Notes

1. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: Norton, n.d.), p. 403. For a more detailed analysis of the problem of stovepiping in the intelligence community, see William J. Lahneman, “Knowledge-Sharing in the Intelligence Community After 9/11,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, vol. 17 (October–December 2004): 614–633.

2. Each of these fields is closely related, of the same psychological family if not twins. For brevity's sake, I will refer to evolutionary psychology throughout this article. As with all evolutionary explanations, evolutionary psychology provides ultimate explanations of human cognition, the evolutionary foundations of human behaviors and the cognitive processes associated with them. The types of explanations are focused on determining that a certain behavior is widespread or even universal and so evolved or innate; and attempting to show why a particular behavior would be adaptive. Cognitive psychology focuses on proximate explanations and is centered on how humans think. It includes topics like memory, learning, attention, language, and motor control. Biological psychology also is concerned with proximate explanations of what the different components of the brain do. I am grateful to Dr. Abigail Marsh, Mood and Anxiety Program, National Institute of Mental Health for these distinctions. Dr. Abigail Marsh, personal communication, April 17, 2007.

3. Certainly there are some in the social sciences who recognize the revolution in the life sciences. The relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology is perhaps the most important. Steven Pinker, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, among others, deserve great credit for helping to bring this about through their scholarship, and for training the next generation of scholars who will build on their work. See John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 19–136; and Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). A few scholars in political science are aware as well. The Association for Politics and the Life Sciences and its journal Politics and the Life Sciences are the focal points for research. I have used the life science approach to reveal the origins of war and ethnic conflict in Bradley A. Thayer, Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004).

4. This argument is advanced most forcefully in René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (Je pense donc je suis); Principles of Philosophy, and Meditations on First Philosophy (Cogito ergo sum). See The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 111–175, 179–291; and The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1–60.

5. See Bernard Brodie, Escalation and the Nuclear Option (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); and Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Glenn H. Snyder, Deterrence and Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); and Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

6. Thomas Schelling, quoted in Kathleen Archibald, ed., Strategic Interaction and Conflict: Original Papers and Discussion (Berkeley, CA: Institute of Internationals Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1966), p. 150. I thank Keith Payne for bringing this quote to my attention.

7. Keith B. Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); and Payne, On Deterrence and Defense: After the Cold War (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, 2007).

8. Keith E. Stanovich, Who Is Rational? Studies of Individual Differences in Reasoning (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999). As Stephen Stich argues: “The mere fact that your cognitive processes and mine are innate would not establish that they are the same” and even were we to “assume that all cognitive systems are innate and that all cognitive systems are optimal from the point of view of natural selection, it still would not follow that all normal cognitive systems are the same.” See Stephen P. Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 73–74 (emphasis original).

9. Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

10. Jerrold M. Post, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

11. John R. Anderson, Daniel Bothell, et al., “An Integrated Theory of the Mind,” Psychological Review, vol. 111 (October 2004): 1036–1060.

12. Variation might be caused as well by genetic drift or genetic mutation, but would be maintained by natural selection.

13. Naturally, there can be other sources of difference and different modes of reasoning. See Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why (New York: Free Press, 2003).

14. This theory is advanced in Keith E. Stanovich, The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

15. Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West, “Individual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 23 (October 2000): 645–726.

16. The details of Phineas Gage's unfortunate story are found in Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994), pp. 3–33.

17. Ibid. p. 32.

18. Ibid. p. 33.

19. Michael Koenigs, Liane Young, Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Fiery Cushman, Marc Hauser, and Antonio Damasio, “Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex Increases Utilitarian Moral Judgements,” Nature, vol. 446 (21 March 2007), published online edition, p. 1.

20. Ibid., p. 1.

21. Benedict Carey, “Brain Injury Said to Affect Moral Choices,” The New York Times, March 22, 2007, available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/science/22brain.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin (accessed March 22, 2007).

22. Here the work of Adrian Raine and his colleagues has been particularly important. See Adrian Raine, Monte Buchsbaum, and Lori LaCasse, “Brain Abnormalities in Murderers Indicated by Positron Emission Tomography,” Biological Psychiatry, vol. 42 (1997), 495–508; and Sharon Ishikawa and Adrian Raine, “The Neuropsychiatry of Aggression,” in Randolph B. Schiffer, Stephen M. Rao, and Barry S. Fogel, eds., Neuropsychiatry (2nd ed., Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2003), pp. 660–679.

23. The literature on this topic is expanding rapidly. An excellent place to start is Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Also see Linda Mealey, Sex Differences: Developmental and Evolutionary Strategies (San Diego: Academic Press, 2000); Steven E. Rhoads, Taking Sex Differences Seriously (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004); and Irwin Silverman and Marion Eals, “Sex Differences in Spatial Abilities: Evolutionary Theory and Data,” in Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind, pp. 533–549.

24. Stalin's reaction to each of these events is documented in Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Knopf, 2004).

25. On the death of Mao's son see Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Knopf, 2005), pp. 378–379. This work is a valuable contribution for understanding why Mao would wage democide against the Chinese people.

26. Andrew Pierce, “If You're Not On His Side, You Don't Figure,” Daily Telegraph, March 14, 2007, available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/14/nbrown14.xml, accessed on March 14, 2007.

27. For a discussion of the environments of evolutionary adaptation and its influence on human behavior see Thayer, Darwin and International Relations, pp. 22–59, and 96–218.

28. A good introduction is Michael S. Gazzaniga, Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

29. For an introduction into emotion see Keith Oatley, “The Structure of Emotions,” in Paul Thagard, ed., Mind Readings: Introductory Selections on Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

30. There is a growing body of literature advancing this argument. Excellent and easily approachable studies are Marc D. Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); and Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

31. Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, “The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment,” Nature, vol. 393 (4 June 1998): 472.

32. Brandon M. Wagar and Paul Thagard, “Spiking Phineas Gage: A Neurocomputational Theory of Cognitive-Affective Integration in Decision Making,” Psychological Review, vol. 111 (January 2004): 67–79.

33. In addition to Damasio, Descartes' Error; see Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003).

34. Oatley, “The Structure of Emotions,” p. 244.

35. Ibid., pp. 244–245.

36. Ibid., p. 245.

37. Eric Eich and Jonathan W. Schooler, “Cognition/Emotion Interactions,” in Cognition and Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 5.

38. Chandra Sekhar Sripada and Stephen Stich, “Evolution, Culture, and the Irrationality of the Emotions,” in Dylan Evans and Pierre Cruse, eds., Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 133–158. For their conception of “culture of honor,” they reference Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

39. Sripada and Stich, “Evolution, Culture, and the Irrationality of the Emotions,” p. 147.

40. Ibid., p. 147.

41. Ibid., pp. 147–149.

42. Their views were first advanced in Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science, vol. 185, no. 4157 (September 1974): 1124–1131; and further developed in Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 3–20.

43. The last jointly written response is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions,” Psychological Review, vol. 103 (July 1996): 582–591. Amos Tversky died in 1996.

44. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Advances in Prospect Theory: Cumulative Representation of Uncertainty,” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, vol. 5 (October 1992): 297–298.

45. The others discussed by Tversky and Kahneman are nonlinear preferences and source dependence. Tversky and Kahneman, “Advances in Prospect Theory,” p. 298.

46. Ibid., p. 298.

47. Ibid., p. 298. This also discussed in Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo, “Timid Choices and Bold Forecasts: A Cognitive Perspective on Risk Taking,” Management Science, vol. 39 (January 1993): 17–31; and Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 106 (November 1991): 1039–1061.