Who are we? How did we get to be this way? These are two of the greatest questions facing our species. The answers are still emerging after decades of field research in linguistics and anthropology, evolutionary theory, psychology, and neuroscience. But one thing is clear. Humans act, think, and exist according to the parameters of the dark matter of their minds – the things that they do not know that they know – their "unknown knowns" to shamelessly appropriate the words of Donald Rumsfeld.
All scientists believe that at some level evolution is responsible for how we humans got to be the way we are. But evolutionary theory alone is not enough. While superficially, humans are alike in many ways, at the same time, we are a varied species, with enormous differences separating individuals even within the same cultures, shaped in profound ways by our life experiences.
The question that most interests me is whether evolution structured humans to be flexible or rigid in their behavioural connection to their environment. The belief in rigidity is evident in a variety of theories, from Noam Chomsky's universal grammar (all humans are born with the same core grammar), to E.O. Wilson's sociobiology (human behaviour is the result of organic evolution), to evolutionary psychology (evolution has created massively modular minds), among whose major proponents are John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Steven Pinker and others. The rigidity hypothesis is ultimately the idea that all humans are born with shared universal knowledge. This hypothesis traces back to Plato and is further seen in the work of Descartes, Freud, Jung and many others.
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