Lehrer, Jonah

"Depression's Upside" [from The New York Times Magazine]

February 25, 2010

"There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head."

In the late 1990s, Thomson became interested in evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain the features of the human mind in terms of natural selection. The starting premise of the field is that the brain has a vast evolutionary history, and that this history shapes human nature. We are not a blank slate but a byproduct of imperfect adaptations, stuck with a mind that was designed to meet the needs of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. While the specifics of evolutionary psychology remain controversial — it’s never easy proving theories about the distant past — its underlying assumption is largely accepted by mainstream scientists. There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head. Instead, researchers have moved on to new questions like when and how this sculpturing happened and which of our mental traits are adaptations and which are accidents.
(p. 40)

Machine

Reading

Lehrer, Jonah. "Depression's Upside."The New York Times Magazine. February 28, 2010. pp. 38-43. <Link to NYTimes.com>

02/28/2010