It would be comforting to think that psychiatrists, who take on the task of
fixing minds, have an equally sensible view of what is going on between your
ears, and why. But they don’t. “It is now much easier to treat many mental
disorders than it is to understand them,” says Simon Baron-Cohen in The
Maladapted Mind: Classic Readings in Evolutionary Psychopathology (Taylor
& Francis, ÂŁ44.95, ISBN 0863774601).

This collection of papers edited by Baron-Cohen attempts to change all that.
They suggest that psychiatry should recognise that the mind is a collection of
cognitive tools designed by natural selection to solve the recurring problems
our ancestors faced. This approach seeks to discover which “psychopathologies”
are the result of normal defences gone wrong, such as phobias; those with hidden
advantages, such as sociopathy; or which are responses to the modern environment
(some aspects of depression).

The papers are only initial forays into the field. But it is clear that an
evolutionary understanding of the mind can tell us something about what causes
good health and what leads to illness— important to get clear before you
take on the workings of the mind.

PSYCHOLOGY needs evolution. This, says Henry Plotkin, head of University
College London’s psychology department, is the “single, simple point” of his
Evolution in Mind. But although his book claims to be an expression of
that “vigorous movement called evolutionary psychology” it is far from attempts
to understand the workings of the mind with reference to evolved mental
tools.

Plotkin correctly condemns the “extraordinarily bankrupt stance of
behaviourism” and points out that brains are not free to learn just any old
thing—not only is general-purpose conditioning too weak a mechanism, but
organisms can’t afford to learn everything by trial and error. But unlike the
evolutionary psychologists, Plotkin argues that what the brain can learn is not
so much facilitated by genes as “constrained” by them, claiming that evolution
has been adding constraints ever since “the initial evolution of learning and
intelligence 500 million or more years ago”. But he does not explain how this
approach solves the problems of conditioning, how these constraints are brought
to bear on learning, or how they account for the intricate design displayed by
the cognitive tools such as language.

Above all, Plotkin won’t accept that his is a very different process from
that envisaged by the evolutionists he mentions favourably, such as Steven
Pinker and Simon Baron-Cohen, who see genes not as “constraining” behaviour but
as the very things that make it possible.

A gene-centred account of human behaviour, argues Plotkin, must be false
because it relies on an unconscious “drive” to propagate one’s selfish genes.
But evolutionary psychologists would argue that genes get selected because they
are good at building things like arms, and in particular, because they built our
brains to respond to our ancestral environment in adaptive ways. Plotkin’s
dilemma is that if evolutionary theory can be applied to human behaviour
directly, through brain construction, there is no need for the metaphorical
application he prefers: cultural evolution.

Plotkin has the notion that complex things, such as culture, require complex
theories to explain them. But he presents no evidence to support his claim that
culture evolves rather than just changes. The question of what might constitute
the “cultural units” of such an evolutionary process remains unresolved. And
there is no discussion of the selection pressures on these units. So cultural
evolution becomes just cultural transmission with a Darwinian gloss.
Evolutionary theory has more to offer the social sciences than this.