Tooby
Tooby, John
Instinctis
Instinct. An instinct is a drive encoded in the genes. The term is used in the Freudian model of the mind to represent one of the main driving forces of the psyche (represented by the id), counterbalanced by the social programming of the superego -with the ego trying to do a balancing act between the demands of these two forces, and the demands of external reality.
This involves using knowledge of specific adaptive problems our hunter-gatherer ancestors encountere d to experimentally map the design of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that evolved among our hominid ancestors to solve them.
Source: John Tooby's website
Under Tooby's direction, the Center maintains a field station in Ecuadorian Amazonia in order to con duct cross-cultural studies of psychological adaptations and human behavioral ecology.
For the last two decades, Tooby and his collaborators have been integrating cognitive science, cultu ral anthropology, evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, cognitive neuroscience, and hunter-gatherer studies to create the new field of evolutionary psychology.
He is particularly interested in documenting how the design of these adaptations shapes cultural and social phenomena, and potentially forms the foundation for a new, more precise generation of social and cultural theories.
Tooby is co-director of UCSB's Center for Evolutionary Psychology, where Tooby and his collaborators use cross-cultural, experimental, and neuroscience techniques to investigate specific cognitive specializations for cooperation, coalitions, group psychology, and human reasoning.
The goal of evolutionary psychology is the progressive mapping of the universal evolved cognitive an d neural architecture that constitutes human nature, and provides the basis of the learning mechanisms responsible for culture.
Tooby is also working on several projects in evolutionary biology, including a book on the evolution of sexual reproduction and genetic systems that interprets their design features as a series of adaptations to parasitic infections.
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