In this lecture we shall take recourse to a particular text which would help us guide our understanding. The text is “Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer” written by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

[link to text: http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html ]

A primer gives us ‘primary information' on any topic. Throughout this lecture we shall have occasion to look at certain extracts from this text since these will guide us through the basics of evolutionary psychology, about the structure and design of the human mind that has created culture.

So how does evolutionary psychology consider the brain and how does it define the mind? The mind is defined in many different ways within many different discourses. But within this discourse we find that the mind is defined as a set of information-processing machines . We can very well see that the analogy is with the computer; the mind is seen as a set of information-processing machines that has been designed by Natural Selection.

And why is the mind which is designed by Natural Selection, designed in a certain way? Why is a particular kind of mind there in the first place? The answer is one of the core claims of evolutionary psychology: the mind does not solve any kind of problems, but adaptive problems . We shall have occasion to look at the term ‘adaptation' later on.