Evolved computers with culture. Commentary: From computers to cultivation: reconceptualizing evolutionary psychology

Citation: Bryant GA (2015) Evolved computers with culture. Commentary: From computers to cultivation: reconceptualizing evolutionary psychology. Front. Psychol. 6:498. Barrett et al. review recent developments in evolutionary psychology (EP) and conclude that EP offers little in way of theoretical advancement over standard computational theory of mind (CTM) accounts, because traditional approaches in psychology implicitly accept that cognition is evolved. To Barrett et al., historical resistance to EP is surprising given that EP assumes the traditional computational-representational model of cognition. Across cognitive psychology, however, evolutionary approaches are sometimes accepted, but often mostly ignored. Vision and auditory perception researchers are typically functionalist, and as a result have made advances exceeding other areas of cognitive science—these scholars are often friendly to EP at least in some form. But many other areas have neither adopted a functionalist perspective nor currently accept the research program of EP. Certainly, most researchers in cognitive psychology do not attempt to reverse engineer computational solutions to adaptive problems as EP does. Not coincidentally, many cognitive psychologists study what EP would consider nonfunctional by products. Still, it is true that EP has largely embraced cognitive psychology (though actual cognitive research is still surprisingly rare) and has integrated it with theories from evolutionary biology. Barrett et al. suggest that the adoption of the CTM constitutes a weakness for EP and they instead propose that various forms of e-cognition (i.e., embodied, embedded, enactive) offer a viable alternative to computational approaches. But as Klasios (2014) pointed out in his recent commentary, Barrett et al. fail to recognize that " cognitive integration " is information processing, and in its most basic sense, is necessarily computational. As Gallistel and King (2009) recently put it, describing the mind as a case of digital computation " is the only game in town " (p. 24). There is no scientific alternative to the notion that the neural coding of events in the world involves the probabilistic transformation of information. If one admits that much, logical entailments prevent the kind of rejection of the CTM that Barrett et al. endorse. Notions of e-cognition can be provocative, and on the surface can seem like an advancement in our ideas about human cognition. However, there are some fundamental problems in the current presentation and the ideas in general. By suggesting that our cognition is shaped by cultural artifact use, I believe Barrett et al. point the causal arrow mostly backwards. That …