Innate psychology and open-ended processes: Finding the middle ground

Rolls's mechanistic account of emotion can help to bridge a rift within the field of evolutionary psychology. One side of the rift emphasizes the impo rtance of innate psychological mechanisms that evolved to solve specific pr oblems encountered in the ancestral environment. The other side emphasizes learning, development, and culture as open-ended evolutionary processes in their own right. Rolls shows how these two views can be reconciled, allowin g a productive middle ground to be explored.