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May 28, 1998
IssueSteven Mithen and Merlin Donald, reply by Howard Gardner
In response to:
Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange from the October 9, 1997 issue
To the Editors:
The exchange between Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker [NYR, October 9, 1997] regarding the
nature of evolutionary psychology and more specifically the notion of cognitive spandrels was
entertaining and informative. Which aspects, if any, of our mental functioning are spandrels, as
opposed to adaptive mechanisms “designed” by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems faced
by our ancestors in their struggle to survive and reproduce (quoting Pinker), is an extremely important
question that requires serious discussion and debate. But it also involves a study of precisely what
those “kinds of problems” may have been, and quite how our ancestors solved them.
In this regard a serious weakness in the current literature of evolutionary psychology is the almost
blasé disregard for the archaeological, fossil, and palaeoenvironmental records that provide evidence to
address these questions. Reading much of the evolutionary psychology literature as an archaeologist, I
find it astonishing that gross generalizations are made about our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer past, with
such little reference to the research of archaeologists who endeavor to reconstruct past lifestyles.
Pinker did at least acknowledge the existence and value of the archaeological record, when
commenting about whether reading may be a spandrel. But whatever its theoretical strengths or
shortcomings as debated by Pinker and Gould, evolutionary psychology will not prosper until it takes
the hunter-gatherer past as seriously as it claims to do so. The archaeological, fossil, and
palaeoenvironmental records provide evidence about past behavior and cognition.
To suggest, as Howard Gardner does in his review of my book The Prehistory of the Mind (Thames
and Hudson, 1996), coincidentally in the same issue as the Pinker-Gould exchange, that discussions of
prehistoric behavior cannot go beyond speculation appears to be a further reflection of this academic
arrogance that pervades the cognitive sciences. Archaeology can go just as far beyond speculation
about past behavior as can, say, a cognitive-development-psychologist when speculating about what
might be going on in a child’s mind. Perhaps a lot further. Archaeology is no longer a young or naive
discipline. The last thirty years has seen a veritable revolution not simply in its use of scientific
techniques to extract ever greater amounts of information from stone artifacts, broken bones, or ancient
sediments, but in its adoption of a scientific methodology to evaluate claims about past behavior, and
indeed past cognition. To dismiss the work of archaeologists as being unable to go beyond speculation
reflects not just an intellectual arrogance, but an ignorance of the theories, methods, and techniques
used in modern archaeology.
So while Stephen Jay Gould argues that evolutionary psychology could become a more fruitful science
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by respecting a plurality of evolutionary processes beyond natural selection, I believe it also needs to
mature by engaging more directly with the evidence for past human behavior and cognition as inferred
from the archaeological record. The discussion about spandrels is a case in point. Pinker, Gould, and
others can bicker as long as they wish about whether, say, propensities for art, religion, or a fear of
death are spandrels or whether they were selected to solve particular problems faced by ancestors. But
it is possible to get to work on such issues by exploring the evolutionary history of these propensities
by exploiting the fossil and archaeological records.
Obviously this is not an easy task; as Howard Gardner noted, the number of new discoveries in the last
few years that may change one’s understanding has been daunting. So I am not arguing that there are
any clear answers about cognitive evolution in these records of the past: cognitive abilities need to be
inferred from reconstructions of past behavior, just as psychologists need to infer the cognitive abilities
of children or apes from behavioral observations. But one can, I contend, reconstruct evolutionary
histories for many of those aspects of human cognition that appear to be uniquely human (but not, the
archaeological record suggests, necessarily unique to Homo sapiens sapiens). These evolutionary
histories should inform us as to the likelihood that we are dealing with spandrels or “engineered mental
solutions” to adaptive problems or at least lead to a more informed and interesting debate.
My own interpretation of the archaeological record as laid out in The Prehistory of the Mind concludes
firmly in the favor of Gould that many, perhaps most, of those peculiarly human mental propensities,
such as believing in supernatural beings and the pursuit of pure science, are indeed spandrels. These
seem to appear suddenly and dramatically in our evolutionary past. Original adaptive values appear
absent, but these propensities can be readily understood as byproducts of ways of thinking which did
indeed help solve adaptive problems faced by our recent human ancestors.
Yet I am an archaeologist, not as adequately versed in evolutionary theory or human psychology as I
would wish. Indeed, perhaps the greatest constraint on our understanding of how the human mind
evolved is that none of us are sufficiently well versed in a sufficient number of disciplines to make
sufficiently informed contributions about cognitive evolution. The structure of our academic
institutions or at least those in the UK continue to inhibit multidisciplinary research, and more
particularly teaching, on cognitive evolution. Some, such as my own of Reading University, are
working to change this with new multidisciplinary graduate degree programs. At Reading a recent
innovation has been an MA course taught jointly by archaeology, psychology, philosophy, and
linguistics. Hopefully graduates from such courses may be able to take our understanding of cognitive
evolution beyond that possible from those of us who have had our minds moulded by one discipline
alone.
Steven Mithen
Department of Archaeology
University of Reading, UK
To the Editors:
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Howard Gardner criticized Steven Mithen’s book The Prehistory of the Mind because the author
proposed that ancient humans evolved a “general-purpose” form of intelligence. While I agree with
Gardner that Mithen is guilty of a misconception in the way he formulated his proposal, I think that
Gardner’s rather global criticism does not do complete justice to Mithen’s proposal.
Two quite different ideas are conflated in Mithen’s proposal, and they should be picked apart, because
only one of them is wrong. The first is the notion that human intelligence could be the result of a
general-purpose evolutionary adaptation. This idea is simplistic, and ignores most of what we know
about evolution. Adaptations always occur under specific environmental pressures, and within the
constraints of very specific brain designs. This results in specialized modifications, rather than general-
purpose ones. This rule applies to apes and humans, just as it applies to other species. In fairness,
Mithen may not have intended to convey what his terminology seems to suggest, but Gardner is right
to criticize him on this point.
The second idea is domain-generality, the notion that some mental faculties have a much wider reach
than others. This is an unassailable structural concept. The human mind has exquisite structure. One
can imagine it as a set of pyramids, each with its own hierarchy of modules, each of which mediates
some special skill. At the base of the pyramid stand many of the most basic reflexive functions. These
are the specialists of the mind, narrow-band modules designed to carry out specific functions, such as
focusing the eyes, or tasting food, with maximum efficiency. The mid-levels of the mind contain
somewhat integrative functions, for instance, spatial maps of the environment, or images of one’s own
body, both of which require synthesis across a few modules. And at the top levels, there are the most
powerful integrative systems, some of which approach true domain-generality in their reach. Language
is one of these. The fact that we can talk about what we hear, smell, touch, or feel, and also describe
our cognitive maps of the environment, testifies that our language brain has broad general access to the
knowledge gleaned by the specialized modules dedicated to hearing, smelling, touching, and feeling, as
well as those concerned with spatial mapping. In that sense, it is a domain- general capacity.
Thus Mithen was right in arguing that humans have evolved some remarkably powerful domain-
general capacities. The catch is that domain-generality in cognition should never be confused with the
notion of general-purpose adaptation. The two are not the same. Domain-generality is a purely
architectural conception, and has nothing whatsoever to say about the specific adaptations by which it
is achieved. Language is not the only domain-general system in the human mind. As both Gardner and
I have argued from quite different vantage points, we have other capacities that are domain-general in
an architectural sense. Because of this, we have many ways of representing the same reality. An artist
might draw his conception of an idea, while a speaker, a mathematician, a dancer, and an actor might
each capture the same idea in a very different way. There is a good case to be made that each of these
is a domain-general construction. Yet none of them can be called a product of “general intelligence.”
As he is undoubtedly discovering, Mithen wandered into treacherous waters when he formulated this
part of his proposal. On the whole, however, his project is a good one. He is forging a distinctively
archaeological “take” on the prehistory of the mind. In doing this, he might serve as a corrective
influence on psychologists such as myself who might lean too heavily on cognitive evidence, and not
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heavily enough on the corresponding cultural record.
Merlin Donald
Professor
Department of Psychology
Queen’s University
Kingston, Ontario
Howard Gardner replies:
I am surprised by Steven Mithen’s response to my review; it seems unnecessarily defensive and
inappropriately offensive. I wrote at length and respectfully of Mithen’s undertaking and commented
substantively on his various claims. I cannot subscribe at all to his boast that archaeology can proceed
as confidently about past behavior—and “perhaps a lot further”—than the field of developmental
psychology. Like geology, cosmology, and astronomy and other historically grounded sciences,
archaeology must deal with a necessarily scanty record of past events and is ever subject to radical
recalibration on the basis of new findings (as both Mithen and I note). In contrast, psychologists
participate in experimentally grounded science. Researchers are in a position to develop theories, test
hypotheses, run control groups, and, most crucially, replicate results at will, varying factors in a
systematic way. It is possible to establish the role assumed by language in the cognitive development
of children all over the world; it will never be possible to establish, with a comparable degree of
authority, the roles played by languages (and protolanguages) in the evolution of human cognition. I
find the distinction between the two kinds of science useful in evaluating the recent exchanges in these
pages about evolutionary psychology. Stephen Jay Gould and Steve Jones acknowledge the
fragmentary nature of the data on which evolutionary psychologists must base their (pre)historical
reconstructions. As Jones notes, “The mind may have evolved through something quite invisible to
experimental science.” In contrast, Steven Mithen and Steven Pinker hope that the interplay among the
archaeological record, cross-species comparisons, findings about human development, and the
principles of natural selection will yield a cumulative and increasingly reliable science.
Merlin Donald makes a judicious point in his letter. It is true that language has the power to refer to
multiple domains. Note, however, that language can never substitute for music, dance, architecture, or
other systems of meaning. As the dancer Isadora Duncan once phrased it, “If I could tell it to you, I
would not have to dance it.”
© 1963-2014 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.
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