Larry’s Reviews > What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Volume 1997) > Status Update

Although Ed Hagen has a nice thread (2022) on why recent evolution is no threat to EP https://x.com/ed_hagen/status/1537566... (because recent evolution builds on necessarily prior complex and therefore universal adaptations—> Griffith’s point here re-applies, I think)

The consequence is that phenotypic variation must arise from the flipping on or off of “disjunctive” developmental programs, which requires evolution to have anticipated the relevant environmental variation. But no: Malaysian barn owls hunt individually in the UK and together in Malaysia, and “there is no reason to suppose that this is the expression of a disjunctive program selected in ancestral birds…”

Problems with EP: the monomorphic mind rests on the assumption that the transmission of complex traits like psychological modules requires a unique genetic architecture—because many genes are involved—, but this would make the transmission of ANY complex trait miraculous.

We are not just born into an environment: we are given one (education).

“… evolution achieves stable outcomes by exploiting reliable interactions between the developing organism and its environment to create reliable developmental outcomes. The fact that a trait has an evolutionary history has no implications about the nature of the process by which it develops, except that the outcome is sufficiently reliable to allow selection.” Dvt process <=> representational architecture?