evolution… Hard-wired 17a: Coincidence and irrational humanity 22 Jul 201917 Jul 2019 In terms of the psychological spandrels we discussed earlier, the tendency to make 'false positive' (type 1) errors is an evolved characteristic. Paranoia, pattern-seeking and agency-detection may well be the…
evolution… Hard-wired 17: Bias and the evolutionary ‘spandrel’ 19 Jul 201915 Jul 2019 In this video we’ll consider three of the most widespread (and misleading) of our evolved mental modules. We’ll look at ‘selective abstraction‘, ‘arbitrary inference’ and ‘confirmation bias’. Each of these…
evolution… Hardwired 16: Pattern recognition 16 Jul 201913 Jul 2019 It’s not hard to see why this obsession with patterns prevailed in the ancestral environment. The early hunter-gatherer who learned to recognise the association between plants and water would have…
evolution… Hard wired 15: The unthinking mental module 15 Jul 201913 Jul 2019 It’s easy to understand how humans and other species evolved physical characteristics as a result of adaptation and natural selection. Helpful variations confer their advantages down through the generations whilst…
evolution… Is anxiety a choice? 2 Feb 201931 Jan 2019 Is anxiety a choice? Is an anxiety disorder a choice? Can a person choose not to be anxious? Last night I had an interesting conversation with a stranger in the…
evolution… Hard-wired 14: Why Freud was almost right 1 Feb 201928 Jan 2019 Although not a fan of Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection (he was more influenced by the earlier, Lamarckian evolutionary theory), Sigmund Freud was very nearly right…
evolution… Hard-wired 13: Creationism? Bring it on! 29 Jan 201927 Jan 2019 I was recently challenged to a debate by a creationist who confidently informed me that evolution is a lie, even going so far as to ask me if I knew…
evolution… Hard-wired 12: Know thy enemy 27 Jan 201926 Jan 2019 Nobody seriously can deny that our evolutionary journey, from the simplest chemical compounds to the complex organisms we know as Homo sapiens involved extreme callousness and even casual cruelty. Survival…
evolutionary psychology… Hard-wired 11: Heuristics – our evolved psychological shortcuts 26 Jan 2019 Heuristics are the psychological shortcuts that keep us going in a complex world. They shorten decision-making time and allow us to function without constantly having to stop and think about…
evolution… Hard wired 10: Evolution, human culture and the big brain 9 Jan 20192 Jan 2019 Evolutionary psychology as we shall see, is tightly bound up with culture. To understand the evolution of culture we need first to explain how we developed our big brain. Without…
