CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 849Evolutionary Psychology and Human BehaviorCognitive Abilities and TestingLanguage and cultural evolution

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Origins of domain specificity: The evolution of functional organization

Cosmides, Leda, Tooby, John·1994·Mapping the Mind
DOI 10.1017/cbo9780511752902.005
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

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.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1017/cbo9780511752902.005

Cites

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 501–600 of 839

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J.
ORCID
Venue
Mapping the Mind
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Published
1994-04-29
Pages
85-116
DOI
10.1017/cbo9780511752902.005
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
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 5941 d)
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 ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review