So, we see now the two ideas come together. The first that, mental life is the product of our physical brains, materialism and the second is that biological entities like the brain are the products of natural selection. So, the brain psychology is a product of evolution, no less than the eye or the hand, and this changes everything among other things, this tells us what we should expect to find as part of human psychology, as part of universal psychology and what we shouldn't. It then becomes rational to see the mind as adapted to fulfill certain tasks, and I've written some of these here. This is very far from a complete list. Now, there are certain confusions people get into when they start thinking about psychology from an evolutionary point of view, certain misconceptions, and I want to warn you against two of them. The first is that natural selection, the forces of evolutionary adaptation cause animals to want to spread their genes. So, sometimes you hear," Well, if evolutionary psychology is right, people should want nothing more than to spread their genes to mention one, inseminate women, women should be inseminated and have children and everything. If evolutionary psychology is right, males should be rushing to the sperm bank to produce as many deposits as possible". But this is a confusion, and it's actually easy enough to see the confusion because according to natural selection, other creatures like mice, and rats, and dogs, and whatever, also have evolved to spread their genes, but we don't assume for a second that they want to spread their genes, we understand they haven't even known anything about genes. The confusion here is the distinction between ultimate causation and proximate causation. Those are fancy terms, but ultimate causation is, the reason why something has evolved, and that involves creature's history and it's the evolutionary course its taken through time. Proximate causation is what a creature wants, and those are different. The point is actually very well made by William James. The reason why we've evolved to have feelings like hunger has to do with sustaining our body with this sort of utility we get from food. But he points out from a psychological point of view, this is not the case. 'Not one man in a billion taking his dinner ever thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more. If you were to ask him why he should want to eat more, what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher, he will probably laugh at you for a fool.'' Or take another case, why do I love my kids? Well, the ultimate causation, the evolutionary reason is not difficult to appreciate. I love my kids because creatures that love their kids spread their genes while creatures who don't love their kids, who are indifferent to their kids don't. But, from approximate psychological point of view, that's not why I love my kids. My love for them has nothing to do with spreading my genes. I would love them if they were adopted. I would love them if they had no plans to ever produce children or were unable to produce children. Therefore, an evolutionary dead end. Evolution wires up our psychology to achieve certain ends, but our psychology's typically ignorant as to evolution's goals. In fact, from a moral point of view, I think it's safe to say these are very different. There's no reason why as people, we should want to pursue the goals and you put that in quotation mark because when we talk about goals for evolution is metaphorical. To pursue the goals of evolution, from an evolutionary point of view, animals are designed to replicate themselves to spread their genes, but as people, we can have very different priorities. A second misconception about evolutionary approaches to the nine is that they predicted everything should be an adaptation, that everything we do has adaptive significance exist in order to increase the reproductive success of the animal. But, that's not how it works. Natural selection doesn't directly influence behaviors, rather, natural selection evolves brains and bodies. Once they come to exist, they do all sorts of things. Some are adaptive, some are what they've evolved to do. Others are not, and this is true for instance for hiccups or lower back pain or self pity. It doesn't make sense to look at everything that people do and say, ''Wow, that must exist for a purpose.'' Rather, some things are adaptations and some things are not. It's also important to realize that our brains have evolved over a period of many millions of years, largely adapted once we became humans and separated from other species, living roughly as hunter-gatherers or at least in some sort of small group without access to alcohol or television or Facebook or all of the things in modern technology. We haven't adapted to live for instance in a world full of billions of people and so we might be ill-suited to do so. Some of the behaviors we do in a world full of billions of people with high-technology and abundant food for many of us may actually be to our detriment. So, one of the difficult things to do and one of the most interesting projects in evolutionary psychology is figuring out which of our mental traits, our behaviors, our desires are adaptations and which of them are accidents. Now, some things seem to be obvious adaptations, like color vision. Mostly our perceptual system is plainly evolved to make sense of the world. One might argue that language, although people will debate exactly how it came into being, must have an adaptive value because it's a communication system, animals evolve communication system. They benefit greatly from them. But, then there's all sorts of things, which are plainly accents. No one would argue that the universal love of pornography is an adaptation rather sexual desires and adaptation pornography exploits it. Our love of television isn't because we've evolved special brain mechanism for dealing with television, we couldn't have, televisions to reason the invention. Or take our love of chocolate. Our love of chocolate probably isn't good for us, it's not adaptive in any sense, but we evolved a sort of taste for the sweetness of fruit and other sweet things that are calorie rich and good for us when we live in a very different environment. Chocolate is a clever machine designed to tickle our appetites that have evolved for other purposes and give us pleasure, but not necessarily be good for us. Now, these are easy cases, but then there's real hard cases where nobody really knows why it evolved. Cases like our pleasure we get from art or music, female orgasm, is this a special adaptation or is this just a by-product of the sheer physiology between males and females? Humor, sexual violence, xenophobia, there's a long list of things we could put down where one will be able say, ''Oh, we've evolved that through natural selection for session so purpose.'' Other people will say, ''No, it's an accident, We, as a product of culture or because we have big brains or something else. Those are the sort of very interesting debates that psychologists have to resolve on a case-by-case basis, and these are the sorts of questions one ends up asking upon taking an evolutionary approach to the mind. Now, one of the cool things about taking such an approach is that it leads us to look scientifically at what most people take for granted. The clearest case of that is, again the emotions. So here's William James again talking about the emotions, ''To the psychologist alone, can such questions occur as: Why do we smile when pleased and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn her wits upside-down? The common man can only say, Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden. So probably does each animal feel about the particular things it attempts to do in the presence of certain objects. To the lion, it is lioness, which is meant to be loved, to the bear, the she-bear. To the broody hen, the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nest full of eggs was not utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object it is to her.'' Now, there's a few things to note here. One is the rating of sexist, it assumes a male audience as William James was up with up to do. The second is it's beautifully written. It's hard to find contemporary psychologists who write this way. The third is, the point is really important. There are all sorts of things that seem natural to us, but actually reflect our evolutionary histories. They are contingent and they need explaining, and you know you can add to the list. Why does poop smell bad? Why does chocolate tastes good? Why do we love our children for the most parts? Why do we get angry when people hit us? Why don't we feel good when somebody does us a favor? And as scientists, we have to withdraw from our intuitions, we have to just block ourselves from saying, ''Well, that's how it is,'' and step back and look at it scientifically. This is similar to what other scientists do. Other scientists ask questions like, why do things fall down? Why is our flesh warm? Why does water turn solid when it gets cold? The universe didn't have to be this way. So, they had to discipline themselves to take common sense, what everybody knows and explore it scientifically as an open question that needs to be answered. As psychologists, we're going to use the tools of evolutionary theory to step back and explore the nature and origins of the most intimate aspects of ourselves including our emotions. Now, we've done this before. We've already talked about aspects of cognitive psychology, perception, memory, language, looking at how things work and where do they come from. But now armed with evolutionary thinking, we're going to start to think a little bit closer about something, maybe a little bit more, as I said more intimate, and maybe a bit more difficult and troubling to address, which is the emotions. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to talk about a final misconception, and this is a misconception about the emotions and how they work. This is a misconception you see often in science fiction, and my example here is Star Trek, the TV show and the movie. So, Star Trek has major characters. Most notably the Vulcan Spock and Android Data who are described as lacking emotions. Spock lacks emotions because he's half alien. Data lacks emotions because he doesn't have an emotion clip. These characters are described as doing great, hyper efficient, fully-functioning, excellent Star Fleet agents. They just lack a little human quirk that makes them interesting and there are episodes where they discover their emotions or get emotions and it changes everything. But the supposition of the show is that you don't need emotions to do 99 percent of things. As we'll see, this is entirely mistaken. Emotions are fundamental to human life. We don't see them any more as noise in the machine, as things that sway you from getting it right, as enemies of rationality and morality, but rather as products of evolution, and they're there for a reason. As we'll see, one way to make sense of the reason is, they set goals and priorities. Plainly, our emotions are shaped by cultural contexts. Depending on who you are and where you live, your emotions will be different, they'll respond to different things. But just as we'd expect from an evolutionary perspective, they have universal roots. There are aspects of emotions that all of us share and that's what we'll begin with now.
