The Causal Role of Consciousness: A Conceptual Addendum to Human Evolutionary Psychology

By concentrating on the unconscious processes driving evolutionary mechanisms, evolutionary psychology has neglected the role of consciousness in generating human adaptations. The authors argue that there exist several “Darwinian algorithms” that are grounded in a novel representational system. Among such adaptations are informationretention homicide, the killing of others who are believed to possess information about the self that has the potential to jeopardize inclusive fitness, and those generating suicide, which may necessitate the capacity for self-referential emotions such as shame. The authors offer these examples to support their argument that human psychology is characterized by a representational system in which conscious motives have inserted themselves at the level of the gene and have fundamentally changed the nature of hominid evolution.