Indeed evolution is a weak, slow, dumb process, but the key point is that it has operated over a staggering time frame and thus is has in fact created an extraordinary number of design brilliancies, many of which exceed their technological counterparts. Quick examples are low power flight and the human brain. Although it’s important to note that evolution operates using simple repetition of trial and error routines, moving away from failure and not towards success, I’d hardly discard the insights from that process in favor of non-evolutionarily derived activities.

…and the evolution is stupid business in: http://alife.co.uk/essays/evolution_sees/

What Eliezer is saying here is that biological adaptations cannot get fixed in a population by “becoming common knowledge” and being universally adopted, the way innovations in the business and engineering world spread. Even an artificial breeding program has to work within these constraints: there’s a limit to how much reproductive skew you can supply.

Or am I missing something?

Surely longer than that…what am I missing?

They’re certainly righter than the Standard Social Sciences Model they criticize, but swung the pendulum slightly too far in the new direction. Human beings are capable of learning a tremendously wider range of nonancestral tasks than chimpanzees, and precisely due to the combinatorial explosion, this cannot be itself explained by postulating any amount of domain-specific modularity. The brain is modular, and some of these modules are certainly domain-specific, but the key modularity is the orthagonalization of intelligence into architectural components like memory and category formation, not domain-specific procedures. The heart is not a specialized organ for running down prey, it’s a specialized organ for pumping blood.

In a sense, my paper “Levels of Organization in General Intelligence” can be seen as a reply to Tooby and Cosmides on this issue; though not, in retrospect, a complete one.