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Origins of domain specificity: The evolution of functional organization
Abstract
By establishing that domain-specific machinery is necessary to explain human cognitive performance, psychologists who advocate modular or domain-specific approaches have found themselves in an unanticipated situation. Metaphorically speaking, it is as if they had laboriously built a road up one side of a nearly impassable mountain range into unexplored terrain, only to find themselves met at the top by a foreign road construction crew – evolutionary functionalist researchers – who had been building a road upward to the same destination from the far side of the mountains. Quite unexpectedly, cognitive psychologists find their field intimately connected to a whole new intellectual landscape that had previously seemed remote, unfamiliar, and all but irrelevant. Yet the proliferating connections tying together the cognitive and evolutionary communities promise to transform both fields, with each supplying necessary principles, methods, and a species of rigor that the other lacks. Although the sudden conjunction of these two communities has led to the customary level of mutual misunderstanding, the long-run significance of these developments is unmistakable. From this emerging integrated perspective, the domain-specific mechanisms or modules cognitive psychologists have been studying can be readily recognized for what they are – evolved adaptations, produced by the evolutionary process acting on our hunter-gatherer ancestors (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987). Natural selection and ancestral environments Viewed from a more encompassing scientific framework, the confluence of these two research communities seems inevitable (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The human brain did not fall out of the sky, an inscrutable artifact of unknown origin, and there is no longer any sensible reason for studying it in ignorance of the causal processes that constructed it.
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“Our findings suggest that the effect of social and ecological complexity may be limited to influencing more specialized, and potentially domain-specific forms of cognition (188-196).”
From The evolution of self-control. (2014) · cites this paper as [193]
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Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J.
- Venue
- Mapping the Mind
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 1994-04-29
- Pages
- 85-116
- OpenAlex
- W1525192663
- Cited by
- 849
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 26 · 2024: 40 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 45 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 42 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 35 · 2015: 37 · 2014: 32 · 2013: 17 · 2012: 29
- FWCI
- 41.52
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Cambridge University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Cognitive Abilities and Testing
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Keywords
- domain specificity, modularity, natural selection, ancestral environment, cognitive evolution, brain organization
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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