Massive Modularity and Brain Evolution
Quartz (2002) argues that some recent findings about the evolution of the brain (Finlay and Darlington 1995) are inconsistent with evolutionary psychologists’ massive modularity hypothesis. In substance, Quartz contends that since the volume of the neocortex evolved in a concerted manner, natural selection did not act on neocortical systems independently of one another, which is a necessary condition for cognition to be massively modular. In this article, I argue that Quartz’s argument fails to undermine the massive modularity hypothesis.
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‡I would like to thank Carl Craver for his reply to a talk based on this article at the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (June 2006). Previous versions were presented at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in April 2006, at the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in June 2006 and at the meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association in November 2006.