Design with Dave & David
2026-05-26 12:00:00.000 +00:00

David, this is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. I'm David Pinsoff. I'm David Petrozowski. This is Actual Evolutionary Psychology. By Actual Evolutionary Psychologists, David, today we have a weird episode where we are uh I'm outside. You're inside. Uh we have a medium uh length episode today because uh people were sick for after H bus. I'm still getting over a cold. So we're sort of doing a medium length episode. We're just talking a coup about a couple issues like design and good or bad adaptationism. I think, you know, we we covered some interesting topics about this this concept of design and why it's so important important to evolutionary psychology, what it means to be design minded, why it is a defensible stance to take.

So and just some misunderstandings. We're going to cover in year two, we're going to also talk about just some topics and issues, not just interview people. And this is a good uh intro of that. But we'll we'll uh we'll end here and we'll see everybody next week. All right. Sounds good. Okay. All right. We're recording David. Today, David, how are you after HBus? I'm doing great. Yeah. Recharged intellectually? Yeah. And uh yeah, lots of food for thought that I'm still digesting. It was a wonderful HBAS. Fantastic. Yeah. and today is uh also a special episode because uh uh a lot of people are recovering from HBS. We've had we had uh a couple of people pull out of scheduled interviews because they

weren't feeling well. Um I'm actually getting over a cold as well. Um uh we're gonna talk to Josh Schnodgrass soon about lassitude, which is the emotion of feeling not well. So Oh yeah, that that paper's awesome. I love that paper. Yeah, it's counterintuitive that that's an emotion. It is counterintuitive, uh, but also very enlightening to to view feeling sick as an emotion. Um, but so I thought we would just uh today uh we're gonna just do a sort of in-between episode where we're gonna cover a couple topics maybe that um people have questions about that we've had people submit uh questions about or or sort of common misunderstandings uh to catch people up who might um want to have those issues addressed.

Yeah. I realize that's very abstract. Um, but uh but yeah, let's get into it, David. Uh one thing is um, and I can hear everybody uh ending listening because we don't have a guest this week. That's an old bit, but um, but it doesn't get old. Um, one question um I heard people talk about is the idea of design. Um, and uh here's a good uh let me pull up my um here we go. Okay, here's here is a comment from somebody who is I don't believe in evolutionary behavioral scientists, but I've heard this sentiment expressed before, which is why is it a common statement that natural selection designs traits when it literally doesn't. It's just a passive filter changing relative frequencies of genes. It doesn't design or create any gene or phenotype.

Thoughts about that, David? Uh it's a really great point. Uh there is, I think it's a misleadingly simple question. It's actually hugely complicated, touching on many different things. So, why do we use design language when we're not intelligent design theorists? Uh I think the answer is that um it is a useful and insightful way of thinking. So um the philosopher Dan Dennett talks about the design stance as a kind of uh intuitive way of understanding the world. He argues that natural selection is a design process without a designer. That is, it creates the appearance of design. And he thinks that that is the best most insightful way to understand the products of natural selection, that uh you do not actually need a designer to have the

appearance of design or the improbable functional organization of matter. So if you think about our tools, you know, hammers, cars, these are uh non-random organizations of matter, and they are improbably well organized for solving a particular problem. And Dennett has argued that natural and and Richard Dawkins and others has have ar argued that natural selection is the only process that can give rise to that improbable fit between form and function. There are other psychological aspects to this question, which is why do we use the design stance when we're trying to understand the mind? We have systems in the head for thinking about people, for thinking about artifacts, for thinking about tools and the proper functions of tools.

We have systems in the head for thinking about foraging, mating, whatever. And so the question is if we're minds trying to understand the human mind, which part of our mind should we use to understand the human mind? And in traditionally in psychology, we've used our folk psychology to do psychology. We've used the system in the head that evolved for understanding people to understand people. But you, Dave, have argued that we should that's actually the wrong system in the head to use. Or or we shouldn't use that system primarily. Yeah, exactly. Or even primary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, it's better for us to to use the design stance. And so maybe I'll put it to you, Dave. So w why do you think that we should not use folk psychology to do psychology

and and we're better off using the design stance, the artifact stance to understand psychology? Well, I think the folk psychology is fine, uh, but it doesn't get you what we want, which is a scientific understanding, because it's the folk psychology system is not designed for a scientific understanding. So scientific understanding has sort of two components. One is understanding how the thing works. And then the other one is prediction. What it means how something works is roughly speaking, that uh you understand the subsystems and then you understand their relations, such that you can do a counterfactual and sort of say if I change this part or this piece has this piece of information or is in this setting, this will then lead to this outcome.

And that leads to the second part, the prediction part. And the idea is that natural selection, the theory of mind system, it's good at prediction, but it's a very rough cut. So, like if I know that David likes France, I know he's going to tend to go to France, but it's not anything like a how does the system work? And it's not going to be very predictive, right? And actually, how my theory of mind system even generates that prediction is sort of all black box. Like I don't know how that works. So, in the same way, like I can anticipate that David's room will um obey the laws of physics. And if I see a violation of the laws of physics, I'll be surprised. But that system is doing all the work.

And if I was a physicist, I would have to flesh out what are the rules that my expectations follow, right? So basically that's just a way of saying that we have this intuition. It doesn't get us what are the subcomponents and how do they work bit. And that's where we need to come up with new pieces of design for lack of a better way of putting it. Like David, as you mentioned, like you know, a lines tracking system or visual system or whatever. And then the issue of how you carve those up is a separate issue. Um, but then the other part is the prediction part, and that it's hard to predict outcomes, even like weather or you know, the performance, like what a car will do per se. But in some sense, for a scientific understanding, we're at least more interested in

narrowing the scope to here's a more mandatory style rule that a complex system should follow, like a computational system. And then if we know how the algorithms or the functions work, then we can know how one setting, a change in a setting should produce a certain outcome. And that's sort of the logic of experimental design. So a lot of experimental studies in psychology are not often framed this way, but you can think of them as if you think of them below the level of the whole agent, what you're doing is you're saying if if this theory of function is correct, there should be a system that's sensitive to this part of the world, and that if our stimuli make that system in into one state, then we should get some general outcome, which is what we measure in our

study. So I don't know. I don't know, David. Does that answer your question? Um, sort of. So is the idea that our folk psychology system is really good at predicting things, even a year in advance, you can predict my physical location, uh, and that wherever HBS is, you can predict that I'm going to be there next year. And that's a really powerful prediction if you think about it. Like uh not even ph physicists can predict you know what's gonna happen. Uh well I mean th astronomers can in terms of the position of the planets and stuff like that, but yeah, um it's very hard to predict something a year in advance. Yes. And yet our folk psychology can do that, uh very precisely, it can predict the location of

my body. And that's really impressive. But what you're arguing is I what I think you're arguing is that that's not enough, is that we also want explanation. Yeah. And so folks' psychology can tell you, you know, why I'm gonna be at HBES, or it can it can tell you that I'm going to be at HBES next year. But it cannot tell you what what it means for my mind to have a belief about HBES, what it means for for me to want to go there, why I want to go there, what goals am I trying to achieve? Uh what is a goal? The processes that are involved that that that got my body to HBAS, none of that is in the folk psychology system. And that's ideally what we want if we want to fully understand the human mind.

We don't just want intuitions that can make certain predictions but are sort of lack any kind of foundation. We want to know what the foundation is. Is that one way of putting what you're saying? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think to just put it concretely, I think this is what you said. I'm just gonna restate it is that if I'm using my intuition to predict that you'll be at HBES next year, if we want to be scientists and not just ourselves, um uh pre scientifically, we would want to have a scientific account of well, what does it mean that I predict that you're gonna go to HBES? Like what's going on in me that leads to the prediction that you're gonna go to HBus wherever it is, um, Arizona, for example.

Um and once you start thinking about well, what is how do you explain Dave's ability to do that? Then you're starting to get scientific. There's a separate question, which is then how do you get scientific about the fact that you, David, independent of my representation of you, um, want to go to HBus? And what does how does how would you build a robot to do that? So I think you know, it comes back to this thing of uh you don't understand something if you can't sort of build it. And the goal of scientific psychology is to figure out how our folk psychology works and to not just use it. We don't have to not document what its outputs are or its contents are. That's sort of the thing to be explained.

if you're just using that, then you're just not doing science, I would say. Or you're doing a a kind of science where you're cataloging the outputs of intuitive psychology, but you're still you still need principles, right? Like you can't just, I think it was Carl Popper who said if a scientist just collected data all their lives in a notebook or observations all their lives in a notebook, nobody would think, oh, this should be like in a science museum, because it's just, you know, like today I woke up and I had an egg for breakfast, and it was there was a bluebird. And, you know, uh, science is not just about cataloging arbitrary outcomes, it's an attempt to apply principles that are generalizable, rules, to make some inferences,

uh, to have a framework. And if I just say David's gonna go to HBest next year, with a unless you're trying to infer some principle, um, then uh then you're not really trying to do, to do science. And once you start asking, well, what are the principles, then you start getting into, well, David has a desire, so that's sort of a principle, but that's a principle of our intuitive psychology. Is that a theory? I don't know. But then how does a desire work? And that's where you get into the to the weeds of science. So but that's the the basic idea is that it's just not enough. There's not enough um uh not enough structure in the explanation. David wants to go to HBus, even though it works really well.

Yeah, that's an another interesting point, which is that the fact that you are able to predict my behavior a year from now itself is the thing we want to explain. Like that's a really impressive ability to emerge uh from nature. And we want an explanation of that. year are infinitesimally small, right? Insofar as you are a hunk of matter that can predict where I'm going to be in a year, we need an explanation for that. And the only explanation we know of that can explain that kind of non-random organization is natural selection, right? Entropy is really powerful. It prevents matter from accumulating these kinds of functional organizations. And insofar as we see a departure from entropy toward a system that can make

predictions a year in advance, we want to explain that. We want to explain the selective process that created that system. Another way of putting it is that, you know, let's say I have a black box and every now and then it just it spits out a prediction. You know, tomorrow it's it's gonna rain. You know, a year from now Dave's gonna be at HBES. And I have no idea how the box works. I could just say, I don't want to do science. I'm just gonna listen to the box and uh go about my life. Or you could say, I want to do science and I want to figure out how the box works. And it seems like using folk psychology is just kind of taking the outputs of the of the box and reifying them and trying to spin them as as theories or as explanations when

they're not, they're just outputs of a of a black box. But when we want to do science, we want to actually get in there and see how the system works. Yeah. And I think like this comes back to the issue of design and looping back to that, and there's still a lot to say about that. But I think the alternative to just saying like this neuron bumps into this or this molecule bumps into this, you know, it's hard to do that for David's going to end up in Arizona next year. So the middle ground is something like the design stance where you it's teleological to say, look, there's some system that has some function. Like the plant grows towards light, and we don't know exactly or worry so much about exactly how it's implemented.

There's different ways to implement it physically, but we can roughly predict that the plant will grow towards light. There's a sort of a functional system that does that. And so trying to decompose desires and beliefs into more specific systems, it makes it harder because now you have lots of characters in your story, but it's not as many characters as physical interactions. And it's abstract means-ends. This has this function. And you have to sort of posit them, like, you know, there's a foraging system, it cares about calories, it cares about macronutrients, it cares about search time and handling time and costs and benefits. These are still abstractions, but they're more concrete than beliefs and desires.

So I think it's just sort of this middle ground. Yeah. Another argument you could give is that what we're ultimately looking for is a unification of knowledge, of a bridging of the gap between psychology and biology and physics. That this this is all part of the same reality. There are different levels that we can look at, but ultimately we want an explanation of our minds that is concilient with and consistent with our understanding of the natural world and the physical world in general. Simply relying on our our folk psychology intuitions is not going to get us there. Yeah. I mean, one question for you, David, is I mean, like the the original email or the original comment that we read is this concern that like we're not positing that there's actually a

designer, and we're sort of talking metaphorically. I wonder though, there's another argument, which is that accepting that design requires a designer is the wrong step, and that natural selection literally does design things. Maybe this is definitional because it depends on what you mean by design, but there is an argument that changes in gene frequencies are the reason why certain means-ends proximate systems exist. The reason why there's a bit of flesh that acts as if it cares about calories or that cares about something abstract like the expected reproductive success of a morph in a con specific, you know. Um, the reason why that chunk of matter does that and not the infinite number of other

things it might do, like play table tennis or calculate pi to the infinite decimal place, is because those things had an effect on fitness, and fitness uh changes is what can design uh flesh, right? So I mean there's an argument that if you strip out the idea that there is a intelligence to begin with and you need to explain intelligence, then design a non-intelligent design, uh a non a design created by a pro dumb process is the original design. And there's an argument then that, you know, lateral selection literally does design, is d actually does design things insofar as what you're describing as design is a means-ends system that's acting as if it's for producing a particular kind of outcome.

Right. I mean there's you could even make the argument that human design doesn't even exist to a certain extent. I mean, you can think about the the idea of an intelligence that designs something, that that itself is a folk psychology intuition. And that itself is probably a misleading description of how the process works. If you take, you know, the example of a human designing a tool to perform a particular function, even there, probably there is some kind of quasi Darwinian process going on inside that human's brain where they're thinking and considering different possibilities and possible ideas. And you know, the the ideas that make sense are going to rise to the top, and the ones that don't are going to get filtered away.

And then they're going to and the ones that they try out, they're going to try some things that's not going to work, and those get discarded, and the things that actually do work are going to stick around. And then if you zoom out past that particular human and you look at the process of cultural evolution or cultural change, the design aspects that that work are probably going to be favored by cultural evolution if you're taking a cultural evolutionary perspective. It may be the case that it's just Darwinism all the way down, that there isn't even a clear case of human design, that there's a is there's a Darwinian whittling process within that human's mind, there's a Darwinian whittling process within cultural evolution that filters

out the cultural variants that don't work. And it may be that, you know, there really is no quote unquote designer. And that's just a kind of folk psychological simplification. So maybe all design is without a little homunculus designing it. Yeah, it would have to be, right? And I think even within the individual, that stuff's being done by systems that are probably doing something like this. I like to say that everything is trial and error. You just don't always see the error, right? So the trial and error can be over evolutionary time. So let's say we take our artifact psychology. There were alternate versions of our artifact psychology that were selected out. Um, so that's some trial and error.

And then within an individual existing, so if David wants to build a better mousetra, that system, I mean, more precisely, it's not David is designing a mousetrap. I mean, you can say that, but precisely and more more precisely, there's a bunch of systems in David that are doing this generate, evaluate, select, refine process that eventually leads to David being like, oh, I have an idea. And so, yeah, so in that sense, um it's it's mechanism all the way down. And to sort of say, start off by saying, look, natural selection doesn't design anything because it's not an intelligence, and you need an intelligence to design something, it's sort of ironically it's using the mechanistic outcome to like sort of reject that it's all mechanistic in a way.

Yeah, totally. So so I I would say, you know, I mean, Brett Beheim alluded to this, you know, the the synthesis between population genetics and the design in the organism. I mean, Lita alluded to this too, that what George Williams would was doing was saying, look, it's changes in gene frequencies and populations wedded to changes in organism design, those are the two things that are that are hooked up together. That's really the uh modern synthesis. In that sense, it it literally is design. And I think it's fine to talk about design. I think, I think maybe the kernel of truth, my thought is that if you say, well, there's design for fitness, and you say fitness teleology, right? This is Letus point.

If I know I'm in an economic scheme and I know I'll never see David again again, I should sort of screw him over. Or if I know that uh, you know, pornography is not gonna lead me to differential to have like more babies, I shouldn't care about pornography because like I know. So the idea of there's sort of this um rationality that's sort of ideal and knows everything. Yeah. I mean, the other point to make is that using the design stance or the folk artifact system, whatever you want to call it, has been tremendously successful in biology. Like it it, you know, it's been said that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution. I think you could also say that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of the

design stance. You think about our knowledge of how the molecular machinery work, proteins, uh RNA DNA, all the different parts of our morphology. We have organs and within them cells and different molecular structures. If you just try to understand how parts of different animals work, how parts of the body work, you really cannot understand any of that without availing yourself of a design metaphor that this thing has this particular function, and that's why it's shaped this way, and that's why the process works this way and not some other way. This little mole piece of molecular machinery does this, this piece does that. Like it it's kind of inconceivable to even think about what biology would look like if we

could not avail ourselves of functional design thinking. And so the argument would just be it's been so successful in biology in general. Uh, why don't we try to leverage that success and see how s successful it can be when we apply it to the mind? Yeah, and I think my point, uh, I agree with that. And I think my point is that the design stance, it's refracted through the constraints of it's not going to be a perfect system. It has to use cues that were available over evolutionary time. And it's not just uh an ideal design from the perspective of any any outcome that would be that would produce uh fitness benefits under any environmental circumstances would be selected for. And um yeah, I think I think that's right.

But yeah, I I think the bottom line is that I think it's fine to talk about natural selection designing things as long as you understand that it's not a foolproof process that's literally driven by a person. And if you give them the information, um, like oh yeah this is a one shot encounter or in a modern environment this won't lead to fitness you know the mechanisms it's not real time fitness teleology it's just that there's a design that was designed for a particular set of environmental circumstances that's the design um and that's sort of fixed and you can't if you take the design out of a it's an evolutionary relevant context then you might get weird results. With if you keep that caveat of the notion of an EA, then I think it's fine to be design

minded. If you don't do that, then yeah, I can see how being design minded would would mislead you. Right. So th there's a bad way to be design minded where you could say that the function of the mind is to maximize fitness. Yes. Right. We want the the reason why we have brains is just to figure out how we can have the most babies. Right. That would be a bad uh design stance. The right design stance is, well, yes, in some sense, minds are designed to maximize fitness, but within a very specific environment, that the environment is crucial. And so once you recognize that our minds are designed to promote fitness in a very specific set of ancestral environments and ecologies, then you have the right design

stance and you can begin to make predictions about how the mind works that make sense. But if you strip away the environment and the and the ecology and you just use your design stance to think about what a fitness maximizing computer would do, you're just going to go astray. Uh and so I think another piece of the design stance is it has to be ecology and environment focused. Yeah. And without an understanding of of of the environment in which the phenotype was selected, you have no understanding of the phenotype. Yeah, that's right. And I think the environment and ecology go together with actually being design minded because if you say people are designed to maximize their fitness and you understand that it

sounds like you're saying a design stance thing, but if you if you think of it from an uh intentional theory mind level, then you just say people are motivated to maximize their fitness. And so whether or not it incurred in an ancestral environment or not, you just sort of say, well, people look around and look at what maximizes their fitness, and they just do it. So I think a lot of misunderstanding happens where people think they're talking at a design level stance, and they're saying, look, there's a system that's for maximizing fitness. But all they're really doing is they're just that's the agent who has an intention or a goal to maximize their fitness. The way you know if somebody's being design minded is you're forced to have

deterministic cues where the cues are what are the inputs, what are the processes, what are the outputs, and these things are are mechanistic or deterministic. That's even if you take an ancestral versus modern perspective, if you're actually just using your theory mind, the theory of mind system might still lead you to think, well, it was ancestrally good to be maximize your fitness. Let's do it in modern environments too. Yeah. Right. And it's important. I mean, a lot of people get tripped up on this. They think that um the mind is is for maximizing fitness and that we're calculating, you know, the how many babies we can make if we if we take option A versus option B. So yeah. So I think design, as long as you know it's not a person doing it, it's fine to talk about

it in the context of natural selection. For sure. Should we talk about bad ways to do design thinking? So we already talked about one, which is fitness teleology, the idea that the mind is designed to maximize fitness independent of what the environment is and what the constraints are. Uh are there other bad ways that this way of thinking has gone? I mean, I think I think one of them is sort of an oversimplification, uh short-term versus long-term meeting, or like genetic quality, um, things like that, where there's this idea that um there's an essence of there's a design looking for something like genetic quality, and not thinking about, well, that has to be a Q-based system. What does genetic quality mean?

Well, it would be things like, well, there's variation in uh how injured or prone to disease an organism is, and what cues would those be? And that doesn't necessarily mean genes per se, but it's just cues of like on the ground, which robots are in better condition versus others, you know, and that and that changes the way you sort of start thinking about it. And leaving it at the level of genetic quality, I think essentializes it sort of conflates selection pressures with the design. And it sort of leads to shorthands that I think lead one not to look into, well, what is the exact design? I think short-term and long-term mating is another one. Well, you could invest a little bit in a lot of offspring or a lot in a few offspring.

And so maybe males are more designed for short-term mating. And then you just get this idea of, well, well, let's just look at short-term mating versus long-term mating motivations, which is fine. And, you know, like that's that's data and that's maybe an insight compared to what existed before. But then work through the logic of, okay, so I'm a male and I have a short-term mating preference. How does that play out in a real world ecology? Do I do differentially better if you're investing in your offspring social political capital, and I'm not. So like Brooke Shelza and that and uh the other people we've talked to have sort of argued that um there's a lot more to investing in the offspring than just uh conception, and uh

as as people put it. And so I think thinking about selection pressures or mechanisms in these slogan y ways of like short-term, long-term, or good genes, it's a shorthand that prevents people from actually fleshing out the design. And I think it leads to just a cottage industry of studies that in some way resemble or sound like they're consistent with that slogan, but it's not fleshing out a design or even asking what would the design look like given that it has to naturally evolve in a real environment. Right. I guess the pitfall there is not thinking of the design in terms of the ecology again, where um the mind is by design an organ that uh processes information from the ecology and uses that information to guide

behavior. That's why we have a mind. It it's it it processes information, it makes behavior contingent on that information. I think probably where people are going wrong is that they're sort of viewing the mind as analogous to any other organ. So like a liver just detoxifies poisons from the blood and it doesn't it doesn't do that conditional on some kind of environmental uh information. It just it just naturally does that. The heart just pumps blood throughout the body. It doesn't do that conditional on, you know, uh whether your uh mate is flirting with someone else. It just always pumps blood throughout the body. It's not con contingent on anything in the environment. The same thing goes with the lungs, any other part of the body.

These are not information contingent adaptations. Their job is to do one thing and they do that thing. You could quibble with that. Maybe in some sense, some organs are contingent on some types of information, but the degree of contingency is way lower than it is in the brain, which is that's that's the whole reason why it's there. You know, we have these elaborate sense organs to pick up information from the environment and use it to guide behavior, our other organs of the body don't have sense organs, or at least not ones that are as elaborate uh as our eyes and ears. And so I think when people do kind of lazy theorizing, like, oh, men just they want to pursue short-term mating in the same way that the heart pumps blood, and they just do that

that's it that's not in any way contingent on anything in the environment. That's just what that's what men do. They they pursue short-term mating and the heart pumps blood and and and it's uh sort of devoid of any kind of e ecological thinking that I think is necessary for the design stance. That might be where where people are going wrong there. Yeah. Yeah, I like that a lot. Yeah, yeah. I think it also it comes back to like Lita's point of like it's a depth psychology where it's if you take an intentional perspective, it's people really are motivated because they want to maximize their genetic interest. You know, that's the real reason why they're doing something. And so that's why it's deflationary to talk about genes when we're talking about falling

in love or caring about your children or caring about social partners and being altruistic. If you view those as opposed, I think that's a good mark that you're probably operating at the wrong level. Um, and you're understanding genes in design, not at the level of design, but but at the intentional level, such that there's some rivalry between the two. Right. And I think it gets you greater purchase on the variation that does exist across cultures and between individuals. If you focus your analysis on how the mind is interacting with the environment to produce the behavior and what kinds of information it's using from the environment to adjust behavior. For example, if you if you ignore that, then you might predict just uh naively more

universality than in fact exists among people. Whereas if you view the mind as an organ that is designed to pick up information from the environment and strategically use it, then you would predict a lot of variation insofar as there's variation in different environments, different affordances, different constraints, different ecologies, et cetera. Yeah, that's right. And I think, you know, the uh the the sort of trope that um evolutionary psychologists don't study cross-cultural differences. I'm of two minds with that, because on the one hand, like a lot of theorizing is based on weird populations, and that's you know, that is a problem. I mean, that said, a weird population is still a human being, right?

Um and it's easy to sort of poo-poo that. But on the other hand, the kernel of truth is that if you're taking the design stance, cross-cultural variation or no cultural being a default is useful if you're taking the design stance because exactly as you said, all the variation and outcomes tell you about the underlying design, right? Um, but if you're if you're sort of not operating at the design stance, then you sort of have this idea well, like there's some outcome that's evolved or genetic or innate. Like, is theory of mind innate. Well, theory of mind has to be universal. So looking at universals, um, it could there's a good smart way to do it, and there's sort of a dumb way to do it. The smart way, I mean, dumb is too strong, but the smart way is to say these are all

outcomes that are diagnostic of design. Um, or the attempt to describe universals is getting at a level of abstraction that isn't just outcomes. But the other version is to say, do men always prefer sexual variety over women? What I think we're kind of describing as sort of fast and loose design stance that might not even be design stance thinking. Yeah. Another way to think of it is that uh the universality is what produces the variation. right? We have a universal design that responds strategically to certain types of information that vary across different ecologies. And insofar as that information varies across ecologies, you're going to see different outcomes across ecologies. But what is universal is not the output.

The output is going to change. What's universal is the information processing structure that responds to that information. Uh, and that and that's the important part. That's that's the the human nature that that we're interested in as evolutionary psychologists. Not necessarily the stuff that is the same across cultures, although that's that's part of it and that gives you some clues. Uh what we're interested in is, you know, what is that machinery doing? Uh and you would expect a machine, a really complicated machine, to produce different outputs in response to different situations. And that is indeed why the brain exists is to, you know, produce uh adaptive behavior in in response to particular situations and contexts and ecologies.

Yeah, I I don't think you can overestimate how much misunderstanding evolutionary psychology is understanding the words and concepts through the lens of just the intentional level. So if you have this idea that uh evolutionary psychologists are interested in genes and universals, and you understand that from the intentional level, then you would think that people's underlying motivations are genes, not the surface level things. So it's this depth psychology, as Lita talked about, and thus you get all this stuff of like, well, people are they really altruistic, or is it just their genes? Or do people really love their family or not? Or is it just their genes? Or do you really care about other people or is it just your genes?

That's the wrong way to think about it, because it's in opposition. The other one is if it's universal, if if what evolutionary psychologists think is universal is just sort of the desires and beliefs of of people, then everywhere people should believe the same thing, desire the same thing, act the same way. Um I don't think that's true. So evolutionary psychology is clearly wrong. Um and that's not what evolutionary psychologists say, but I think again, that's like a symptom of taking the design not taking the design stance, which is a weird way to think. And but I think the the defaults of taking the intentional theory of mind approach to psychology, that's that is sort of well, most of the misunderstandings of evolutionary

psychology, I think, are a consequence of treating it from that perspective and misunderstanding it from that perspective. Right. I I think there is a defensible version of that, which is that you can say that human motivations are are universal. Like every human wants physical safety and health, and, you know, they they want their offspring to be safe and well fed, and they want status and support and uh coalitional strength. You know, yeah, I think there's a defensible reading of that, which is that, you know, the underlying things we're striving for and we evolved to strive for the the things that natural selection picked up on as fitness proxies to strive for, those things are universal. But the strategies that people pursue to to get those fitness proxies, to get those those

goals, those motivations, are going to be different from place to place. You know, just the simplest possible example, you know, every human everywhere has fear of being in in physical danger, right? And there are systems in the mind that monitor the environment for signs of physical danger. And you could say that, you know, that is a universal part of human nature. But what is dangerous in one place is going to be very different from what is dangerous in a different place. You might have snakes in one place and not in another place, you know, poisonous spiders in one place and not in another place. You might have warfare that is intense and ubiquitous in one place and not so intense and ubiquitous in another place.

So just because the underlying fear system is the same across humans doesn't mean that the outputs of that fear system and the strategies that people take to pursue the goal of safety are going to be the same. They're going to be very different. Totally agree, David. David, maybe should we just end here? That's fine. I think this is good. Um we'll we'll uh we'll end here and we'll see everybody next week. All right, sounds good. Okay. Hey everybody. Uh we're doing provisional recording, so thanks for bearing with our abrupt ending. Uh on our way out here we'll hear from Greg Bryant, who we ran into at HBS in Robot Morocco as well. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you next week. Here maybe I'll get on this side.

Yeah, because David, you have to say something. So David Oh okay. Uh how's it going, Greg? I'm doing well. Yeah, did you have a good HPAS? Yeah, both both conference both conferences were good. Yeah, oh you went to CES and HPS. Yeah, I did the whole spiel. Oh wow, okay. Which one was better? No way, man. No way. You're not touching that one. Nope. Um, I like them both, you know. Uh actually it's been inspiring me to think about what kinds of factors would um cause the divisions we see and what kinds of things could we do to increase the um community overall. For sure. And um I'm thinking about that right now and I think people need to write about it and think about it. Totally agree. Yeah I think that was a common theme I saw here at at HBES at least.

I didn't go to CDS, but uh the desire to have greater unification uh within the evolutionary social sciences. Absolutely. Yeah yeah I mean the old version of HBES included um all these different people. Yeah. And now, you know, the community's fracturing a little bit for reasons that are good too because people are specializing, but I think we need to figure out how to come together as evolutionary behavioral science or behavioral scientists and uh and see each the value in each other's work and then recognize where there may be empirical differences that are resolvable. Yeah. It was really great they were able to do like organize the two back to back too. Yeah, I mean like uh Clark mentioned, uh that was a uh difficult uh thing to get

going. But um hopefully people appreciated that and then you can do it again. Yeah. Yeah. Uh any uh any big any takeaway findings, talks, things that stuck with you from the conference? Oh, that's a tough one. Um what did you talk about? Either any of that? Yeah, yeah, what your talk could be your favorite talk. Exactly. That was definitely. I saw Greg's talk. It was very good. It was about laughter. You want to give the Yeah, well I'm um I just talked about um just kind of an incremental um uh finding in my own research program that was in collaboration with the folks I work with at the Bioacoustics Research Lab in France looking at um how volitional laughter functions as an effective signal and there aren't really

laugh types that are associated with different meanings but instead laughter works on the dimension of valence in particular that allows people to communicate different kinds of uh meanings in their discourse. So like a evil laugh versus a happy laugh or well that those were two of the eight contexts we looked at and evil laugh which doesn't really happen in normal um conversation. Yeah it was kind of we included that to really see how a real category that we know exists how that would manifest in the data. Uh-huh. Um and that one was the only category that was highly recognizable. But yeah, it's uh just trying to figure out the puzzle of how nonverbal um vocalizations are you know perceived and what the acoustic features are.

Do whales laugh not that I know of but I'm assuming they have play vocalizations of some sort. Right. Or play signals. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, but pro probably probably it wouldn't be how a how to cocoa has got me thinking about whales. Yeah. Yeah, no. Yeah, no. I would bet they'd have a place signal. But the odds of it being uh that there being convergence evolution toward the lap in particular is a place signal seems unlikely. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean it th there could be some place signal that is um sort of appears within the repertoire that they already have. Yeah. Or it co evolves with their own localizations Yeah. Yeah, it would be cool to see if there's a particular vocal signature that happens at the

onset of play behavior. Yeah. Yeah. Uh they probably have visual signals as well. I don't yeah, yeah. I don't know about whale play, have to say. Yeah. A little hard to measure. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to dominate the podcast. No no, that's great, Frank. Thank you so much. Good to see you. Awesome. Yeah, two whales left.