Reply to Maloney

Alan Maloney makes a number of serious claims against the argument I presented in my paper, ‘The Baldwin effect: a neglected influence on C. G. Jung's evolutionary thinking’. At the heart of both my paper and Maloney's commentary is the question of what architecture of mind is best suited to underwrite the theory of archetypes. Maloney appears to hold what I will term a deep innatist position, which closely resembles the position taken by the evolutionary psychologists and some Jungian theoreticians, notably Anthony Stevens.

Maloney correctly points out that evolutionary psychology (EP) is an interdisciplinary effort to combine the insights of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and cognitive science. The defining issue on the evolutionary side is the notion that identifiable traits in an organism are the result of natural selection, that they exist as adaptations to environmental imperatives, and that traits survive by enhancing the fitness of the organisms that possess them. On the cognitive science side of the discipline, evolutionary psychology adopts a point of view that began with the British mathematician Alan Turing in the 1930 s (Pfeiffer & Scheier 1999). Turing's analysis of mathematics formed the basis for a computational and modular notion of mind, and was elaborated in the 1960s by the linguist Noam Chomsky (1965) and later by other philosophers and cognitive scientists, notably Jerry Fodor (1983). Chomsky argued that infants inhabit a linguistic world that is ‘impoverished’ in the sense that there is not enough information about the structure of language in the infant's experience to account for the rapid development of a child's ability to accurately use complex grammatical structures. Therefore, Chomsky reasoned, infants must be born with ‘knowledge’ of fundamental grammatical structures or syntax that is subsequently implemented in the infant's language community. Additionally, Chomsky relied on sophisticated linguistic analysis of adult language patte