EEA and Folk Physics (feedback needed on a proposal)

Hello all--

I'm working on a project for Greg Laden's course on the EEA. I have an idea and a brief proposal, and I'd be interested in any feedback/suggestions/criticisms that anyone has on this idea.

Thanks in advance, Ellery

* * *

Stone Age Minds in Physics 101?

In a talk at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, John Tooby pointed out: "If you take physicists... and you ask them dynamical questions and you ask the physicists to sit on their hands, so they can't use a pencil and paper and so on, they will give incorrect answers that will be the same incorrect answers that everybody else does" (Cosmides and Tooby 1998). Numerous studies have examined the difficulties that students have learning physics, particularly dynamics, and the greatest obstacle seems to be that they have established ideas on how motion and forces work. McDermott (1984) describes such preconceptions as "highly resistant to instruction" (32). As a result, students often consider physics as "counter-intuitive" and a view of the world that should be used only in the classroom. The paper will investigate the possibility that the students' preconceptions are a result of specialized neural circuits in our species and, perhaps, other primates.

Physics examines, most basically, the interaction of energy and matter. Our ancestors must have faced problems in their environments that involved distance, time, force, mass, shape, projectile motion, and so on. Several of the resultant neural circuits are evident in infants and young children. Cosmides and Tooby (1997) point out that infants assume that the world contains solid objects and are surprised when two objects appear to pass through each other. Additionally, babies can discern between objects that move when acted on and those capable of self-generated motion. These neural circuits help us make sense of the physical world around us, or, more accurately, the circuits helped our ancestors make sense of the physical world around them.

The "common-sense" preconceptions about the world around us are known as folk physics, rather than scientific physics. Folk physics should, if a result of neural circuits based in our species' evolution, involve the types of events and objects confronted in daily life and supply what Cosmides and Tooby would call a "crib sheet" to solve problems involving these events and objects. Was folk physics "forged" in the Pleistocene? Do non-human primates share a similar set of preconceptions about distance, force, mass, shape, motion, and so on? If true, what are the implications for the EEA of these neural circuits? Does their EEA lie deeper in time than the Pleistocene?

Cosmides, Leda and John Tooby. 1997. Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer. Center for Evolution Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara website.

Cosmides, Leda and John Tooby. 1998. Has Natural Selection Shaped How Humans Reason? Colloquium at Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, 20 May 1998.

McDermott, L.C. 1984. Research on Conceptual Understanding in Mechanics. Physics Today, 37, 24-32.