The evolutionary turn in cultural-historical psychology and theory of cognitive gadgets: analogies or homologies?

The aim of this paper is to examine the new trends in cognitive psychology, which conceptually, semantically, or lexically seem to be similar to Vygotsky's original theoretical framework and its further developments. This paper attempts to determine whether various lines of research addressing to cultural forming or construction of human mind might be seen as analogies, i.e. generally equivalent results of independent theoretical assumptions. To this end, here we focus exclusively on the recently published theory of cognitive gadgets (Cecilia Heyes, 2018). According to Heyes, cognitive gadgets are mental technologies created by a blind-variation-and-selective-retention process of cultural evolution. At the same time, Heyes dramatically reduces a list of cognitive mechanisms, which are programmed in the genes. It is limited to social tolerance, selective attention to social stimulus, enhanced associative learning, and powerful executive functions. In contrast to mainstream evolutionary psychology, Heyes insists that unique human psychological abilities commonly thought to be genetically inherited cognitive instincts, in fact, are cognitive gadgets. From this perspective she analyses imitation, mindreading, and language, just to name a few. The comparison of Heyes's cognitive gadgets theory with recent developments in Russian cultural-historical psychology led us to conclusion that the latter has outrun the former in several significant ideas. First and foremost, the evolutionary turn in cultural-historical psychology put to the forefront the prospective (future-oriented) pressure of evolution instead of retrospective one. This perspective allows to explore the human ability to generate the excessive diversity of cultural preadaptations, which makes a successful response to uncertainty possible.