David and Tamler talk about the often rancorous debate among cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists over whether the mind is modular -- composed of discrete systems responsible for vision, reasoning, cheater detection, sexual jealousy, and so on. David and Tamler (mostly David) describe the history of the debate, then dive into a recent paper (Pietraszewski & Wertz, 2021) arguing that virtually all the disagreement is the product of a conceptual and methodological confusion �€" that the two sides are operating with different levels of analysis and talking past each other as a result.

Plus, we REALLY tried not to talk about the University of Austin thing for the whole opening segment. We had another topic lined up and everything. It just didn�€™t work out. Cicero would understand. Bari Weiss stans might wanna skip to the main segment.

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Links:

• The University of Austin (UATX)
• Modularity of Mind (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Pietraszewski, David, and Annie E. Wertz. "Why evolutionary psychology should abandon modularity." Perspectives on Psychological Science (2021).
• Break Music: I Am Blue by peez [soundcloud.com]