David C. Geary

David C. Geary is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences (and a former departmental chair) and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Missouri. His many publications include The Origin of Mind and Evolution of Vulnerability . I wanted to interview him because his ideas on biologically primary and biologically secondary abilities have been discussed at length on this blog. Question 1: Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the idea of biologically primary abilities that we have evolved to acquire, and biologically secondary abilities that are culturally specific and that we have therefore not evolved to acquire. Is this an accurate summary of the theory and, if so, what empirical evidence supports it and what potential empirical evidence could prove it wrong? The motivational and behavioral component is expressed through children’s engagement in self-initiated activities, such as social play or exploring the environment. These activities are typically considered fun, consistent with a built-in reward mechanism that reinforces children’s activities in these areas. Children need to engage in these types of activities because it takes many years for primary abilities to become fully developed. The plasticity of these abilities and a bias to engage in activities that flesh them out allows them to become adapted to local conditions (e.g., the local language). In other words, the combination of skeletal constraints and built-in motivational and behavioral biases ensures that certain competencies emerge (e.g., various social skills) but at the same time are adjusted to better fit the nuances of the contexts in which the children are situated. The development of these competences occurs with little if any explicit instruction or mental effort. Biologically secondary abilities, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, do not have this deep evolutionary history, are not human universals, and in fact the cultural-goal (at least in developed nations) of universal education is less than 200 years old. There are many implications to my basic argument but the key ones are: a. The cognitive, attentional, motivational, and behavioral biases that ensure the acquisition of primary abilities will not be sufficient for the learning of secondary abilities. b. I’ve laid out why secondary abilities will require the engagement of domain-general abilities, such as working memory, at least during the early phases of learning elsewhere (e.g., 2008 article in Educational Psychologist, and 2007 monograph, Educating the Evolved Mind). As you know, John Sweller and others have repeatedly demonstrated the importance of working memory for school learning. c. We cannot expect a universal motivation for secondary learning. Some people will of course like to learn new things, especially once they have the basics mastered, but the goal is universal education, not just the education of the curious and cognitively able. For most children, the goal to learn secondary competencies in school is competing against a strong motivation to engage in activities that flesh out primary abilities, such as social play or other social activities. d. These points suggest that for most children to become proficient in secondary domains, well-developed curricula and competent teachers must provide students the structure and scaffolding provided by evolution to support primary learning. This will involve explicit curricular goals and for many children explicit instruction (see below). e. Making school more fun essentially involves making the associated activities more similar to the activities that promote primary learning. This might work, with teachers’ help, during the initial (preschool) phases of learning secondary abilities, but won’t be effective as material becomes more abstract. If my thesis is incorrect, then it can be easily falsified. As one example, whole language should be more effec