THE THEORY OF evolution by natural selection has revolutionary implications for understanding the design of the human mind and brain, as Darwin himself was the first to recognize (Darwin, 1859). Indeed, a principled understanding of the network of causation that built the functional architecture of the human species offers the possibility of transforming the study of humanity into a natural science capable of precision and rapid progress. Yet, nearly a century and a half after The Origin of Species was published, the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences remain largely untouched by these implications, and many of these disciplines continue to be founded on assumptions evolutionarily informed researchers know to be false (Pinker, 2002; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences—a framework that not only incorporates the evolutionary sciences on a full and equal basis, but that systematically works out all of the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The long-term scientific goal toward which evolutionary psychologists are working is the mapping of our universal human nature. By this, we mean the construction of a set of empirically validated, high-resolution models of the evolved mechanisms that collectively constitute universal human nature. Because the evolved function of a psychological mechanism is computational—to regulate behavior and the body adaptively in response to informational inputs—such a model consists of a description of the functional circuit logic or information

We report the case of K.R., an individual with Alzheimer’s dementia. Although K.R. has difficulty retrieving even mundane facts about the world, she has accurate knowledge of her own personality. But the self she knows is out–of–date. K.R.’s inability to update her trait self–knowledge stands in contrast to other neuropsychological cases in which individuals can acquire and update their fund of personality knowledge despite impairments to semantic and episodic memory. Results add to the growing body of literature suggesting that semantic memory contains a subsystem devoted to the acquisition and representation of trait self–knowledge. Recent neuropsychological studies suggest that the unified self of everyday experience may actually be composed of at least five functionally (and neurally) isolable components (e.g., Klein, 2001; Klein, Rozendal, & Cosmides, 2002). These include: (a) episodic memories of one’s own life (e.g., Levine, et al., 1998), (b) representations of one’s own personality traits (e.g., Klein, Loftus, Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992), (c) facts about one’s personal history (semantic

Over the past two decades, an abundance of evidence has shown that individuals typically rely on semantic summary knowledge when making trait judgments about self and others (for reviews, see Klein, 2004; Klein, Robertson, Gangi, & Loftus, 2008). But why form trait summaries if one can consult the original episodes on which the summary was based? Conversely, why retain episodes after having abstracted a summary representation from them? Are there functional reasons to have trait information represented in two different, independently retrievable databases? Evolution does not produce new phenotypic systems that are complex and functionally organized by chance. Such systems acquire their functional organization because they solved some evolutionarily recurrent problems for the organism. In this article we explore some of the functional properties of episodic memory. Specifically, in a series of studies we demonstrate that maintaining a database of episodic memories enables its owner to reevaluate an individual’s past behavior in light of new information, sometimes drastically

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Abstract: The field of psychology remains a divided one. Several different sub-disciplines (e.g., developmental, cognitive, behaviorism, social, etc.) form what could be a unified scientific area. However, there is no widely accepted theory of unification. Charles Darwin once theorized that evolutionary theory would change the foundation of psychology; but over the years, evolutionary psychology has been met with hostile resistance from some of the prominent psychologists within the other sub-disciplines. Yet in recent years, all of the divided sub-disciplines of psychology have been slowly implementing evolutionary principles into their literature and research. This slow integration of evolutionary psychology into the other sub-disciplines indicates the possibility of a unified psychology with evolution as its foundation. This paper briefly reviews the literature within each major sub-discipline of psychology to show their implementation of evolutionary psychological theories, indicating the possibility of evolutionary psychology becoming the unifying paradigm upon which the entire field of psychology can be based. A call for action to continue this process is also discussed.

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We report the case of R. J., an individual with autism. R. J.’s developmental disorder has impaired his ability to retrieve episodic memories as well as his ability to acquire consensually shared knowledge of animals, foods, and objects (Klein, Cosmides, Costabile, & Mei, 2002). Nevertheless, R. J. has developed normal, consensually accurate knowledge of his own personality traits (Klein, Chan, & Loftus, 1999). Moreover, his self–ratings show that he sees his own personality as distinct from the personalities of others. But R. J.’s facility in learning about his own personality does not translate into a facility in learning about the personality traits of others: He fails to differentiate between the personalities of his various family members, and his ratings of them appear to be less nuanced and less situationally specific than his ratings of his own personality. This pattern is radically at variance from that shown by cognitively normal individuals. Because R. J.’s dissociation is developmental in origin, it can illuminate the nature of the learning mechanisms by which knowledge of personality traits is acquired. It suggests that learning about one’s own personality traits may engage a different set of mechanisms than learning about the personality traits of others. How do we come to know our own personality traits? The cognitive architecture of an individual is able to learn the personality traits of

evolved system for planning future acts

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The hippocampus and inferential reasoning: building