What is a psychological adaptation?
A psychological adaptation is a functional component of the nervous system that solves a particular reproductive problem. Information processing is the highly abstract domain upon which psychological adaptations are thought to operate. That is, the reproductive problems solved by the nervous system are thought to be best characterized as information processing problems. Computer algorithms, broadly construed, are usually thought to provide the best model currently available for the information processing abilities of psychological adaptations. This model of animal psychology derives, in part, from the following observations: The information content of a physical system is the number of distinct and detectable states that that system can assume. Thus, a light switch can be either off or on–two distinct states that can be abstractly represented by 0 and 1. Since two is the minimum number of discrete states possible for any system, the minimum unit of information–the bit–represents two
