From 2003...The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology and the Theory Of Tandem, Coordinated Inheritances

From 2003... Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., & Barrett, H. C. (2003). The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology and the Theory Of Tandem, Coordinated Inheritances: Comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003). Psychological Bulletin, 129(6), 858–865. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.6.858

Abstract: Organisms inherit a set of environmental regularities as well as genes, and these two inheritances repeatedly encounter each other across generations. This repetition drives natural selection to coordinate the interplay of stably replicated genes with stably persisting environmental regularities, so that this web of interactions produces the reliable development of a functionally organized design. Selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to lose rather than grow functional organization. This means that the individually unique and unpredictable factors in the web of developmental interactions are a disordering threat to normal development. Selection built anti-entropic mechanisms into organisms to orchestrate transactions with environments so that they have some chance of being organization-building and reproduction-enhancing rather than disordering.

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As evolutionary psychologists, we believe in design reincarnation based on two inheritances, not genetic preformationism based on one.

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Lessons for Psychology From Thermodynamics and Darwinism

The most basic lesson is that natural selection is the only known natural process that pushes populations of organisms thermodynamically uphill into higher degrees of functional order, or even offsets the inevitable increase in disorder that would otherwise take place. Therefore, all functional organization in undomesticated organisms that is greater than could be expected by chance (which is nearly all functional organization) is ultimately the result of the operation of natural selection and hence must be explained in terms of it (if it is to be explained at all). This is why understanding natural selection is enormously beneficial to any theoretically principled psychology. In effect, natural selection defines the design criteria to which organisms were built to conform. This is why knowledge of ancestral natural selection combined with knowledge of ancestral environments provides a principled theoretical framework for deriving predictions about the reliably developing design of the human mind. Natural selection is (a) the set of enduring, nonrandom, cause-and-effect relationships in the world that (b) interact with the reliably developing features of organisms (c) in such a way that they consistently cause some design variants to reproduce their designs more frequently than others because of their design differences. Hence, those traits that do not reliably develop across generations cannot be systematically interacted with by selection and thus will not be organized by the long-term operation of selection. Reciprocally, if a property of the world does not stably endure across generations, then it will not last long enough to cause some design features to supplant others in large populations, and its effects will not show up in the species-typical designs of organisms. Selection brings about a functional coordination between the stable, long-term properties of environments and the stable, cross-generationally recurrent, reliably developing (and hence predictable or prespecifiable) properties of organisms. In contrast, there is no process that guarantees that unique, novel interactions between environments and organisms will be functional. Hence, natural selection predicts and explains the extraordinarily nonrandom, functionally organized relationships that interpenetrate the species-wide designs of all organisms, including humans. Whenever one sees functional order, one is seeing the downstream contrivances of natural selection.