How to create a cultural species: Evaluating three proposals

2012

“This book is extremely well-written and in my view is among the best synthesizers in human evolution study. Dwight provides a much-needed clarity and guidance on what makes us humans. I strongly recommended.” Amazon (Independent Reviewer), Dr. Paulo Finuras, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Lisbon “Read effectively uses theory-of-mind concepts and recent work in the extended mind/social-brain realm (e.g., Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010) as central components in modeling the development of human social relationships from a broader primate behavioral profile. I greatly appreciate his connection between cognitive processes and the expansion of social complexity and complex kinship systems in humans. Importantly, Read notes how direct comparisons between human and other primate social structure are rife with problems and that while we share much with our primate kin, core areas such as working memory and other cognitive processes differentiate us…. In sum, I agree with Read’s notion of innovation in the human lineage and his proposal for what that innovation entails,…” Current Anthropology, Agustus Fuentes, University of Notre Dame “How Culture Makes Us Human is an intriguing book that I like very much. My appreciation stems from the author’s ability to explicitly outline the cognitive capabilities within various primate lineages in order to demonstrate qualities of mind that allow for a cultural kinship system to develop. …Our species’ expanded intellectual capacities introduces cultural group selection… The author acknowledges this process and portrays culture as a conceptual system, in Tylor-like fashion, rather than focus on the transmission of individual culture traits as typically posited by gene-culture coevolutionary theorists and memeticists….Clearly written … I recommend it highly …” Anthropology Review Database, Dr. William Yaworsky, University of Texas at Brownsville “… Read (UCLA) argues for the emergence of enhanced cognitive abilities …as a driving force behind human behavioral evolution. The author reviews the diversity of social systems among Old World monkeys and chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, in an attempt to establish the foundations of human social organization. The book leads readers from an appreciation of the complexities of monkey and ape societies to an understanding of the sophistication of modern human communities; this transition is accompanied by an organizational shift from biological kin selection to cultural group selection. In sum, a provocative book with tantalizing ideas,…” Choice, R.A.Delgado Jr. , University of Southern California Abstract The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.

The Spanish Journal of Psychology, 2017

The comparative and evolutionary analysis of social learning and all manner of cultural processes has become a flourishing field. Applying the ‘comparative method’ to such phenomena allows us to exploit the good fortunate we have in being able to study them in satisfying detail in our living primate relatives, using the results to reconstruct the cultural cognition of the ancestral forms we share with these species. Here I offer an overview of principal discoveries in recent years, organized through a developing scheme that targets three main dimensions of culture: the patterning of culturally transmitted traditions in time and space; the underlying social learning processes; and the particular behavioral and psychological contents of cultures. I focus on a comparison between humans, particularly children, and our closest primate relative the chimpanzee, for which we now have much the richest database of relevant observational and experimental findings. Commonalities across these si...

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2016

Noting important recent discoveries, we review primate social learning, traditions and culture, together with associated findings about primate brains. We survey our current knowledge of primate cultures in the wild, and complementary experimental diffusion studies testing species' capacity to sustain traditions. We relate this work to theories that seek to explain the enlarged brain size of primates as specializations for social intelligence, that have most recently extended to learning from others and the cultural transmission this permits. We discuss alternative theories and review a variety of recent findings that support cultural intelligence hypotheses for primate encephalization. At a more fine-grained neuroscientific level we focus on the underlying processes of social learning, especially emulation and imitation. Here, our own and others' recent research has established capacities for bodily imitation in both monkeys and apes, results that are consistent with a role for the mirror neuron system in social learning. We review important convergences between behavioural findings and recent non-invasive neuroscientific studies.

Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2007

Because culture requires transmission of information between individuals, thinking about the origin of culture has mainly focused on the genetic evolution of abilities for social learning. Current theory considers how social learning affects the adaptiveness of a single cultural trait, yet human culture consists of the accumulation of very many traits. Here we introduce a new modeling strategy that tracks the adaptive value of many cultural traits, showing that genetic evolution favors only limited social learning owing to the accumulation of maladaptive as well as adaptive culture. We further show that culture can be adaptive, and refined social learning can evolve, if individuals can identify and discard maladaptive culture. This suggests that the evolution of such ''adaptive filtering'' mechanisms may have been crucial for the birth of human culture.

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2019

Ryan Nichols, Henrike Moll, and Jacob L. Mackey. Review of Heyes, C. (2018). Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets. Heyes’s 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 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.

Politics and the Life Sciences, 2010

Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Development Evolutionary perspectives on human development, 2005

T he relation between culture and biology emerged as one of anthropology's first intellectual responsibilities. It remains one of our most frustrating enigmas. The dichotomy of "nature and nurture" has been a persistent obstacle to consilience between the biological and social sciences. Anthropology has traditionally recognized that culture is inextricably linked to the evolution of mind and that the converse is equally important. In this chapter, I review a scenario in which the mind evolved as a "social tool" in an increasingly cultural environment. I posit that the human psyche was designed primarily to contend with social relationships, whereas the physical environment was relatively less important. Most natural selection in regard to brain evolution was a consequence of interactions with conspecifics, not with food and climate. The primary mental chess game was with other intelligent hominid competitors and cooperators, not with fruits, tools, prey, or snow. An extended juvenile period was favored by natural selection because of the need for more time to develop mental competencies used in forming coalitions and other aspects of social competition. "Culture," shorthand for the information acquired and used by minds in social ways, was a

Innateness and the structure of the mind

Humans are at once phylogenetically linked to, and yet fundamentally different from, other primates. Most profound among these differences is the extent of our reliance on culture, by which I mean socially transmitted information shared by at least some members of the learner's group. While recent work reveals the existence of socially transmitted foraging techniques and social behaviors in some nonhuman primates (Fragaszy and Perry, 2003;, compared to the human case, cultural information plays a minor role in these animals' efforts to negotiate their physical and social environments. Highly altricial and relatively gracile, lacking large teeth, strong jaws, or claws, we are a rather unimposing mammal-our ability to exist, indeed to prosper, in nearly every ecosystem on the planet is primarily due to our capacity to acquire, employ, and elaborate on socially transmitted information. This chapter is based on the premise that these capacities reflect the workings of special-purpose psychological mechanisms that evolved in order to exploit the enormous adaptive potential of socially transmitted information. After reviewing the principal existing approaches to this question, I outline some of the major topics that I believe need to be addressed in developing an evolutionary psychology of our uniquely culture-dependent species.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2004