..in addition to whatever content-independent mechanisms our psychological architecture may contain, it also contains content-specific devices, including those computationally responsible for the generation and regulation of human cultural and social phenomena. These content-specific mechanisms are adaptations (as are content-independent mechanisms), and evolved to solve long-enduring adaptive problems characteristic of our hunter-gatherer past. Because of their design, their operation continually imparts evolutionary patterned content to modern human life. If this view is correct, then the specifics of evolutionary biology have a central significance for understanding human thought and action. Evolutionary processes are the "architect" that assembled, detail by detail, our evolved psychological and physiological architecture. The distinctive characteristics of these processes are inscribed in the organizational specifics of these designs. Consequently, an understanding of the principles that govern evolution is an indispensable ally in the enterprise of understanding human nature and an invaluable tool in the discovery and mapping of the species-typical collection of information-processing mechanisms that together comprise the human mind. The complex designs of these mechanisms are the main casual channels through which the natural sciences connect to and shape the substance of the "social" sciences. (pp. 49-50).
...an adaptationist approach does not properly involve explaining or interpreting individual behaviour in specific situations as "attempts" to increase fitness (Symons, 1989, this volume; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990b). To make the distinction between these alternative views of evolutionary explanation clear &endash; humans as fitness-maximizers (fitness-teleology) versus humans as adaptation-executors (adaptationism) &endash; a brief example will serve. Fitness teleologists may observe a situation and ask something like, "How is Susan increasing her fitness by salting her eggs?" An adaptationist would ask, instead, "What is the nature of the evolved human salt preference mechanisms &endash; if any &endash; that are generating the observed behaviour and how did the structure of these mechanisms mesh with the physiological requirements for salt and the opportunities to procure salt in the Pleistocene?" So, in viewing cases of behaviour, the adaptationist question is not, "How does this or that action contribute to this particular individual's reproduction?" Instead, the adaptationist questions are "What is the underlying panhuman psychological architecture that leads to this behaviour in certain specified circumstances?" and "What are the design features of this architecture &endash; if any &endash; that regulate the relevant behaviour in such a way that it would have constituted functional solutions to the adaptive problems that regularly occurred in the Pleistocene? (p. 55)
(1) the Standard Social Science Model's analysis of developmental or "nature-nurture" issues is erroneous; (2) the general-purpose, content-free psychology central to the SSSM could not have been produced by the evolutionary process and, therefore, is not a viable candidate model of human psychology; and (3) a psychology of this kind cannot explain how people solve a whole array of tasks they are known to routinely perform. (p. 49)
..models of a robust, universal human nature by their very character cannot participate in racist explanations of intergroup differences. This is not just a definitional trick of defining human nature as whatever is universal. There are strong reasons to believe that selection usually tends to make complex adaptations universal or nearly universal, and so humans must share a complex, species-typical and species-specific architecture of adaptations, however much variation there might be in minor, superficial, nonfunctional traits. As long-lived sexual reproducers, complex adaptations would be destroyed by random processes of sexual recombination every generation if the genes that underlie our complex adaptations varied from individual to individual. Selection in combination with sexual recombination tends to enfore uniformity in adaptations, whether physiological or psychological, especially in long-lived species with an open population structure, such as humans (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990b). Empirically, of course, the fact that any given page out of Gray's Anatomy describes in precise anatomical detail individual humans from around the world demonstrates the pronounced monomorphism present in complex human physiological adaptations. Although we cannot directly "see" psychological adaptations (except as described neuroanatomically), no less could be true of them. Human nature is everywhere the same. (p. 38)
Psych 391h: Cognitive
Neuroscience 
Kyle Cave
Psychology Dept.
U.
Mass.