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John Tobey (July 26, 1952 – November 9, 2023) was a founder of the field of evolutionary psychology, co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology (with his wife, Leda Cosmides), and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in biological anthropology from Harvard University in 1989 and was a professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. Tobey and Cosmides also co-founded and co-directed the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara and jointly received the 2020 Jean Nicod Award.
Tooby and his collaborators integrated cognitive science, cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and hunter-gatherer studies to create the new field of evolutionary psychology, whose goal is to gradually map the universal evolved cognitive and neural structures that underlie human nature and provide a basis for the learning mechanisms of culture. This involves using knowledge of the specific adaptive problems encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors to experimentally map the design of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that our hominid ancestors evolved to solve these problems.
At the UC Santa Barbara Center for Evolutionary Psychology, he and his colleagues use cross-cultural, experimental, and neuroscience techniques to study cooperation, coalitions, group psychology, and specific cognitive specializations in human reasoning. Under Tooby’s direction, the Center has set up a field station in the Ecuadorian Amazon to conduct cross-cultural studies of psychological adaptations and human behavioral ecology. He is particularly interested in documenting how the design of these adaptations shapes cultural and social phenomena and may lay the foundation for a new generation of more precise social and cultural theories. Tooby is edge community, wrote many articles in response edge annual issue, examples of which we are pleased to share below. John Tooby edge Profile page
Alliance Instinct
By John Tooby
Coalition thinking makes everyone, including scientists, much dumber in the coalition collective than they are individually. Paradoxically, a party united by supernatural beliefs can revise its beliefs about the economy or climate without the modifiers becoming bad coalition members. But when new information emerges that requires a revision of beliefs, as is often the case, those coalition members, all constituted by a shared adherence to “rational” scientific propositions, run into problems. Questioning or disagreeing with the coalition’s precepts, even for rational reasons, makes one a bad, unethical coalition member—risking the loss of job opportunities, friends, and cherished group identities. This freezes belief revision.
The race between genetic collapse and germline engineering
By John Tooby
The most remarkable breaking news in science is my existence. Well, not just me. People like me would have died young without technology. Of the roughly 5.5 billion people who have survived past adolescence, perhaps only a billion would have survived without modern hygiene, medicine, technology, and market-driven abundance. From an ancestral perspective, the vast majority of humans died before they had children, often before they survived childhood. For those of us who live in the developed world, our reinvented life table is one of the Enlightenment’s greatest humanist victories — freeing parents from the grief of having most of their children die, and freeing children from the loss of their parents (and then dying in poverty themselves).
The Iron Law of Intelligence
By John Tooby
The universe is vast and filled with countless layers of rich structure; in contrast, the brain (or computer) is infinitesimally small. To reconcile this size difference, evolution has selected hacks that are small enough to fit in the brain, but yield huge inference gains—super-efficient compression algorithms (inevitably lossy, since one of the keys to effective compression is to throw away almost everything).
Learning and Culture
By John Tooby
Operationally, all that is meant by “learning” is that the interaction of an organism with its environment results in changes in information states in the brain, by an unknown mechanism. And all that is meant by “culture” is that some information states in one person’s brain somehow lead to the reconstruction of “similar” information states in another person’s brain, by an unknown mechanism. People assume that because so-called instances of “culture” (or “learning”) are all referred to by the same name, they are the same thing. Instead, each instance masks a whole host of very different things. Trying to construct a science with culture (or learning) as a unifying concept is as wrong as trying to develop a robust science of white things (eggshells, clouds, O-type stars, Pat Boone, human sclera, bones, first-generation MacBooks, dandelion juice, lilies…).
Unfriendly physics, monsters from the id, and self-organized collective delusion
By John Tooby
Indeed, as an ideal, the scientific enterprise is devoted exclusively to improving the accuracy of beliefs. Yet we can point out where this analysis goes wrong when we consider the multiple functions of holding beliefs. We take for granted that the function of beliefs is to reconcile with reality so that when actions are based on that belief, they will be successful. The more often beliefs conflict with reality, the more often accurate beliefs will replace inaccurate ones (e.g., through feedback from experiments, engineering tests, markets, natural selection). However, holding a belief has a second function that affects whether people consciously or unconsciously accept it—the social rewards of being in harmony or disharmony with the beliefs of others (Socrates was executed for “not recognizing the gods recognized by the city”). The mind is designed to balance these two functions: being in harmony with reality and being in harmony with others. The greater the social rewards of being in harmony with reality, the less the belief is tested against reality, and the more social demands will determine the belief—that is, the network fixation of beliefs will dominate. Physics and chip design will be highly in harmony with reality, while social sciences and climatology will be less in harmony.
Homecoming: Entropy, Galileo’s Reference Frame, and the Desperate Ingenuity of Life
By John Tooby
The hardest choice I faced early in my scientific career was whether to abandon the beautiful puzzles of quantum mechanics, nonlocality, and cosmology and turn to something equally compelling: to reverse-engineer the code that natural selection has embedded in the programming that makes up the circuit structure of the human being. In 1970, the surrounding cultural fever and geopolitics made this first step toward a non-ideological and computational understanding of our evolutionarily designed “human nature” seem urgent; the rise of computer science and cybernetics made it seem possible; and the near-total avoidance and hostility of behavioral and social scientists toward evolutionary biology, which had all but trivialized these fields, made it seem necessary.
Causation, Morality Wars, and Misattribution Arbitrage
By John Tooby
Here are three simple conceptual tools that may help us see what is happening: causation, morality wars, and misattribution arbitrage. Causation itself is an evolved conceptual tool that simplifies, systematizes, and focuses our representations of situations. This cognitive mechanism leads us to think in terms of causes—one effect has only one cause. However, to deepen understanding, it is more accurate to represent an effect as the result of the intersection or connection of multiple factors, including the absence of excluding conditions.
I seem to be metadata
By John Tooby
The shockwave from the Yucatan impact 65 million years ago wiped out entire lineages of species—diatoms and dinosaurs, corals and crustaceans, ammonites and amphibians—tearing apart the intricate interdependencies of Earth’s ecosystems, turning the blanket of life into a shroud in a single, fiery geological instant. These shifts and extinctions eliminated key species and upended community structure, opening up new opportunities, triggering the adaptive radiation of birds and mammals and other bursts of innovation that transformed the biological world—and ultimately cleared the way for our placental-fed, unprecedentedly lush brains.
In any case, the situation we are facing now is that the Internet and the World Wide Web that runs on it have had an equally explosive impact on our human information ecology, with shock waves rippling through our culture, society, economy, politics, technology, science and even cognition.
The Great Transformation: Artificial Intelligence, Local Intelligence, and the Bridge Between Them
By John Tooby
Humans will continue to be blind slaves to the programs that evolution has implanted in our brains unless we pull them into the light. Often, we live only in the version of reality they have spontaneously constructed for us – the surface of things. Because we do not realize that we are in a theater, and that our roles and lines are largely written for us by our mental programs, we credulously get sucked into these dramas (such as the genocidal drama between us and them). The endless chain reaction between these programs has made us victims of history – trapped in wars and oppression, enveloped by mass delusions and cultural epidemics, and caught in an endless cycle of negativity and conflict.
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