Evolutionary psychology and the brain

Abstract

The human brain is a set of computational machines, each of which was designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These machines are adaptive specializations: systems equipped with design features that are organized such that they solve an ancestral problem reliably, economically and efficiently. The search for functionally specialized computational adaptations has now begun in earnest. A host of specialized systems have recently been found, including ones designed for sexual motivation, social inference, judgment under uncertainty and conditioning, as well as content-rich systems for visual recognition and knowledge acquisition.