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Introduction
1. INTRODUCTION
Chimpanzees lead quite interesting lives. They build
nests, form alliances with other members of their
troop and use simple toolsfor example, sticks to fish
for termites and stones to open nuts. However, as we
are reminded by comedic images of chimpanzees wearing clothes and using computers, the lives of our closest
evolutionary relatives are very different from our own.
Translated as wise man, Homo sapiens is an optimistic
sobriquet; translated as knowing man it is merely
descriptive of our species. We are animals that specialize
in thinking and knowingin cognitionand our extraordinary cognitive powers have enabled us to do
remarkable things. We have transformed our eating
habits with agriculture and cooking, and transformed
our habitats with buildings, bridges and roads. Compared with our chimpanzee cousins, we can travel over
vast distances, moving our whole bodies in cars,
planes and space craft, and moving our minds to yet
more remote places with radio telescopes and electron
microscopes. We are political and economic animals,
negotiating agreements that affect millions of people,
and trading instantly in rarefied currencies with completely anonymous strangers in different time zones. We
*cecilia.heyes@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
One contribution of 15 to a Theme Issue New thinking: the
evolution of human cognition.
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Barbara school or high church evolutionary psychology. It suggests that the human mind consists of a
large collection of computationally distinct modules.
Each of these modules is a way of thinking that was
shaped by natural selection to solve a particular type
of problem faced by our Stone Age ancestors
for example, communicating, prey stalking, disease
avoidance, mate choice and coalition formation. Evolutionary Psychologys central metaphor is the Swiss
Army knife. It casts the evolved human mind as a set
of cognitive gadgets, each specialized to learn, remember and reason about particular types of information.
Evolutionary Psychology has fulfilled an important
function. It has drawn attention to the need to integrate
cognitive science with evolutionary biology in order to
explain not only how brains and behaviour have evolved,
but also the evolution of the middle manthe cognitive processes, often characterized as computational
software, which are instantiated by the brain and control
behaviour. However, the massive modularity hypothesis has long been an object of criticism [48], and
the articles in this theme issue represent the emerging
alternative view of the evolved human mind.
The alternative view, the new thinking that runs
through this theme issue, sees the human mind as
more like a hand than a Swiss Army knife [9].1 The
hand is a multi-purpose instrument of a very different
kind to the Swiss Army knife. It has a deep evolutionary
history, rooted in the earliest emergence of the pentadactyl limb, and incorporates many genetic adaptations.
However, the human hand is also capable of performing
a wide and open-ended variety of technical and social
functions. It can strip the defensive spines from a piece
of fruit, making it safe to eat, but in Thai dancing it
can also signal the smallest nuances of emotion. The
human hand performs with equal facility a vast array of
tasks that natural selection did and did not foresee.
This article introduces the theme issue by contrasting our new thinking with Evolutionary Psychology
in relation to three closely related questions about
the evolution of human cognition: When did the
most important changes take place? How did the
changes happen? What have the changes produced?
in this theme issue look deep into the evolutionary history of human cognition, examining its roots in the
common ancestors of extant eutherian mammals
(125 Mya [12]), primates (85 Mya [13]) and great
apes (15 Mya [14]).
Barton [12] uses phylogenetic comparative analysis
to examine the evolution of brain structures, the neocortex and cerebellum, in mammals. Phylogenetic
comparative analysis is a set of statistical modelling
techniques that combines information about relationships of descent among species with data on their
phenotypic traits. The models represent inferences
about the evolutionary change in traits along the
branches of a tree representing the relationships
among the species. These models can be used to test
hypotheses about which traits are linked, the kinds of
selection pressures that shaped the evolution of the
traits and, when the traits relate to the brain, about
the cognitive capacities that were evolving. The analyses reported by Barton in this theme issue show
that the neocortex and the cerebellum have evolved
together particularly tightly not only in primates, but
in mammals more generally. Traditionally, the neocortex is associated with higher cognition, such as
planning and executive control, while the cerebellum
is associated with sensorimotor processing of the kind
involved in visually guided reaching and grasping. The
co-evolution of these structures not just in primates,
but over deep evolutionary timein all mammalian
lineagesimplies that in evolutionary terms the division between higher and sensorimotor intelligence,
between thinking and acting, is artificial. The evolution
of human cognition has not merely involved the addition
of processes that supervise and control more primitive ways of thinking; it has accelerated an ancient
trend towards increasingly powerful and coordinated
embodied modes of thought.
The article by Barrett and colleagues [13] also uses
new quantitative techniques, draws attention to the
continuity between human and non-human cognition,
and emphasizes the importance of embodied cognition; of thinking that is not fundamentally distinct
from acting. Drawing on the work of Mead and
Vygotsky early in the twentieth century, Barrett et al.
argue that, in human and non-human primates,
thought is a form of social action and interaction.
With the emergence of language, individual humans
became able explicitly to represent their roles in a
social group, but this new ability was integrated with
a much older way of coordinating social behaviour,
in which participants generate and respond to cues
from others but do not have an aerial view of group
dynamics or of their position within the group. This
kind of embodiment hypothesis is sometimes dismissed as impractical, as a rich set of ideas that cannot
be cashed out in a feasible strategy for empirical
research. Challenging this view, Barrett and colleagues
show that the social networks of free-living baboons
can be modelled as multi-dimensional objects, and
that this approach predicts the effects of natural
knock-outsthe disappearance of group members
on the behaviour of other members of the group.
Whiten & Erdals [14] pre-Pleistocene perspective focuses on the comparison of humans with
3. HOW?
(a) Incremental co-evolution
Evolutionary Psychology sometimes gives the impression
that new cognitive processes appeared suddenly and
fully-formed as a result of lucky genetic mutations and
fierce, unimodal selection pressures. This impression is
Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2012)
C. Heyes
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against predation in more exposed environments). Supporting a gesture-first model of language evolution,
in which vocal language evolved from complex gestural
communication, Sterelny argues that the improvements in technical (extractive foraging) and social skills
(gestural communication) were mediated by common
cognitive processesprocesses that encode and control
complex sequences of action. Therefore, pressure for
improvement in technical competence enhanced social
as well as technical skills, and vice versa, creating a positive feedback loop that culminated in the appearance
of fully syntactic vocal communication. Bartons
phylogenetic comparative analyses of mammalian brain
evolution converge on a very similar conclusion about
the co-evolution of technical and social skills [12].
In their article, also concerned with language,
Jablonka et al. [19] discuss both techno-social and
geneculture co-evolution. In the former case, like
Sterelny, they argue that selection pressures for technical (tool making) and social (alloparenting) skills are
likely to have fostered the evolution of an overlapping set
of cognitive processes. However, rather than emphasizing the common requirement for encoding of complex
sequences, they point out that learning to make complex tools and to alloparent both require the kind
of inhibitory control that enables patience and social
tolerance and reshapes human emotions. Turning to
geneculture co-evolution, Jablonka et al. review several recent theories suggesting that various aspects of
language were initially invented and inherited as cultural
conventions, and were later genetically assimilated.
Their own view is distinctive in two respects: it highlights ways in which human cognition has adapted to
language, not merely language to cognition, and, via
the assimilate-and-stretch principle, stresses that genetic assimilation makes room for further learning.
Thus, when a previously learned linguistic trait, X, has
been genetically assimilatedwhen it develops with
minimal environmental inputthis frees-up resources
allowing a new linguistic trait, Y, to be learned.
C. Heyes
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END NOTE
1
The hand metaphor emerged from discussion among the participants in the Evolution of Human Cognition project based at All
Souls College, Oxford in May/June 2011 (Robert Barton, Alison
Gopnik, Russell Gray, Cecilia Heyes, Eva Jablonka, Arthur
Robson, Kim Sterelny), but it was ultimately the product of Eva
Jablonkas dexterous mind.
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