human evolutionists today endorse Wallace's solution. In the modern context the problem appears to pose two aspects with an as-yet uncertain degree of interdependence. The first aspect addresses the species-universal architecture of human cognition and its antecedents in more basal systems (Pinker, 1997). The second aspect is concerned with quantitative differences among individuals along dimensions of cognitive abilities and changes in the distributions of the traits represented by these dimensions over the course of evolutionary time. This second aspect, however, has been less well explored by evolutionary psychologists and other workers concerned with the stated outstanding problem. The aim of this chapter with respect to this underdevelopment is twofold: (1) to propose possible resolutions to problematic issues that may to some extent be responsible for this relative neglect, and (2) to discuss future prospects for the integration of differential psychology into human evolutionary studies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Foundations in Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience , pp. 57 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009