What Does LEGO Have To Do With Evolutionary Psychology?

This video - which is not only incredibly cool, but also set to dramatic music - tells the story about a device called the Antikythera mechanism. Here are the basics.

This video - which is not only incredibly cool, but also set to dramatic music - tells the story about a device called the Antikythera mechanism. Here are the basics.

In 1900, the remains of an ancient mechanism built around 150 BC was found off a Greek Island called Antikythera (thus the name). Research on these remains over the next hundred years eventually revealed what the device was for. After some initial false starts - a navigation instrument was one early suggestion - in 2008, examination of the parts using modern technology established clearly that it was a calendar, able to predict the position of heavenly bodies, solar eclipses and even when the Olympic games were to take place. That's already pretty cool, but, as the video shows, a functional replica of the device has now been built by an Apple engineer... out of LEGO.

So what does that have to do with evolutionary psychology? Well, quite a lot.

Work on the Antikythera mechanism illustrates a key principle that underlies evolutionary psychology, reverse engineering. The idea is that it's possible to reason out what something is for - its function - by investigating its parts and seeing what it does. Objects' shapes allow you to guess their function; archeologists do this all the time when they find artifacts like hand axes and needles.

Because the parts of plants and animals also have functions, it's possible to infer these functions from the shapes of the parts of organisms. Ever since Darwin, we have known that (to put it somewhat roughly) the parts of organisms have the properties they do because of how these properties contributed to survival and reproduction: their function causes their shapes. So, reasoning the other direction, by looking at the details of organisms' parts, we can guess what they're for: their shapes reveal their function. No one doubts, for instance, that they eye is for seeing, which we can figure out from the clear lens, the photosensitive retina, and so on. From the eye's shape and properties - its form - we know its function

Work on the Antikythera device shows that this is true not just for things like hand axes and beaks, but also for computational devices, things that process information, in this case, information about things like where planets will be at particular times. In the case of the Antikythera mechanism, we know what it's for because the shapes of the gears make it useful for calculating what's going to happen in the heavens at particular times. The clues lie not just in the fact that it has gears, but in the details of how these gears interact with one another, allowing the machine to do fancy things like division.

And this brings me to evolutionary psychology. That's what I do, as an evolutionary psychologist. The human mind is, at its most basic, just like the Antikythera mechanism insofar as the mind's job is to process information. Just like the researchers who figured out the function of this ancient device, evolutionary psychologists similarly try to figure out what the human mind is for. (Psychologists use behavior and other kinds of data rather than the shapes of gears in their work, slightly breaking the parallelism.)

Now, of course, the human mind is a lot more complicated, arguably the most complicated object within the scope of human knowledge. But the theory of evolution by natural selection tells us that although the mind is complex, and no doubt has a large number of parts, those parts have functions and, just as in the Antikythera case, we can made guesses about these functions, and test them.

But the building of the device out of LEGO is the icing on the cake. If you have only limited information about a device - as they did in the case of the Antikythera mechanism - you can still make good guesses about the parts you don't have if you've correctly figured out the function. Because researchers were able to infer from the parts they did have that the device needed to do various calculations - including multiplying by five nineteenths, apparently - they could guess the other parts that it must have had to do this. Then they could reconstruct it out of LEGO.

Which brings me to the last point I want to make, which is that this nifty device illustrates another subtle but very deep point about information processing. It's possible to make things that compute out of essentially anything. This includes traditional materials, like wood, bronze, and silicon, but it also includes LEGO blocks - as illustrated here - and, most importantly (from my point of view, anyway), neurons.

So, armed with the key insight is that the brain is a computational device with subcomponents designed to contribute to reproductive success, evolutionary psychologists, just like researchers studying this mechanism, try to reverse engineer the mind, making guesses about the functions of the parts that comprise it. In the same way that researchers could confirm that the Antikythyra mechanism was a calendar - inferring function from form, just as biologists do - evolutionary psychologists have been able to provide evidence for a number of functions.

Philosophy Essential Reads

How to Handle Difficult People Like a Stoic

Daniel C. Dennett: Tribute to A Philosophical Giant

In the case of the Antikythera mechanism, once they had reverse engineered the device, they could the forward-engineer it, building a functional replica, in this case out of LEGO. In the case of the human mind, reverse engineering is still in its infancy, so I'd say forward-engineering one out of LEGO is probably a fair ways off...