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1
Heyes, Cecilia. "New thinking: the evolution of human cognition." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1599 (August 5, 2012): 2091–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0111.
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Humans are animals that specialize in thinking and knowing, and our extraordinary cognitive abilities have transformed every aspect of our lives. In contrast to our chimpanzee cousins and Stone Age ancestors, we are complex political, economic, scientific and artistic creatures, living in a vast range of habitats, many of which are our own creation. Research on the evolution of human cognition asks what types of thinking make us such peculiar animals, and how they have been generated by evolutionary processes. New research in this field looks deeper into the evolutionary history of human cognition, and adopts a more multi-disciplinary approach than earlier ‘Evolutionary Psychology’. It is informed by comparisons between humans and a range of primate and non-primate species, and integrates findings from anthropology, archaeology, economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. Using these methods, recent research reveals profound commonalities, as well striking differences, between human and non-human minds, and suggests that the evolution of human cognition has been much more gradual and incremental than previously assumed. It accords crucial roles to cultural evolution, techno-social co-evolution and gene–culture co-evolution. These have produced domain-general developmental processes with extraordinary power—power that makes human cognition, and human lives, unique.
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Barkow, Jerome H. "Précis ofDarwin, sex and status: Biological approaches to mind and culture." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14, no. 2 (June 1991): 295–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00066711.
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AbstractDarwin, Sex and Statusargues that a human sociobiology that mistakes evolutionary theory for theories of psychology and culture is wrong, as are psychologies that could never have evolved or social sciences that posit impossible psychologies. Status develops theories of human self-awareness, cognition, and cultural capacity that are compatible with evolutionary theory. Recurring themes include: the importance of sexual selection in human evolution; our species' preoccupation with self-esteem and relative standing; the individual as an active strategist, regularly revising culturally provided information; and awareness as an impressionmanagement device. Culture is a somewhat structured information pool that itself evolves, often in ways that reduce the genetic fitness of its participants.
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Cross, Ian. "The evolutionary nature of musical meaning." Musicae Scientiae 13, no. 2_suppl (September 2009): 179–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1029864909013002091.
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The paper will draw on ethnomusicological, cognitive and neuroscientific evidence in suggesting that music and language constitute complementary components of the human communicative toolkit. It will start by outlining an operational definition of music as a mode of social interaction in terms of its generic, cross-cultural properties that facilitates comparison with language as a universal human faculty. It will argue that, despite the fact that music appears much more heterogeneous and differentiated in function from culture to culture than does language, music possesses common attributes across cultures: it exploits the human capacity to entrain to external (particularly social) stimuli, and presents a rich set of semantic fields while under-determining meaning. While language is held to possess both combinatoriality and semanticity, music is often claimed to be combinatorial but to lack semanticity. This paper will argue that music has semanticity, but that this semanticity is adapted for a different function from that of language. Music exploits the human capacity for entrainment, increasing the likelihood that participants will experience a sense of ‘shared intentionality’. It presents the characteristics of an ‘honest signal’ while under-specifying goals in ways that permit individuals to interact even while holding to personal interpretations of goals and meanings that may actually be in conflict. Music allows participants to explore the prospective consequences of their actions and attitudes towards others within a temporal framework that promotes the alignment of participants’ sense of goals. As a generic human faculty music thus provides a medium that is adapted to situations of social uncertainty, a medium by means of which a capacity for flexible social interaction can be explored and reinforced. It will be argued that a faculty for music is likely to have been exaptive in the evolution of the human capacity for complex social interaction.
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Jameson, Kimberly. "Culture and Cognition: What is Universal about the Representation of Color Experience?" Journal of Cognition and Culture 5, no. 3-4 (2005): 293–348. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853705774648527.
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AbstractExisting research in color naming and categorization primarily reflects two opposing views: A Cultural Relativist view that posits color perception is greatly shaped by culturally specific language associations and perceptual learning, and a Universalist view that emphasizes panhuman shared color processing as the basis for color naming similarities within and across cultures. Recent empirical evidence finds color processing differs both within and across cultures. This divergent color processing raises new questions about the sources of previously observed cultural coherence and cross-cultural universality. The present article evaluates the relevance of individual variation on the mainstream model of color naming. It also presents an alternate view that specifies how color naming and categorization is shaped by both panhuman cognitive universals and socio-cultural evolutionary processes. This alternative view, expressed, in part, using an Interpoint Distance Model of color categorization, is compatible with new empirical results showing divergent color processing within and across cultures. It suggests that universalities in color naming and categorization may naturally arise across cultures because color language and color categories primarily reflect culturally modal linguistic mappings, and categories are shaped by universal cognitive constructs and culturally salient features of color. Thus, a shared cultural representation of color based on widely shared cognitive dimensions may be the proper foundation for universalities of color naming and categorization. Across cultures this form of representation may result from convergent responses to similar pressures on color lexicon evolution.
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Nichols, Ryan, Henrike Moll, and Jacob L. Mackey. "Rethinking Cultural Evolutionary Psychology." Journal of Cognition and Culture 19, no. 5 (November 8, 2019): 477–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340070.
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AbstractThis essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and autistic in character.
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Copple, Mary M. "Gesture and Speech." Gesture 3, no. 1 (October 16, 2003): 47–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/gest.3.1.04cop.
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The role of gesture in Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of the origin of language is portrayed in its historical context and in view of recent research to allow a balanced appraisal of his contribution to the debate. Written in the mid-1960s, his Gesture and Speech offers a vivid contrast to Chomsky’s contemporary mentalist view of language that espoused Cartesian rationalism with its barriers between man and beast, and between body and mind. On the contrary, Leroi-Gourhan takes an integrated approach to human evolution: gesture (conceived of as ‘material action’) and speech are seen as twin products of an embodied mind that engendered our technical and social achievements. His explanation of the evolutionary association between the hand and the face provides a biological basis for cognitive as well as communicative aspects of gesture, with culture emerging as an extension of our zoological foundation. He asserts that the liberating of the hand from locomotion led to the liberating of the face from prehension, thus creating the duality of instrument and symbol whereby human beings physically and mentally grasp the world in which they live.
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Thompson, Bill, Simon Kirby, and Kenny Smith. "Culture shapes the evolution of cognition." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 16 (April 4, 2016): 4530–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1523631113.
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A central debate in cognitive science concerns the nativist hypothesis, the proposal that universal features of behavior reflect a biologically determined cognitive substrate: For example, linguistic nativism proposes a domain-specific faculty of language that strongly constrains which languages can be learned. An evolutionary stance appears to provide support for linguistic nativism, because coordinated constraints on variation may facilitate communication and therefore be adaptive. However, language, like many other human behaviors, is underpinned by social learning and cultural transmission alongside biological evolution. We set out two models of these interactions, which show how culture can facilitate rapid biological adaptation yet rule out strong nativization. The amplifying effects of culture can allow weak cognitive biases to have significant population-level consequences, radically increasing the evolvability of weak, defeasible inductive biases; however, the emergence of a strong cultural universal does not imply, nor lead to, nor require, strong innate constraints. From this we must conclude, on evolutionary grounds, that the strong nativist hypothesis for language is false. More generally, because such reciprocal interactions between cultural and biological evolution are not limited to language, nativist explanations for many behaviors should be reconsidered: Evolutionary reasoning shows how we can have cognitively driven behavioral universals and yet extreme plasticity at the level of the individual—if, and only if, we account for the human capacity to transmit knowledge culturally. Wherever culture is involved, weak cognitive biases rather than strong innate constraints should be the default assumption.
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Caporael, Linnda R. "The Evolution of Truly Social Cognition: The Core Configurations Model." Personality and Social Psychology Review 1, no. 4 (November 1997): 276–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0104_1.
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This article introduces a vocabulary suitable for evolutionary analyses in the human cognitive, social, and behavioral sciences. The vocabulary carves a middle way between advocates and critics of evolutionary perspectives by substituting the concept of repeated assembly for nature-nurture dualism. A model of core configurations-based on human morphology and ecology in human evolutionary history-is presented, and I argue that these configurations offace-to-face groups are the selective context for uniquely human mental systems. Hence, human cognition is “truly social,” specialized for group living. The relevance of the core configuration model is illustrated with respect to two areas of interest to social psychologists: the self and social identity, and distributed cognition and shared reality. A final section illustrates the integrative power of the core configuration model with a brief comparison of the social and cognitive tasks faced by scientists and foragers.
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Wilke, Andreas, and Peter M. Todd. "Studying the evolution of cognition: Toward more methodological diversity in evolutionary psychology." Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences 12, no. 3 (July 2018): 133–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000147.
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Phillips, Claude S. "Culture, Social Minds, and Governance in Evolution." Politics and the Life Sciences 20, no. 2 (September 2001): 189–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0730938400005475.
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In the past quarter century, the concept of culture has undergone change as evolutionary scientists have come to include social behavior in their purview. Evolutionary psychology is the newest field to concern itself with culture by claiming that mostspecifichuman behaviors are generated by minds specifically designed for these behaviors—and not from a general-purpose mind—as a result of adaptations made during the Pleistocene. Thus, mental behaviors are explained as having formed independently of cultural learning. In defending the concept, however, the leading proponents practically slough off culture as significant in human affairs. I argue that they have neglected the powerful explanatory statement of Darwin regarding at least one general-purpose adaptation of social animals, namely, the instinct for sociability, a position supported by recent neurological studies. Expanding the Darwinian concept, modern research shows that (1) the human brain was selected for sociability, which explains the origin and strength of culture, as well as its variability; (2) the development of complex culture in a pre-human primate initiated the two-and-one-half million-year evolution to modern humans; and (3) there are political contributions to cultural evolution that rest on the nature of groups (competitive and cooperative).
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Burns, Jonathan Kenneth. "An evolutionary theory of schizophrenia: Cortical connectivity, metarepresentation, and the social brain." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27, no. 6 (December 2004): 831–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x04000196.
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Schizophrenia is a worldwide, prevalent disorder with a multifactorial but highly genetic aetiology. A constant prevalence rate in the face of reduced fecundity has caused some to argue that an evolutionary advantage exists in unaffected relatives. Here, I critique this adaptationist approach, and review – and find wanting – Crow's “speciation” hypothesis. In keeping with available biological and psychological evidence, I propose an alternative theory of the origins of this disorder. Schizophrenia is a disorder of the social brain, and it exists as a costly trade-off in the evolution of complex social cognition. Paleoanthropological and comparative primate research suggests that hominids evolved complex cortical interconnectivity (in particular, frontotemporal and frontoparietal circuits) to regulate social cognition and the intellectual demands of group living. I suggest that the ontogenetic mechanism underlying this cerebral adaptation was sequential hypermorphosis and that it rendered the hominid brain vulnerable to genetic and environmental insults. I argue that changes in genes regulating the timing of neurodevelopment occurred prior to the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa 100,000–150,000 years ago, giving rise to the schizotypal spectrum. While some individuals within this spectrum may have exhibited unusual creativity and iconoclasm, this phenotype was not necessarily adaptive in reproductive terms. However, because the disorder shared a common genetic basis with the evolving circuitry of the social brain, it persisted. Thus schizophrenia emerged as a costly trade-off in the evolution of complex social cognition.
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Uomini, Natalie, Joanna Fairlie, Russell D. Gray, and Michael Griesser. "Extended parenting and the evolution of cognition." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375, no. 1803 (June 2020): 20190495. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0495.
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Traditional attempts to understand the evolution of human cognition compare humans with other primates. This research showed that relative brain size covaries with cognitive skills, while adaptations that buffer the developmental and energetic costs of large brains (e.g. allomaternal care), and ecological or social benefits of cognitive abilities, are critical for their evolution. To understand the drivers of cognitive adaptations, it is profitable to consider distant lineages with convergently evolved cognitions. Here, we examine the facilitators of cognitive evolution in corvid birds, where some species display cultural learning, with an emphasis on family life. We propose that extended parenting (protracted parent–offspring association) is pivotal in the evolution of cognition: it combines critical life-history, social and ecological conditions allowing for the development and maintenance of cognitive skillsets that confer fitness benefits to individuals. This novel hypothesis complements the extended childhood idea by considering the parents' role in juvenile development. Using phylogenetic comparative analyses, we show that corvids have larger body sizes, longer development times, extended parenting and larger relative brain sizes than other passerines. Case studies from two corvid species with different ecologies and social systems highlight the critical role of life-history features on juveniles’ cognitive development: extended parenting provides a safe haven, access to tolerant role models, reliable learning opportunities and food, resulting in higher survival. The benefits of extended juvenile learning periods, over evolutionary time, lead to selection for expanded cognitive skillsets. Similarly, in our ancestors, cooperative breeding and increased group sizes facilitated learning and teaching. Our analyses highlight the critical role of life-history, ecological and social factors that underlie both extended parenting and expanded cognitive skillsets. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.
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Arbilly, Michal, and Kevin N. Laland. "The magnitude of innovation and its evolution in social animals." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 284, no. 1848 (February 8, 2017): 20162385. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2016.2385.
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Innovative behaviour in animals, ranging from invertebrates to humans, is increasingly recognized as an important topic for investigation by behavioural researchers. However, what constitutes an innovation remains controversial, and difficult to quantify. Drawing on a broad definition whereby any behaviour with a new component to it is an innovation, we propose a quantitative measure, which we call the magnitude of innovation , to describe the extent to which an innovative behaviour is novel. This allows us to distinguish between innovations that are a slight change to existing behaviours (low magnitude), and innovations that are substantially different (high magnitude). Using mathematical modelling and evolutionary computer simulations, we explored how aspects of social interaction, cognition and natural selection affect the frequency and magnitude of innovation. We show that high-magnitude innovations are likely to arise regularly even if the frequency of innovation is low, as long as this frequency is relatively constant, and that the selectivity of social learning and the existence of social rewards, such as prestige and royalties, are crucial for innovative behaviour to evolve. We suggest that consideration of the magnitude of innovation may prove a useful tool in the study of the evolution of cognition and of culture.
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Reader, Simon M., Yfke Hager, and Kevin N. Laland. "The evolution of primate general and cultural intelligence." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1567 (April 12, 2011): 1017–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0342.
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There are consistent individual differences in human intelligence, attributable to a single ‘general intelligence’ factor, g . The evolutionary basis of g and its links to social learning and culture remain controversial. Conflicting hypotheses regard primate cognition as divided into specialized, independently evolving modules versus a single general process. To assess how processes underlying culture relate to one another and other cognitive capacities, we compiled ecologically relevant cognitive measures from multiple domains, namely reported incidences of behavioural innovation, social learning, tool use, extractive foraging and tactical deception, in 62 primate species. All exhibited strong positive associations in principal component and factor analyses, after statistically controlling for multiple potential confounds. This highly correlated composite of cognitive traits suggests social, technical and ecological abilities have coevolved in primates, indicative of an across-species general intelligence that includes elements of cultural intelligence. Our composite species-level measure of general intelligence, ‘primate g S ’, covaried with both brain volume and captive learning performance measures. Our findings question the independence of cognitive traits and do not support ‘massive modularity’ in primate cognition, nor an exclusively social model of primate intelligence. High general intelligence has independently evolved at least four times, with convergent evolution in capuchins, baboons, macaques and great apes.
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Whiten, Andrew. "Social, Machiavellian and cultural cognition: A golden age of discovery in comparative and evolutionary psychology." Journal of Comparative Psychology 132, no. 4 (November 2018): 437–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/com0000135.
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Uller, Claudia. "Developmental and evolutionary considerations on numerical cognition: A review." Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 6, no. 4 (December 2008): 237–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/jep.6.2008.4.7.
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Fabrega, Jr., Horacio. "Biological evolution of cognition and culture: Off Arbib's mirror-neuron system stage?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, no. 2 (April 2005): 131–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x05280032.
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Arbib offers a comprehensive, elegant formulation of brain/language evolution; with significant implications for social as well as biological sciences. Important psychological antecedents and later correlates are presupposed; their conceptual enrichment through protosign and protospeech is abbreviated in favor of practical communication. What culture “is” and whether protosign and protospeech involve a protoculture are not considered. Arbib also avoids dealing with the question of evolution of mind, consciousness, and self.
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Yi, Chenhe, and Shan Li. "A Study on the Formation and Evolution Model of Social Psychology in Major Public Health Emergencies." E3S Web of Conferences 290 (2021): 02027. http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202129002027.
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The occurrence of local or regional major public health emergencies has seriously damaged human health and life safety, and has an impact on the psychological state of the public. The study introduces “social amplification of risk” effect and the mechanism of emotional infection, and constructs a process model of psychological prediction, psychological cognition and psychological behavior in the generation of social psychology of major public health emergencies, and from the level of individual emotions, group emotions and social emotions analyze the evolutionary model of social psychology; Research has found that information disclosure, government trust and social confidence are the main factors influencing the formation of social psychology of major public health emergencies.
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Wheeler, Michael, and Andy Clark. "Culture, embodiment and genes: unravelling the triple helix." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1509 (September 19, 2008): 3563–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0135.
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Much recent work stresses the role of embodiment and action in thought and reason, and celebrates the power of transmitted cultural and environmental structures to transform the problem-solving activity required of individual brains. By apparent contrast, much work in evolutionary psychology has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to an ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness, with an attendant stress upon the limitations and cognitive biases that result. On the face of it, this suggests either a tension or, at least, a mismatch, with the symbiotic dyad of cultural evolution and embodied cognition. In what follows, we explore this mismatch by focusing on three key ideas: cognitive niche construction; cognitive modularity; and the existence (or otherwise) of an evolved universal human nature. An appreciation of the power and scope of the first, combined with consequently more nuanced visions of the latter two, allow us to begin to glimpse a much richer vision of the combined interactive potency of biological and cultural evolution for active, embodied agents.
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Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. "Culture and the evolution of human cooperation." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1533 (November 12, 2009): 3281–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0134.
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The scale of human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. All of the available evidence suggests that the societies of our Pliocene ancestors were like those of other social primates, and this means that human psychology has changed in ways that support larger, more cooperative societies that characterize modern humans. In this paper, we argue that cultural adaptation is a key factor in these changes. Over the last million years or so, people evolved the ability to learn from each other, creating the possibility of cumulative, cultural evolution. Rapid cultural adaptation also leads to persistent differences between local social groups, and then competition between groups leads to the spread of behaviours that enhance their competitive ability. Then, in such culturally evolved cooperative social environments, natural selection within groups favoured genes that gave rise to new, more pro-social motives. Moral systems enforced by systems of sanctions and rewards increased the reproductive success of individuals who functioned well in such environments, and this in turn led to the evolution of other regarding motives like empathy and social emotions like shame.
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Tehrani, Jamshid Johari. "The past and future of the evolutionary taxonomy of cultures." Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 8, no. 2 (June 2010): 169–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/jep.8.2010.2.6.
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Asma, Stephen, and Rami Gabriel. "Précis: The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition." Winter 2020 2, no. 2 (January 31, 2021): 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.33497/2020.winter.2.
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An affective approach to culture and cognition may hold the key to uniting findings across experimental psychology and, eventually, the human sciences. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power, yet for nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason the emotional centers of the brain were running the show. To attain a clearer picture of the evolution of mind, we challenge the cognitivist and behaviorist paradigms in psychology by exploring how the emotional capacities that we share with other animals saturate every thought and perception. Many of the distinctive social and cultural behaviors of our species, including, bonding, social learning, hierarchy, decision-making, self-identity, can be integrated if we use an affective approach.
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Overmann, Karenleigh A., and Thomas Wynn. "On Tools Making Minds: an Archaeological Perspective on Human Cognitive Evolution." Journal of Cognition and Culture 19, no. 1-2 (May 2, 2019): 39–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340047.
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AbstractUsing a model of cognition as extended and enactive, we examine the role of materiality in making minds as exemplified by lithics and writing, forms associated with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains. We address ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause such change, and the spans of time required for neurofunctional reorganization. We also offer three hypotheses for investigating co-influence and change in cognition and material culture.
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Jablonka, Eva, Simona Ginsburg, and Daniel Dor. "The co-evolution of language and emotions." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1599 (August 5, 2012): 2152–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0117.
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We argue that language evolution started like the evolution of reading and writing, through cultural evolutionary processes. Genuinely new behavioural patterns emerged from collective exploratory processes that individuals could learn because of their brain plasticity. Those cultural–linguistic innovative practices that were consistently socially and culturally selected drove a process of genetic accommodation of both general and language-specific aspects of cognition. We focus on the affective facet of this culture-driven cognitive evolution, and argue that the evolution of human emotions co-evolved with that of language. We suggest that complex tool manufacture and alloparenting played an important role in the evolution of emotions, by leading to increased executive control and inter-subjective sensitivity. This process, which can be interpreted as a special case of self-domestication, culminated in the construction of human-specific social emotions, which facilitated information-sharing. Once in place, language enhanced the inhibitory control of emotions, enabled the development of novel emotions and emotional capacities, and led to a human mentality that departs in fundamental ways from that of other apes. We end by suggesting experimental approaches that can help in evaluating some of these proposals and hence lead to better understanding of the evolutionary biology of language and emotions.
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Donald, Merlin. "Précis ofOrigins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no. 4 (December 1993): 737–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00032647.
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AbstractThis book proposes a theory of human cognitive evolution, drawing from paleontology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and especially neuropsychology. The properties of humankind's brain, culture, and cognition have coevolved in a tight iterative loop; the main event in human evolution has occurred at the cognitive level, however, mediating change at the anatomical and cultural levels. During the past two million years humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, each of which has left the human mind with a new way of representing reality and a new form of culture. Modern humans consequently have three systems of memory representation that were not available to our closest primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These three systems are supported by new types of “hard” storage devices, two of which (mimetic and linguistic) are biological, one technological. Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with the external memory system. The independence of these three uniquely human ways of representing knowledge is suggested in the way the mind breaks down after brain injury and confirmed by various other lines of evidence. Each of the three systems is based on aninventivecapacity, and the products of those capacities – such as languages, symbols, gestures, social rituals, and images – continue to be invented and vetted in the social arena. Cognitive evolution is not yet complete: the externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think. This is changing the role of biological memory and the way in which the human brain deploys its resources; it is also changing the form of modern culture.
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Tesser, Abraham, and Jinn Jopp Bau. "Social Psychology: Who We Are and What We Do." Personality and Social Psychology Review 6, no. 1 (February 2002): 72–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0601_4.
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The author index of the Handbook of Social Psychology (Gilbert, Fiske & Lindzey, 1998) and of Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Processes (Higgins & Kruglanski, 1996) served as the basis for identifying and describing some of the people constructing social psychology in the 1990s. Over 10,000 names are mentioned, but relatively few are mentioned several times. The 106 contributors who were mentioned mostfrequently are identified and described. They are mostly men about 20 years beyond the PhD. The select set of institutions at which they work and from which they obtained their degrees are also identified. Similarities among contributors were calculated on the basis of the proximity of their mentions in the handbooks. An analysis of those similarities yielded eight “contributor factors”: social cognition, attitudes, motivated attribution, self, interpersonal influence, intergroup relations and stereo-types, culture and evolution, and interpersonal relationships.
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Bridgeman, Bruce. "It is not evolutionary models, but models in general that social science needs." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29, no. 4 (August 2006): 351–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x06279081.
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Mathematical models are potentially as useful for culture as for evolution, but cultural models must have different designs from genetic models. Social sciences must borrow from biology the idea of modeling, rather than the structure of models, because copying the product is fundamentally different from copying the design. Transfer of most cultural information from brains to artificial media increases the differences between cultural and biological information.
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Landau, Mark J., Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski, and Jeff Greenberg. "On the Compatibility of Terror Management Theory and Perspectives on Human Evolution." Evolutionary Psychology 5, no. 3 (July 1, 2007): 147470490700500. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/147470490700500303.
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Terror management theory (TMT) posits that the uniquely human awareness of death gives rise to a potential for debilitating terror, which is averted by the construction and maintenance of cultural worldviews. Over 300 studies have supported hypotheses derived from TMT. In a recent critique of TMT, Navarrete and Fessler (2005) argued that TMT is inconsistent with contemporary evolutionary biology and that the evidence supporting TMT can be better accounted for by an alternative “coalitional psychology” (CP), which posits a domain general mechanism whereby a wide range of adaptive threats activate an even wider range of judgments and behaviors all directed toward sustaining unspecified coalitions. In this paper, we argue that: a) Navarrete and Fessler do not adequately present either TMT or the empirical evidence in support of it; b) TMT is in no way inconsistent with modern evolutionary biology; and c) CP is not theoretically plausible and cannot provide a convincing empirical account of evidence supporting TMT. The broader goal of this paper is to encourage evolutionary theorists to move beyond overly simplistic alternatives that target superficial portrayals of TMT and the evidence supporting it, and contribute to a more useful integration of TMT and its findings with evolutionary thinking about culture and human social behavior.
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Pléh, Csaba. "Beérkezett könyvek." Magyar Pszichológiai Szemle 60, no. 3 (October 1, 2005): 425–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/mpszle.60.2005.3.10.
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Ádám György: A rejtozködo elme. Egy fiziológus széljegyzetei Carpendale, J. I. M. és Müller, U. (eds): Social interaction and the development of knowledge Cloninger, R. C.: Feeling good. The science of well being Dunbar, Robin, Barrett, Louise, Lycett, John: Evolutionary psychology Dunbar, Robin: The human story. A new history of makind's evolution Geary, D. C.: The origin of mind. Evolution of brain, cognition and general intelligence Gedeon Péter, Pál Eszter, Sárkány Mihály, Somlai Péter: Az evolúció elméletei és metaforái a társadalomtudományokban Harré, Rom: Cognitive science: A philosophical introduction Horváth György: Pedagógiai pszichológia Marcus, G.: The birth of the mind. How a tiny number of genes creates the complexities of human thought Solso, R. D.: The psychology of art and the evolution of the conscious brain Wray, A. (ed.): The transition to language
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Sheskin, Mark, Coralie Chevallier, Kuniko Adachi, Renatas Berniūnas, Thomas Castelain, Martin Hulín, Hillary Lenfesty, Denis Regnier, Anikó Sebestény, and Nicolas Baumard. "The Needs of the Many Do Not Outweigh the Needs of the Few: The Limits of Individual Sacrifice across Diverse Cultures." Journal of Cognition and Culture 18, no. 1-2 (March 28, 2018): 205–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340026.
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Abstract A long tradition of research in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries has investigated how people weigh individual welfare versus group welfare in their moral judgments. Relatively less research has investigated the generalizability of results across non-WEIRD populations. In the current study, we ask participants across nine diverse cultures (Bali, Costa Rica, France, Guatemala, Japan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Serbia, and the USA) to make a series of moral judgments regarding both third-party sacrifice for group welfare and first-person sacrifice for group welfare. In addition to finding some amount of cross-cultural variation on most of our questions, we also find two cross-culturally consistent judgments: (1) when individuals are in equivalent situations, overall welfare should be maximized, and (2) harm to individuals should be taken into account, and some types of individual harm can trump overall group welfare. We end by discussing the specific pattern of variable and consistent features in the context of evolutionary theories of the evolution of morality.
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Brooks, Robert. "“Asia's Missing Women” as a Problem in Applied Evolutionary Psychology?" Evolutionary Psychology 10, no. 5 (December 1, 2012): 147470491201000. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/147470491201000512.
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In many parts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, women and children are so undervalued, neglected, abused, and so often killed, that sex ratios are now strongly male biased. In recent decades, sex-biased abortion has exacerbated the problem. In this article I highlight several important insights from evolutionary biology into both the origin and the severe societal consequences of “Asia's missing women”, paying particular attention to interactions between evolution, economics and culture. Son preferences and associated cultural practices like patrilineal inheritance, patrilocality and the Indian Hindu dowry system arise among the wealthy and powerful elites for reasons consistent with models of sex-biased parental investment. Those practices then spread via imitation as technology gets cheaper and economic development allows the middle class to grow rapidly. I will consider evidence from India, China and elsewhere that grossly male-biased sex ratios lead to increased crime, violence, local warfare, political instability, drug abuse, prostitution and trafficking of women. The problem of Asia's missing women presents a challenge for applied evolutionary psychology to help us understand and ameliorate sex ratio biases and their most severe consequences.
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Chen, Xi, Shen Zhao, and Wei Li. "Opinion Dynamics Model Based on Cognitive Styles: Field-Dependence and Field-Independence." Complexity 2019 (February 11, 2019): 1–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2019/2864124.
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Two distinct cognitive styles exist from the perspective of cognition: field-dependence and field-independence. In most public opinion dynamics models, people only consider that individuals update their opinions through interactions with other individuals. This represents the field-dependent cognitive style of the individual. The field-independent cognitive style is ignored in such cases. We consider both cognitive styles in public opinion dynamics and propose a public opinion evolution model based on cognitive styles (CS model). The opinions of neighbors and experiences of the individual represent field-dependent cognition and field-independent cognition, respectively, and the individual combines both cognitive styles to update his/her own opinion. In the proposed model, the experience parameter is designed to represent the weight of the current opinion in terms of the individual’s experiences and the cognitive parameter is proposed to represent the tendencies of his/her cognitive styles. We experimentally verify that the CS and Hegselmann–Krause (HK) models are similar in terms of public opinion evolution trends; with an increase in radius of confidence, the steady state of a social system shifts from divergence to polarization and eventually reaches consensus. Considering that individuals from different cultures have different degrees of inclination for the two styles, we present experiments focusing on cognitive parameter and experience parameter and analyze the evolutionary trends of opinion dynamics in different styles. We find that when an individual has a greater tendency toward the field-independent cognitive style under the influence of culture, the time required for a social system to reach a steady state will increase; the system will have greater difficultly in reaching consensus, mirroring the evolutionary trends in public opinion in the context of eastern and western cultures. The CS model constitutes an opinion dynamics model that is more consistent with the real world and may also serve as a basis for future cross-cultural research.
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Henrich, Joseph, and Michael Muthukrishna. "The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation." Annual Review of Psychology 72, no. 1 (January 4, 2021): 207–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-081920-042106.
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Humans are an ultrasocial species. This sociality, however, cannot be fully explained by the canonical approaches found in evolutionary biology, psychology, or economics. Understanding our unique social psychology requires accounting not only for the breadth and intensity of human cooperation but also for the variation found across societies, over history, and among behavioral domains. Here, we introduce an expanded evolutionary approach that considers how genetic and cultural evolution, and their interaction, may have shaped both the reliably developing features of our minds and the well-documented differences in cultural psychologies around the globe. We review the major evolutionary mechanisms that have been proposed to explain human cooperation, including kinship, reciprocity, reputation, signaling, and punishment; we discuss key culture–gene coevolutionary hypotheses, such as those surrounding self-domestication and norm psychology; and we consider the role of religions and marriage systems. Empirically, we synthesize experimental and observational evidence from studies of children and adults from diverse societies with research among nonhuman primates.
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Dissanayake, Ellen. "If music is the food of love, what about survival and reproductive success?" Musicae Scientiae 12, no. 1_suppl (March 2008): 169–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1029864908012001081.
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This article departs from many discussions of the origin, evolution, and adaptive function(s) of music by treating music not as perceptual qualities (pitch, timbre, meter), formal elements (prosody, melody, harmony, rhythm), performed activity (singing, drumming), or genre (lullaby, song, dance). Rather, music is conceptualized as a behavioral and motivational capacity: what is done to sounds and pulses when they are “musified” — made into music — and why. For this new view, I employ the ethological notion of ritualization, wherein ordinary communicative behaviors (e.g., sounds, movements) are altered through formalization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration, thereby attracting attention and arousing and shaping emotion. The universal sensitivity of infants as young as 8 weeks to such alterations of (or operations on) voice, facial expression, and body movements, when these are presented to them by adults in intimate dyadic interactions within a shared temporal framework, suggests an evolved, adaptive capacity that enabled and reinforced emotional bonding. Such proto-aesthetic (proto-musical) operations existed as a reservoir from which individual cultures could draw when inventing art-saturated ritual ceremonies that united groups temporally and emotionally as they did mother-infant pairs. Music in its origins and evolution is assumed to be multimodal (visual and kinesic, as well as aural) and a social — not solitary — activity. An appendix describes important structural and functional resemblances between music, mother-infant interaction, ceremonial ritual, and adult courtship and lovemaking (as differentiated from copulation). These resemblances suggest not only an evolutionary relationship among these behaviors but argue for the existence of an evolved amodal neural propensity in the human species to respond — cognitively and emotionally — to dynamic temporal patterns produced by other humans in contexts of affiliation.
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Olson, David R., and Janet Wilde Astington. "Cultural learning and educational process." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, no. 3 (September 1993): 531–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00031460.
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Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner relate the evolution of social cognition – the understanding of others' minds – to the evolution of culture. Tomasello et al. conceive of the accumulation of culture as the product of cultural learning, a kind of learning dependent upon recognizing others' intentionality. They distinguish three levels of this recognition: of intention (what is x trying to do), of beliefs (what does x think about p), and of beliefs about beliefs (what does x think y thinks about p). They then tie these levels to three discrete forms of cultural learning – imitative, instructed, and collaborative – which children become capable of when they are 9 months, 4 years, and 6 years old respectively, at least in Western culture where relevant data are available.
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Turner, Jonathan H. "The Sociology of Emotions: Basic Theoretical Arguments." Emotion Review 1, no. 4 (September 16, 2009): 340–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1754073909338305.
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In this article, the basic sociological approaches to theorizing human emotions are reviewed. In broad strokes, theorizing can be grouped into several schools of thought: evolutionary, symbolic interactionist, symbolic interactionist with psychoanalytic elements, interaction ritual, power and status, stratification, and exchange. All of these approaches to theorizing emotions have generated useful insights into the dynamics of emotions. There remain, however, unresolved issues in sociological approaches to emotions, including: the nature of emotions, the degree to which emotions are hard-wired neurological or socially constructed, the relevance of analyzing the biology and evolution of emotions, the relationship between cognition and emotions, the number of distinctive emotional states produced by humans, and the relationship between emotions and rationality.
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Nettle, Daniel, and Willem E. Frankenhuis. "Life-history theory in psychology and evolutionary biology: one research programme or two?" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375, no. 1803 (June 2020): 20190490. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0490.
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The term ‘life-history theory’ (LHT) is increasingly often invoked in psychology, as a framework for integrating understanding of psychological traits into a broader evolutionary context. Although LHT as presented in psychology papers (LHT-P) is typically described as a straightforward extension of the theoretical principles from evolutionary biology that bear the same name (LHT-E), the two bodies of work are not well integrated. Here, through a close reading of recent papers, we argue that LHT-E and LHT-P are different research programmes in the Lakatosian sense. The core of LHT-E is built around ultimate evolutionary explanation, via explicit mathematical modelling, of how selection can drive divergent evolution of populations or species living under different demographies or ecologies. The core of LHT-P concerns measurement of covariation, across individuals, of multiple psychological traits; the proximate goals these serve; and their relation to childhood experience. Some of the links between LHT-E and LHT-P are false friends. For example, elements that are marginal in LHT-E are core commitments of LHT-P, and where explanatory principles are transferred from one to the other, nuance can be lost in transmission. The methodological rules for what grounds a prediction in theory are different in the two cases. Though there are major differences between LHT-E and LHT-P at present, there is much potential for greater integration in the future, through both theoretical modelling and further empirical research. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.
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Varnum, Michael E. W., and Igor Grossmann. "Cultural Change: The How and the Why." Perspectives on Psychological Science 12, no. 6 (September 15, 2017): 956–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691617699971.
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More than half a century of cross-cultural research has demonstrated group-level differences in psychological and behavioral phenomena, from values to attention to neural responses. However, cultures are not static, with several specific changes documented for cultural products, practices, and values. How and why do societies change? Here we juxtapose theory and insights from cultural evolution and social ecology. Evolutionary approaches enable an understanding of the how of cultural change, suggesting transmission mechanisms by which the contents of culture may change. Ecological approaches provide insights into the why of cultural change: They identify specific environmental pressures, which evoke shifts in psychology and thereby enable greater precision in predictions of specific cultural changes based on changes in ecological conditions. Complementary insights from the ecological and cultural evolutionary approaches can jointly clarify the process by which cultures change. We end by discussing the relevance of cultural change research for the contemporary societal shifts and by highlighting several critical challenges and future directions for the emerging field of cross-temporal research on culture and psychology.
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Buchanan, Allen, and Russell Powell. "Précis of The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory." Analyse & Kritik 41, no. 2 (November 1, 2019): 183–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/auk-2019-0011.
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Abstract The idea of moral progress played a central role in liberal political thought from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century but is rarely encountered in moral and political philosophical discourse today. One reason for this is that traditional liberal theorists of moral progress, like their conservative detractors, tended to rely on under-evidenced assumptions about human psychology and society. For the first time, we are developing robust scientific knowledge about human nature, especially through empirical psychological theories of morality and culture that are informed by evolutionary theory. On the surface, evolutionary accounts of morality paint a rather pessimistic picture of human moral nature, suggesting that certain types of moral progress are unrealistic or inappropriate for beings like us. Humans are said to be ‘hard-wired’ for tribalism. However, such a view overlooks the great plasticity of human morality as evidenced by our history of social and political moral achievements. To account for these changes while giving evolved moral psychology its due, we develop a dynamic, biocultural theory of moral progress that highlights the interaction between adaptive components of moral psychology and the cultural construction of moral norms and beliefs, and we explore how this interaction can advance, impede, and reverse moral progress.
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Eriksson, Kimmo, and Julie C. Coultas. "Corpses, Maggots, Poodles and Rats: Emotional Selection Operating in Three Phases of Cultural Transmission of Urban Legends." Journal of Cognition and Culture 14, no. 1-2 (January 30, 2014): 1–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342107.
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Abstract In one conception of cultural evolution, the evolutionary success of cultural units that are transmitted from individual to individual is determined by forces of cultural selection. Here we argue that it is helpful to distinguish between several distinct phases of the transmission process in which cultural selection can operate, such as a choose-to-receive phase, an encode-and-retrieve phase, and a choose-to-transmit phase. Here we focus on emotional selection in cultural transmission of urban legends, which has previously been shown to operate in the choose-to-transmit phase. In a series of experiments we studied serial transmission of stories based on urban legends manipulated to be either high or low on disgusting content. Results supported emotional selection operating in all three phases of cultural transmission. Thus, the prevalence of disgusting urban legends in North America may be explained by emotional selection through a multitude of pathways.
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Kitcher, Philip. "Précis ofVaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10, no. 1 (March 1987): 61–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x00056284.
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AbstractThe debate about the credentials of sociobiology has persisted because scholars have failed to distinguish the varieties of sociobiology and because too little attention has been paid to the details of the arguments that are supposed to support the provocative claims about human social behavior. I seek to remedy both deficiencies. After analysis of the relationships among different kinds of sociobiology and contemporary evolutionary theory, I attempt to show how some of the studies of the behavior of nonhuman animals meet the methodological standards appropriate to evolutionary research. I contend that the efforts of E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Charles Lumsden, and others to generate conclusions about human nature are flawed, both because they apply evolutionary ideas in an unrigorous fashion and because they use dubious assumptions to connect their evolutionary analyses with their conclusions. This contention rests on analyses of many of the major sociobiological proposals about human social behavior, including: differences in sex roles, racial hostility, homosexuality, conflict between parents and adolescent offspring, incest avoidance, the avunculate, alliances in combat, female infanticide, and gene–culture coevolution.Vaulting Ambitionthus seeks to identify what is good in sociobiology, to expose the errors of premature speculations about human nature, and to prepare the way for serious study of the evolution of human social behavior.
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Evans, E. Margaret, and Devereaux Poling. "Religious Belief, Scientific Expertise, and Folk Ecology." Journal of Cognition and Culture 4, no. 3-4 (2004): 485–524. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1568537042484931.
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AbstractIn the United States, lay-adults with a range of educational backgrounds often conceptualize species change within a non-Darwinian adaptationist framework, or reject such ideas altogether, opting instead for creationist accounts in which species are viewed as immutable. In this study, such findings were investigated further by examining the relationship between religious belief, scientific expertise, and ecological reasoning in 132 college-educated adults from 6 religious backgrounds in a Midwestern city. Fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist religious beliefs were differentially related to concepts of evolution, adaptation, and extinction. Biological expertise (r = .28) and creationism (r = –.46) were significantly and differentially related to the endorsement of the Darwinian concept of common descent. Yet, creationists were more likely to reject macroevolutionary than microevolutionary concepts. Overall, the greater the taxonomic distance between species, the less likely were participants to agree that species-pairs had common ancestors. It is argued that lay adults from contemporary industrialized societies adopt a view of evolution in which species adapt to novel environments, but remain the same "kind" despite changes. Therefore, extinction is considered unlikely and the relations between micro- and macroevolution misconstrued. Lay-adults' species concepts appear to be an amalgam of a common-sense understanding of species and of evolutionary ideas, modified but not transformed by religious and scientific beliefs. Finally, it is argued that the development of scientific expertise does not involve the radical transformation of ingrained worldviews. Rather, scientists select specializations that are compatible with their existing philosophies, then consciously apply the constructs of their disciplines in order to transcend their common-sense folk beliefs.
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Duening, Thomas, Nigel Nicholson, and Jill Bradley-Geist. "Evolutionary awareness: Darwin among the organizational sciences." International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior 22, no. 4 (November 11, 2019): 297–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijotb-12-2018-0127.
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Purpose Recent criticisms of organizational science theory have lamented a lack of depth and a growing “maturity” that is impeding empirical advances. The purpose of this paper is to propose that organizational scientists can address this problem by embracing “evolutionary awareness” (EA). EA builds on theories and constructs developed in the evolutionary sciences that serve to add depth to theory building. Design/methodology/approach The design of the paper is first to introduce the concept of EA and identify its four key constructs. Next, the authors apply EA to three areas of research within organizational science: human motivation, interpersonal communication and leadership. The authors’ intent is to show that EA constructs extend and deepen traditional organizational science theorizing. Thereby, the authors show that the problems noted above, i.e., lack of depth and maturing theories, can be addressed by embracing EA. Findings The findings are that EA substantially enhances and freshens theorizing in the organizational sciences in the areas of human motivation, communication and leadership. By extension, other areas of interest will also benefit by embracing the EA perspective. Research limitations/implications The implications of the research are many. Organizational scientists can advance theory building, research and practical prescriptions by embracing EA. They can also engage in interdisciplinary research programs with scholars in the evolutionary sciences eager to see their work having practical implications. The limitation of this work is that the authors were only able to show a limited application of EA to three areas of interest to organizational science scholars. Practical implications The practical implications of this research are potentially far reaching. At this very moment, scholars in a wide array of disciplines are re-casting their views of humanity, cognition, values and other constructs based on the acceptance of evolution and its primary mechanism, variation and selection based on consequences. These changes will usher in new ideas about leadership, work-life balance, organizational purpose and many others. Social implications A much-needed “consilience” across the human sciences through embracement of the EA perspective may provide insights that will advance human flourishing in organizations and beyond. The authors believe that an increasingly veridical understanding of humanity will produce substantial social impact. Originality/value This work will provide an encompassing perspective that will assist organizational scholars in advancing their theory building and research questions. A much-needed “consilience” across the human sciences may provide insights that will advance human flourishing in organizations and beyond.
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Chien, Jui-Pi. "Between emotion, imagination and cognition: Play as a hybrid neuro-evolutionary concept in bridging Saussure, Hegel and Alexander von Humboldt." Sign Systems Studies 43, no. 2/3 (November 30, 2015): 249–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/sss.2015.43.2-3.07.
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This study seeks to discover hidden links between Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics, Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics / Philosophy of Mind and Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos. To begin with, the notion of play is employed to examine the interplay between our emotion, imagination and cognition, and to examine how such a composite of faculties serves to unify conceptualizations of communication-modelling systems, philosophical hermeneutics and moral psychology in our times. At discovering a certain future-oriented and symbiotic scheme of time implied in these theories, the inquiry moves on to engage with certain perspectives on the evolution of our verbal and nonverbal capacities. Further, observations concerning the actual functioning of mirror neurons in humans are introduced to revise our understanding of the enactive power of nonverbal capacities such as feeling and imagining. The hypothesis made by neuropsychologists concerning the correlation between the mirror and sign systems reveals signifi cant connections between Saussure, Hegel and Humboldt: our emotions and imagination are as schematic and extensive as our speech acts in teaming up with diverse beings and pushing for new solutions and deeper understandings. Finally, this study draws on implications of the empowered sign-cum-mirror system for revisiting certain controversial issues such as the emergence of language-ready brain and the urgency of overcoming eeriness in our linguistic and artistic world-making. It is suggested that we employ our capacities as a somatosensory system so as to on the one hand observe the changing coordination between our body and mind, and on the other, generate rewarding strategies for a greater success at dealing with intriguing patterns found in art, nature and culture.
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Snell-Rood, Emilie, and Claire Snell-Rood. "The developmental support hypothesis: adaptive plasticity in neural development in response to cues of social support." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375, no. 1803 (June 2020): 20190491. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0491.
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Across mammals, cues of developmental support, such as touching, licking or attentiveness, stimulate neural development, behavioural exploration and even overall body growth. Why should such fitness-related traits be so sensitive to developmental conditions? Here, we review what we term the ‘developmental support hypothesis’, a potential adaptive explanation of this plasticity. Neural development can be a costly process, in terms of time, energy and exposure. However, environmental variability may sometimes compromise parental care during this costly developmental period. We propose this environmental variation has led to the evolution of adaptive plasticity of neural and behavioural development in response to cues of developmental support, where neural development is stimulated in conditions that support associated costs. When parental care is compromised, offspring grow less and adopt a more resilient and stress-responsive strategy, improving their chances of survival in difficult conditions, similar to existing ideas on the adaptive value of early-life programming of stress. The developmental support hypothesis suggests new research directions, such as testing the adaptive value of reduced neural growth and metabolism in stressful conditions, and expanding the range of potential cues animals may attend to as indicators of developmental support. Considering evolutionary and ecologically appropriate cues of social support also has implications for promoting healthy neural development in humans. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.
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Frith, Uta, and Chris Frith. "The social brain: allowing humans to boldly go where no other species has been." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 365, no. 1537 (January 12, 2010): 165–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0160.
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The biological basis of complex human social interaction and communication has been illuminated through a coming together of various methods and disciplines. Among these are comparative studies of other species, studies of disorders of social cognition and developmental psychology. The use of neuroimaging and computational models has given weight to speculations about the evolution of social behaviour and culture in human societies. We highlight some networks of the social brain relevant to two-person interactions and consider the social signals between interacting partners that activate these networks. We make a case for distinguishing between signals that automatically trigger interaction and cooperation and ostensive signals that are used deliberately. We suggest that this ostensive signalling is needed for ‘closing the loop’ in two-person interactions, where the partners each know that they have the intention to communicate. The use of deliberate social signals can serve to increase reputation and trust and facilitates teaching. This is likely to be a critical factor in the steep cultural ascent of mankind.
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Petronić, Đorđe, and Igor Vujović. "Cognitive niche." Биомедицинска истраживања 11, no. 1 (2020): 64–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.5937/bii2001064p.
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In a joint publication with Alfred Russell Wallace, Charles Darwin presented the theory which stated that all life forms were developed by natural selection in which the fight for survival had the effect similar to artificial intelligence applied to selective breeding. Despite a coincidence of views concerning the origin of life, these two scientists had their disagreements. Wallace argued that intelligence could have never arisen through the process of natural adaptation, but rather as a consequence of intelligent design. On the other hand, Darwin insisted that human intelligence could only be explained by the theory of evolution. This difference in point of views on the matter is a manifestation of the difference in the efforts to answer the question: "Why are people so intelligent?" In this context, the main aim of the study is to present a literature review concerning evolutionary psychology and to provide an explanation of the evolution of human intelligence. In other words, the study seeks to explain why people are able to accomplish such intellectual exploits as the ones found in mathematics, science, philosophy, law, etc., bearing in mind that such abilities or talents cannot be found in the original human habitat. The results have showed that evolutionary psychologists consider humans to be so intelligent due to the fact that they have evolved to fill the "cognitive niche". The cognitive niche is a survival mode characterized by managing the environment through mediating cognition and social cooperation.
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Gurven, Michael D., Raziel J. Davison, and Thomas S. Kraft. "The optimal timing of teaching and learning across the life course." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375, no. 1803 (June 2020): 20190500. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0500.
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The evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton (Hamilton 1966 J. Theor. Biol. 12 , 12–45. ( doi:10.1016/0022-5193(66)90184-6 )) famously showed that the force of natural selection declines with age, and reaches zero by the age of reproductive cessation. However, in social species, the transfer of fitness-enhancing resources by postreproductive adults increases the value of survival to late ages. While most research has focused on intergenerational food transfers in social animals, here we consider the potential fitness benefits of information transfer, and investigate the ecological contexts where pedagogy is likely to occur. Although the evolution of teaching is an important topic in behavioural biology and in studies of human cultural evolution, few formal models of teaching exist. Here, we present a modelling framework for predicting the timing of both information transfer and learning across the life course, and find that under a broad range of conditions, optimal patterns of information transfer in a skills-intensive ecology often involve postreproductive aged teachers. We explore several implications among human subsistence populations, evaluating the cost of hunting pedagogy and the relationship between activity skill complexity and the timing of pedagogy for several subsistence activities. Long lifespan and extended juvenility that characterize the human life history likely evolved in the context of a skills-intensive ecological niche with multi-stage pedagogy and multigenerational cooperation. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.
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Arshinov, V. I., and V. G. Budanov. "V. S. Stepin’s Concept of Post-Non-Classical Science and N. N. Moiseev’s Concept of Universal Evolutionism." Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences 62, no. 4 (July 6, 2019): 96–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.30727/0235-1188-2019-62-4-96-112.
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The article is devoted to the memory of Vyacheslav Semenovich Stepin and Nikita Nikolaevich Moiseev, whose multifaceted work was integrally focused on philosophical, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research of the key ideas and principles of universal human-dimensional evolutionism. Other remarkable Russian scientists V.I. Vernadsky, S.P. Kurdyumov, S.P. Kapitsa, D.S. Chernavsky worked in the same tradition of universal evolutionism. While V.I. Vernadsky and N.N. Moiseev had been the originators of that scientific approach, V.S. Stepin provided philosophical foundations for the ideas of those remarkable scientists and thinkers. The scientific legacy of V.S. Stepin and N.N. Moiseev maintained the formation of a new quality of research into the philosophy of science and technology as well as into the philosophy of culture. This new quality is multidimensional and it is difficult to define unambiguously, but we presume the formation of those areas of philosophical knowledge as constructively oriented languages of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary co-participation of philosophy in the convergent-evolutionary development of scientific knowledge in general. In this regard, attention is paid to V.S. Stepin’s affirmations about non-classical nature of modern social and humanitarian knowledge. Quantum mechanics teaches us that the reality revealed through it is a hybrid construct, or symbiosis, of both mean and object of cognition. Therefore, the very act of cognitive observation constructs quantum reality. Thus, it is very close to the process of cognition in modern sociology and psychology. V.S. Stepin insisted that these principles are applicable to all complex selfdeveloping systems, and such are all “human-dimensional” objects of modern humanities. In all the phases of homeostasis changes, or crises, there is necessarily a share of chaos, instability, uncertainty in the selection process of future development scenarios, which is ineliminably affected by our observation. Therefore, a cognitive observer in the humanities should be considered as a concept of post-non-classical rationality, that is as an observer of complexity.
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Kiriakova, A. V., and V. V. Moroz. "Creativity from perspective of axiology." Pedagogicheskiy Zhurnal Bashkortostana 92, no. 2 (2021): 10–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.21510/1817-3292-2021-92-2-10-20.
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Interest in creativity as a subject of research has been growing exponentially since the second half of the 20th century in all areas of human history. A wide range of both domestic and foreign studies allows authors to assert that creativity is a personality trait, inherent to one degree or another. Whereas the development of such trait becomes an urgent necessity in the new reality. The entire evolutionary process of the social development illustrates its dependence on personal and collective creativity. The aim of this research is to study the phenomenon of creativity through the perspective of axiology, i.e. the science of values. Axiology allows us to consider the realities of the modern world from the perspective of not only external factors, circumstances and situations, but also of deep value foundations. Creativity has been studied quite deeply from the point of view of psychology: the special characteristics of a creative person, stages of the creative process, the relationship between creative and critical thinking, creativity and intelligence. Some psychologists emphasize motivation, creative skills, interdisciplinary knowledge, and the creative environment as the main components that contribute to the development of creativity. The authors of the article argue that values and value orientations towards cognition, creativity, self-realization and self-expression are the drivers of creativity. In a broad sense, values as a matrix of culture determine the attitude of society to creativity, to the development of creativity of the individual and the creative class, and to how economically successful a given society will be. Since innovation and entrepreneurship are embodied creativity. Thus, the study of creativity from the perspective of axiology combines the need for a deep study of this phenomenon and the subjective significance of creativity in the context of new realities