Evolutionary Thinking in the Social Sciences
Evolutionary Thinking in the Social Sciences
The papers in this section elaborate on evolutionary theories and explanatory models in contemporary social sciences. (The topic is related to questions discussed in the June 1999 Replika issue on Daniel C. Dennett’s philosophy and cognitive theory.) In the essay Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer, the authors Leda Cosmides and John Tooby introduce the ambitious trend of evolutionary psychology as an approach to psychology, in which “knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind”. The subsequent papers by the Hungarian authors were originally written for the Eighth Congress of the Hungarian Cognitive Sciences in Szeged in February 2000. By highlighting correspondences between the laws of linguistic diversity and change and the dynamics of evolutionary processes, Klára Sándor and György Kampis argue for a new conception of language in their paper entitled Language and Evolution. In his essay The Development of Cognitive Functions: Rite, Rule, and Time, Vilmos Csányi discusses the development of cognitive functions from an evolutionary perspective, and analyzes the role of rites, rules and time on the different stages of development. In the last essay of this selection, Csaba Pléh discusses the metaphorically represented biological theories on the spreading mechanisms of ideas in the wider context of traditional social scientific explanations.