Quotes from “Adaptive specializations, social exchange, and the evolution of human intelligence”

By Leda Cosmides, Clark Barrett, & John Tooby (2010)

• The need for special inferential rules for cheater detection derives from the fact that standard, domain-general conditional reasoning rules will fail to identify cheaters in many circumstances, and will misidentify reciprocators and altruists as cheaters in others.#
  Cooperation
• The computational problems our ancestors faced were not drawn randomly from the universe of all possible problems; instead, they were densely clustered in particular, recurrent families (e.g., predator avoidance, foraging, mating) that occupy only miniscule regions of the space of possible problems.#
  HistoryEvolutionPsychology
• General-purpose reasoning methods are very weak, and have crippling defects (e.g., combinatorial explosion) that are a direct consequence of their domain generality.#
  EpistemologyPsychology