This book sheds new light on the problem of how the human mind evolved. Harry Smit argues that current studies of this problem misguidedly try to solve it by using variants of the Cartesian conception of the mind, and shows that combining the Aristotelian conception with Darwin's theory provides us with far more interesting answers. He discusses the core problem of how we can understand language evolution in terms of inclusive fitness theory, and investigates how scientific and conceptual (...) insights can be integrated into one explanatory framework, which he contrasts with the alternative Cartesian-derived framework. He then explores the differences between these explanatory frameworks with reference to co-operation and conflict at different levels of biological organization, the evolution of communicative behaviour, the human mind, language, and moral behaviour. His book will interest advanced students and scholars in a range of subjects including philosophy, biology and psychology. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume brings together expert researchers coming from primatology, anthropology, ethology, philosophy of cognitive sciences, neurophysiology, mathematics and psychology to discuss both the foundations of non-human primate and human social cognition as well as the means there currently exist to study the various facets of social cognition. The first part focusses on various aspects of social cognition across primates, from the relationship between food and social behaviour to the connection with empathy and (...) communication, offering a multitude of innovative approaches that range from field-studies to philosophy. The second part details the various epistemic and methodological means there exist to study social cognition, in particular how to ascertain the proximal and ultimate mechanisms of social cognition through experimental, modelling and field studies. In the final part, the mechanisms of cultural transmission in primate and human societies are investigated, and special attention is given to how the evolution of cognitive capacities underlie primates’ abilities to use and manufacture tools, and how this in turn influences their social ecology. A must-read for both, young scholars as well as established researchers! (shrink)

The articles in this theme issue seek to understand the evolutionary bases of social learning and the consequences of cultural transmission for the evolution of human behaviour. In this introductory article, we provide a summary of these articles and a personal view of some promising lines of development suggested by the work summarized here.

Introduction, W G Runciman Social Evolution in Primates: The Role of Ecological Factors and Male Behaviour, Carel P van Schaik Determinants of Group Size in Primates: A General Model, R I M Dunbar Function and Intention in the Calls of Non-Human Primates, Dorothy L Cheney & Robert M Seyfarth Why Culture is Common, but Cultural Evolution is Rare, Robert Boyd & Peter J Richerson An Evolutionary and Chronological Framework for Human Social Behaviour, (...) Robert A Foley Friendship and the Banker?s Paradox: Other Pathways to the Evolution of Adaptations for Altruism, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides The Early Prehistory of Human Social Behaviour: Issues of Archaeological Inference and Cognitive Evolution, Steven Mithen The Emergence of Biologically Modern Populations in Europe: A Social and Cognitive ?Revolution??, Paul Mellars Responses to Environmental Novelty: Changes in Men?s Marriage Strategies in a Rural Kenyan Community, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder Genetic Language Impairment: Unruly Grammars, M Gopnik, J Dalalakis, S E Fukuda, S Fukuda & E Kehayia The Emergence of Cultures among Wild Chimpanzees, Christophe Boesch Terrestriality, Bipedalism and the Origin of Language, Leslie C Aiello Conclusions, John Maynard Smith. (shrink)

People’s attitudes towards social norms play a crucial role in understanding group behavior. Norm psychology accounts focus on processes of norm internalization that influence people’s norm following attitudes but pay considerably less attention to social identity and group identification processes. Social identity theory in contrast studies group identity but works with a relatively thin and instrumental notion of social norms. We argue that to best understand both sets of phenomena, it is important to integrate the insights (...) of both approaches. Social status, social identity, and social norms are considered separate phenomena in evolutionary accounts. We discuss assumptions and views that support this separation, and suggest an integrated view of our own. We argue that we should be open to the early origins of human social complexity, and conjecture that the longer that the human social world involved multi-level societies the more probable it is that norm psychology and social identity interacted in rich ways. (shrink)

Boehm's model conceptualizes a common ancestor to humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos at several million years B.P., followed by a model of prehistoric foragers at 25,000-50,000 B.P. based on ethnographic data from twentieth-century hunters and gatherers. By putting processes of complex communication into the picture, we can refine Boehm's model considerably by filling in significant scenarios for humans beginning at perhaps 2 million years ago. These include a suite of features that include constraints on sexual behaviour, a rudimentary division of (...) labour, the gendering of morality, socialized control over junior males, increased group size, increased home range size, the reduction of bullying behaviour, and a reverse dominance hierarchy that promotes egalitarianism among fully adult males. Boehm's model emphasizes the last two of these, but it is consistent with the others as well. Cultural or proto-cultural elaboration of beliefs and associated practices is the symbolic dimension of morality and is an important component of human evolution. Boehm's model is extremely important for outlining socio-political mechanisms and concomitants in the formation of adult male egalitarian groups, and, in the process, identifying a key element in the evolution of human morality. (shrink)

This chapter compares the social behaviour of human hunter-gatherers with that of the better-studied chimpanzee species, Pan troglodytes, in an attempt to pinpoint the unique features of human social evolution. Although hunter-gatherers and chimpanzees living in central Africa have similar body weights, humans live at much lower population densities due to their greater dependence on predation. Human foraging parties have longer duration than those of chimpanzees, lasting hours rather than minutes, and a higher (...) level of mutual dependence, through the division of labour between men and women ; which is in turn related to pair-bonding, and meat sharing to reduce the risk of individual hunters' failure on any particular day. The band appears to be a uniquely human social unit that resolves the tension between greater dispersion and greater interdependence. (shrink)

The Acheulean techno-complex represents a significant chapter in hominin cognitive evolution. Two important developments include enchained technological behaviours that were practiced with broad consistency over thousands of generations, and the expansion of hominins into dynamic Pleistocene environments, well beyond their evolutionary origins. In this paper we expand on Material Engagement Theory to argue that the making and use of Acheulean tools generates social forms that are emergent outcomes of complex technical practice. We introduce three key features of this (...) sociality, which form the basis of what we term Technologically Emergent Communities of Practice. These features include (1) enactive alignment, the synchronization of materially mediated experience and intentionality; (2) techno-intercorporeality, the shared dispositions and awareness through which communities respond with environmental change; and (3) tool-dependent ontology, the non-representational ordering of being and relationality that guides collective environmental cognition among users of a technology. Understood as an early example of such a community, the Acheulean represents an evolutionary shift in the relationship between hominins and their environments, characterized by novel cybernetic processes of feedback, memory, and responsiveness. We argue that for Acheulean communities, this emergent sociality—scaffolded by technological practice—enabled an ecological creativity that is expressed in the eventual radiation and resilience of hominins across dynamic Pleistocene environments that stretched across Africa, Asia and Europe. By conceptualizing the Acheulean as an emergent sociality, we link enactivism, niche expansion and ecological agency. This framework sheds light on the evolution of sociality and offers a new direction to explore the genesis of coupled human-environment systems. (shrink)

These papers bring an interdisciplinary approach to bear on what is arguably the central question in the study of human social evolution: how did the simple hunting and foraging bands of the Upper Palaeolithic evolve into the institutionally complex societies of the so-called Neolithic Revolution? The contributors to this volume are leading experts from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and game theory, all of whom share a common evolutionary perspective. The ideas presented here form a (...) major addition to the widespread current interest in evolutionary theory as applied to human behaviour. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the growing promise of cultural evolutionary theory as a new approach to bringing human behaviour fully within the broader evolutionary synthesis. This review of two recent seminal works on this topic argues that cultural evolution now holds the potential to bring together fields as disparate as neuroscience and social anthropology within a unified explanatory and ontological framework.

Originally published in 1967. This reprints the second edition of 1973, revised and expanded. Evolution and Human Behaviour considers man’s biological and cultural development within the framework of Darwinian evolution. Rejecting analogue models of biological evolution common in the social sciences, the author shows how the theory of biological evolution applies to the study of contemporary human behaviour.

The current project introduces a general theory and supporting models that offer a plausible explanation and viable mechanism for generating and perpetuating prosocial behavior. The proposed mechanism is preferential detachment and the theory proposed is that agents utilizing preferential detachment will sort themselves into social arrangements such that the agents who contribute a benefit to the members of their group also do better for themselves in the long run. Agents can do this with minimal information about their environment, the (...) other agents, the future, and with minimal cognitive/computational ability. The conclusion is that self-organizing into groups that maintain prosocial behaviors may be simpler and more robust than previously thought. The primary contribution of this research is that a single, simple mechanism operating in different contexts generates the conceptually distinct prosocial behaviors achieved by other models, and in a manner that is more amenable to evolutionary explanations. It also bears importantly on explanations of the evolution of our moral experiences and their connection with prosociality. (shrink)

Why do societies collapse? We use an individual-based evolutionary model to show that, in environmental conditions dominated by low-frequency variation (“red noise”), extirpation may be an outcome of the evolution of cultural capacity. Previous analytical models predicted an equilibrium between individual learners and social learners, or a contingent strategy in which individuals learn socially or individually depending on the circumstances. However, in red noise environments, whose main signature is that variation is concentrated in relatively large, relatively rare excursions, (...) individual learning may be selected from the population. If the social learning system comes to lack sufficient individual learning or cognitively costly adaptive biases, behavior ceases tracking environmental variation. Then, when the environment does change, fitness declines and the population may collapse or even be extirpated. The modeled scenario broadly fits some human population collapses and might also explain nonhuman extirpations. Varying model parameters showed that the fixation of social learning is less likely when individual learning is less costly, when the environment is less red or more variable, with larger population sizes, and when learning is not conformist or is from parents rather than from the general population. Once social learning is fixed, extirpation is likely except when social learning is biased towards successful models. Thus, the risk of population collapse may be reduced by promoting individual learning and innovation over cultural conformity, or by preferential selection of relatively fit individuals as models for social learning. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Recent evolutionary studies on cooperation devote specific attention to non-verbal expressions of emotions. In this paper, I examine Robert Frank’s popular attempt to explain emotions, non-verbal markers and social behaviours. Following this line of work, I focus on the green-beard explanation of social behaviours. In response to the criticisms raised against this controversial ultimate explanation, based on resources found in Frank’s work, I propose an alternative red-beard explanation of human sociality. The red-beard explanation explains the emergence and (...) evolution of emotions, a proximate cause, rather than patterns of behaviour. In contrast to simple evolutionary models that invoke a green-beard mechanism, I demonstrate that the red-beard explanation can be evolutionary stable. Social emotions are a common cause of a social behaviour and a phenotypic marker and therefore cooperative behaviour cannot be suppressed without also changing the marker. (shrink)

Previous discussions of the evolution of the self have diverged greatly in their estimates of the date at which the capacity for self-thought emerged, the factors that led self-reflection to evolve, and the nature of the evidence offered to support these disparate conclusions. Beginning with the assumption that human self-awareness involves a set of distinct cognitive abilities that evolved at different times to solve different adaptive problems, we trace the evolution of self-awareness from the common ancestor of (...) humans and apes to the beginnings of culture, drawing upon paleontological, anthropological, biological, and psychological evidence. These data converge to suggest that that modern self-thought appeared just prior to the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, approximately 60,000 years ago.Recto running head: Evolution of the Self. (shrink)

My essay first takes me into the arena in which science, spirituality, and theology meet. I comment on the enterprise of science and how scientists could well benefit from reciprocal interactions with theologians and religious leaders. Next, I discuss the evolution of social morality and the ways in which various aspects of social play behavior relate to the notion of “behaving fairly.” The contributions of spiritual and religious perspectives are important in our coming to a fuller understanding (...) of the evolution of morality. I go on to discuss animal emotions, the concept of personhood, and how our special relationships with other animals, especially the companions with whom we share our homes, help us to define our place in nature, our humanness. It is when we take the life of another being in the ritual of compassionately euthanizing them (“putting them to sleep”) that who we are in the grand scheme of things comes to the fore. I end with a discussion of the importance of ethological studies, behavioral research in which a serious attempt is made to understand animals in their own worlds, inquiries in which it is asked, “What is it like to be another species?” Species other than nonhuman primates need to be studied. I plead for developing compassionate, heartfelt, and holistic science that allows for interdisciplinary talk about respect, grace, spirituality, religion, love, Earth, and God. (shrink)

Kinship plays a foundational role in organizing human social behavior on both local and more global scales. Hence, any adequate account of the evolution of human sociality must include an account of the evolution of human kinship. This article aims to make progress on the latter task by providing a few key pieces of an evolutionary model of kinship systems. The article is especially focused on the connection between primate social cognition and the (...) origins of kinship systems. I argue that early conceptions of kinship in our line were very likely scaffolded by preexisting forms of primate social cognition. It was only later, as linguistic resources increased in our line, and as human social life grew more complex, that these conceptions came to resemble kin categories as we now know them. I conclude by situating “kin cognition” within a broader cognitive science framework for studying capacities that reflect both innate knowledge and human cultural learning. (shrink)

Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior – largely independent of each other. Here, we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene–environment interactions, we describe the cultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. A cultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as rates of (...) innovation and diffusion, density of cultural subgroups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of the cultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness. Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels, and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integrated cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature–nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ. (shrink)

The 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. (shrink)

Humans are moral creatures. Among all life on Earth, we alone experience rich moral emotions, follow complex rules governing how we treat one another, and engage in moral dialogue. But how did human morality evolve? And can humans become morally evolved? -/- In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell draw on the latest research in the biological and social sciences to explain the key role that morality has played in human evolution. They explore the (...) moral traits that humans share with chimpanzees; how a more complex moral mind enabled Homo sapiens to arise and out-compete other human species; and the place of morality alongside historic revolutions in technology and social organization. Throughout the book, Kumar and Campbell argue that morality co-evolved with intelligence and complex sociality. Morality prevents societal collapse and enables complex knowledge. -/- After unearthing the ancient origins of human morality, Kumar and Campbell use evolutionary theory to deliver profound insights about how to advance moral progress and resist moral regress, such as reducing animal suffering on industrial farms; capitalizing on the recent revolution in gay rights to foster a nascent revolution in transgender rights; opposing intersectional inequality that impacts women and people of color in lower socioeconomic classes; and addressing major problems of global inequality, especially impending crises of injustice caused by anthropogenic climate change. Understanding how we evolved--and how we continue to evolve--can help us become a better ape. (shrink)

Humans are uncontroversially better than other species at learning from their peers. A key example of this is imitation, the ability to reproduce both the means and ends of others’ behaviours. Imitation is critical to the acquisition of a number of uniquely human cultural and cognitive traits. However, while authors largely agree on the importance of imitation, they disagree about the origins of imitation in humans. Some argue that imitation is an adaptation, connected to the ‘Mirror Neuron System’ that (...) evolved to facilitate action understanding and the learning of social behaviours. Others argue that imitation is a cultural practice learned in childhood, and that there is no evidence that it evolved genetically. We offer a third alternative that is consistent with both data that the human brain is optimised for imitation, and consistent with its being substantially learned. We hypothesise that at some point in human history humans underwent natural selection for two imitation-relevant abilities – specifically, (i) the tendency to be more attentive to our peers, and (ii) fine motor skill in the manual and oro-facial domains. These changes enabled us to excel at both learning to imitate, and learning by imitating. (shrink)

Music is a deeply entrenched human phenomenon. In this article, I argue that its evolutionary origins are intrinsically intertwined with the incremental anatomical, cognitive, social, and technological evolution of the hominin lineage. I propose an account of the evolution of Plio-Pleistocene hominins, focusing on traits that would be later implicated in music making. Such traits can be conceived as comprising the musicality mosaic or the multifaceted foundations of musicality. I then articulate and defend an account of (...) protomusical behaviour, drawing theoretical licence from the social brain framework of Robin Dunbar and colleagues, as well as the evolutionary framework for human culture and cooperation developed by Kim Sterelny. The role of gene-culture co-evolution and niche construction is brought to the fore in articulating the evolutionary account. Finally, I defend the view that music subsequently developed via processes of social learning and cumulative culture. (shrink)

Numerous studies show that humans tend to be more cooperative than expected given the assumption that they are rational maximizers of personal gain. As a result, theoreticians have proposed elaborated formal representations of human decision-making, in which utility functions including “altruistic” or “moral” preferences replace the purely self-oriented "Homo economicus" function. Here we review mathematical approaches that provide insights into the mathematical stability of alternative ways of representing human decision-making in social contexts. Candidate utility functions may be (...) evaluated with help of game theory, classical modeling of social evolution that focuses on behavioral strategies, and modeling of social evolution that focuses directly on utility functions. We present the advantages of the latter form of investigation and discuss one surprisingly precise result: “Homo economicus” as well as “altruistic” utility functions are less stable than a function containing a preference for the golden rule or for the common welfare that is only expressed in social contexts composed of individuals with similar preferences. We discuss the contribution of mathematical models to our understanding of human other-oriented behavior, with a focus on the classical debate over psychological altruism. We conclude that human can be psychologically altruistic, but that psychological altruism evolved because it was generally expressed towards individuals that contributed to the actor’s fitness, such as own children, romantic partners and long term reciprocators. (shrink)

Several evolutionary accounts of human social cognition posit that language has co-evolved with the sophisticated mindreading abilities of modern humans. It has also been argued that these mindreading abilities are the product of cultural, rather than biological, evolution. Taken together, these claims suggest that the evolution of language has played an important role in the cultural evolution of human social cognition. Here we present a new computational model which formalises the assumptions that underlie (...) this hypothesis, in order to explore how language and mindreading interact through cultural evolution. This model treats communicative behaviour as an interplay between the context in which communication occurs, an agent’s individual perspective on the world, and the agent’s lexicon. However, each agent’s perspective and lexicon are private mental representations, not directly observable to other agents. Learners are therefore confronted with the task of jointly inferring the lexicon and perspective of their cultural parent, based on their utterances in context. Simulation results show that given these assumptions, an informative lexicon evolves not just under a pressure to be successful at communicating, but also under a pressure for accurate perspective-inference. When such a lexicon evolves, agents become better at inferring others’ perspectives; not because their innate ability to learn about perspectives changes, but because sharing a language with others helps them to do so. (shrink)

In his historical perspective on the changes in scientific thought over the last 100 years, Carl N. Degler explores the study of social evolution and the ongoing search for human nature. In Search of Human Nature provides a detailed perspective on the reasons behind the shifting emphasis in social thought from biology, to culture, and again to biology. Degler examines why these changes took place, the evidence and people fostering these changes and why students of (...) human nature decided to accept this momentous change in thought. He suggests varying ideologies as the underlying force behind this shift in the study of social science. From Darwin's theory that human social behaviour has drastically evolved from animals, to the belief that human experience serves as the basic differentiating factor in humans, Degler provides a thorough and captivating examination of the roots of human behaviour. (shrink)

How did social communication evolve in primates? In this volume, primatologists, linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of science systematically analyze how their specific disciplines demarcate the research questions and methodologies involved in the study of the evolutionary origins of social communication in primates in general, and in humans in particular. In the first part of the book, historians and philosophers of science address how the epistemological frameworks associated with primate communication and language evolution studies have changed (...) over time, and how these conceptual changes affect our current studies on the subject matter. In the second part, scholars provide cutting-edge insights into the various means through which primates communicate socially in both natural and experimental settings. They examine the behavioral building blocks by which primates communicate, and they analyze what the cognitive requirements are for displaying communicative acts. Chapters highlight cross-fostering and language experiments with primates, primate mother-infant communication, the display of emotions and expressions, manual gestures and vocal signals, joint attention, intentionality and theory of mind. The primary focus of the third part is on how these various types of communicative behavior possibly evolved, and how they can be understood as evolutionary precursors to human language. Leading scholars analyze how both manual and vocal gestures gave way to mimetic and imitational protolanguage, and how the latter possibly transitioned into human language. In the final part, we turn to the hominin lineage, and anthropologists, archeologists and linguists investigate what the necessary neurocognitive, anatomical and behavioral features are in order for human language to evolve, and how language differs from other forms of primate communication. (shrink)

In late September 1838, Darwin read Malthus's Essay on Population, which left him with “a theory by which to work.”115 Yet he waited some twenty years to publish his discovery in the Origin of Species. Those interested in the fine grain of Darwin's development have been curious about this delay. One recent explanation has his hand stayed by fear of reaction to the materialist implications of linking man with animals. “Darwin sensed,” according to Howard Gruber, “that some would object to (...) seeing rudiments of human mentality in animals, while others would recoil at the idea of remnants of animality in man.”116 With this link closed, Darwin hung the materialist chain around his own neck, where it rested most uncomfortably. Stephen Gould, supporting Gruber's argument, finds evidence for this reconstruction in Darwin's M and N notebooks, whichinclude many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism-the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. No notion could be more upsetting to the deepest traditions of Western thought than the statement that mind-however complex and powerful-is simply a product of brain.117The proferred hypothesis suggests, then, that Darwin was acutely sensible of the social consequences of equating men with animals and therefore mind with brian, and that he thus shied from publically revealing his views until the intellectual climate became more tolerant.The history I have examined makes this hypothesis implausible. Even if Darwin warily explored the implications of his emerging theory in his notebooks, his subsequent study of Fleming, Wells, Brougham, and Kirby should have quieted any trepidation. If these natural theologians did not flinch at seeing human reason prefigured in the mind of a worm, should Darwin have? Moreover, he recognized in his M notebook that the thesis of evolutionary continuity between men and animals did not require an explicit avowal of his conviction that brain was the agent of thought.118 And in any case, his materialism was of a rather benign sort; at least he so expressed it in an annotation in Abercrombie's Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers (1838): “By materialism I mean, merely the intimate connection of thought with form of brain — like kind of attraction with nature of element.”119 This belief would have held little terror for British intellectuals, who were quite familiar — some even comfortable-with Locke's anti-Cartesian argument that there was nothing contradictory in supposing God could make matter to think.120 Finally, even if the intellectual atmosphere of early nineteenth-century Britain were inhospitable to Darwin's brand of materialism, there is little reason to believe he breathed a different air at mid-century while preparing his manuscript.That Darwin should not have feared suspicions of materialism, of course, does not mean that he did not. But I think there were other, more persistent sources of anxiety that kept him from rushing to publish: namely, the several conceptual obstacles he had to overcome if his theory of evolution by natural selection were to be made scientifically acceptable. Prominent among these were the problems surrounding his changing notions of instinct.The inertia of his older ideas about instinct at first made it hard for Darwin to gauge how far the theory of natural selection might be applied to behavior. By the early 1840s he finally felt ready to meet the challenge of the natural theologians by providing a naturalistic explanation for the wonderful instincts of animals. In his “Essays” of 1842 and 1844 one sort of instinct is, however, not considered-that of neuter insects. Yet Darwin seems to have appreciated the difficulties such instincts entailed at least by 1843, when he read Kirby and Spence. He simply required time to work out a solution to a problem he initially perceived as “fatal to my whole theory.” Even while writing the “Species Book” in the summer of 1857, he was still juggling several possible solutions compatible with natural selection. It was only a short time before he actually turned to work on the Origin of Species that he appears to have settled on a single explanation for the difficulties posed by the instincts of worker bees and ants. The force of his theory of community selection snapped the last critical support of the creationist hypothesis and, conveniently enough, also fractured the generalized Lamarckian account of the evolution of behavior. These results were worth waiting for. (shrink)

Alexandra Maryanski's cladistic analysis of the last common ancestor to humans and apes reveals biological propensities in hominoids for autonomy, individualism, and weak-tie formation. The evolution of emotional capacities in humans, and the neuroanatomical bases for these capacities, are viewed as representing one of the many compensatory mechanisms for overcoming the low sociality contained in humans’ape ancestry. Speculation on the selection forces involved in hominids’growing capacity to use complex arrays of emotions for mobilizing energy, attuning, sanctioning, moral coding, exchanging (...) and decision-making is conducted with an eye towards redirecting micro-level theorizing in sociology. (shrink)

Are humans too generous and too punitive? Many researchers have concluded that classic theories of social evolution (e.g., direct reciprocity, reputation) are not sufficient to explain human cooperation; instead, group selection theories are needed. We think such a move is premature. The leap to these models has been made by moving directly from thinking about selection pressures to predicting patterns of behavior and ignoring the intervening layer of evolved psychology that must mediate this connection. In real world (...) environments, information processing is a non-trivial problem and details of the ecology can dramatically constrain potential solutions, often enabling particular heuristics to be efficient and effective. We argue that making the intervening layer of psychology explicit resolves decades-old mysteries in the evolution of cooperation and punishment. (shrink)

This article takes an evolutionary “reverse engineering” standpoint on Homo discens, learning man, to track down the mechanisms that played a pivotal role in the natural selection of human being. The approach is “evolutionary sociological”—as opposed to gene-centred or psychologising—and utilises notions of co-evolutionary organism–environment transactions and niche construction. These are compatible with a Deweyan theory of action, which entails that in action one cannot but learn and one can only learn in action. Special attention is paid to apprentice-like (...) learning-by-doing peculiar to human socio-cultural niches since the Pleistocene, which has permitted each subsequent generation to learn the many habits and skills needed in utilising the affordances of action that constitute their ecological niche. Affordances and actions have changed over the history of human–environment transactions, but the core mechanisms of human learning have not changed much. It is increasingly important to appreciate these mechanisms now in the global age “knowledge society,” which is in a way similar to the Pleistocene era: characterised by uncertainty and life-determining problem-situations without any ready-made solutions, it calls for capacities to adapt to changing circumstances, and thus apprentice-like learning in action supported by savvy epistemological engineering of learning environments. (shrink)

The significance of scientific research into the evolution of altruism for environmental ethics can be highlighted through an analysis of recent debates over William Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness. Recent debates over how to explain altruism have become particularly charged with ideological weight because they are seen to have some consequence for how we understand the human moral project, especially with regard to nonhuman life. By analyzing the place of evolutionary theory in the work of environmental ethicists some (...) conclusions can be drawn about the extent to which these debates, and evolutionary research into behavior more generally, are and are not significant for environmental ethics. In particular, the most important issues at stake for environmental ethicists concern the conditions under which altruistic forms of behavior can thrive and the degree to which we can consider intensive forms of altruism to be unstable and anomalous, or rather stable and predictable outcomes of social evolution given favorable conditions. (shrink)

Aspects of human symbolic evolution are studied by scholars active in a variety of fields and disciplines in the life and the behavioral sciences as well as the scientific-philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and linguistic sciences. These fields and disciplines all take on an evolutionary approach to the study of human symbolism, but scholars disagree in their theoretical and methodological attitudes. Theoretically, symbolism is defined differentially as knowledge, behavior, cognition, culture, language, or social group living. Methodologically, the diverse (...) symbolic evolution sciences establish their teachings upon diverging evolutionary biological schools and paradigms. This chapter reviews past and current research fields in human symbolic evolution for how they differentially implement tenets of the major evolution schools that were discussed in the previous chapter. Traditional evolutionary epistemology and biosemiotics bring in a mesoevolutionary outlook by drawing on early Darwinism and evolutionary developmental biology movements that emphasize the role of the organism in evolution. Communication studies instead originally take on a microevolutionary perspective by investigating how units of information are transmitted across generations through time. Only later do they integrate studies on meaning-making at the organismal level. Sociobiology complements a microevolutionary with a macroevolutionary outlook by implementing population genetic approaches, typical of the Modern Synthesis, into studies on individual and group behavior. The new symbolic evolutionary sciences build upon these traditions and include disciplines such as evolutionary psychology, evolutionary linguistics, evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary archaeology, evolutionary sociology, and evolutionary economics. Originally centered on implementing Darwinian selection theory, these fields are now including ecological and evolutionary developmental biology as well as reticulate evolutionary paradigms. As diverse in outlook and scope as they are, no discipline holds a privileged position over the other and all have made valuable contributions to our understanding of human symbolic evolution. (shrink)

E.O. Wilson (1975) described humans as one of the four pinnacles of social evolution. The other pinnacles are the colonial invertebrates, the social insects, and the non-human mammals. Wilson separated human sociality from that of the rest of the mammals because, with the exception of the social insect like Naked Mole Rats, only humans have generated societies of a grade of complexity that approaches that of the social insects and colonial invertebrates. In the (...) last few millennia, human societies have even begun to exceed, in numbers of individuals and degree of complexity, the societies of ants, termites, and corals. (shrink)

This introductory chapter surveys some basic findings on primate evolution and the evolution of mind; examines socially transmitted traditions in relation to the concept of culture; recounts the sources of evidence regarding the evolution of mind and culture; charts the history of evolutionary approaches to mind and behavior since Darwin; reviews several prominent theoretical syntheses concerning the evolution of the human mind and behavior; and, along the way, introduces the specific questions examined in the individual (...) chapters. (shrink)

The evolution of human symbolic capacity must have been very rapid even in some intermediate stage (e.g. the proto-symbolic behavior of Homo erectus). Such a rapid process requires a runaway model. The type of very selective and hyperbolically growing self-organization called “hypercyle” by Eigen and Schuster could explain the rapidity and depth of the evolutionary process, whereas traditional runaway models of sexual selection seem to be rather implausible in the case of symbolic evolution. We assume two levels: (...) at the first level the species is adapted to ecological demands and accumulates the effects of this process in the genome. At the second level a kind of social/cultural knowledge is accumulated via a set of symbolic forms, one of which is language. Bühler’s model of three basic functions of signs can also be elaborated so that its cyclic structure becomes apparent. We assume that the hypercyclic process of semiosis and functional differentiation was triggered in 2 my BP (with the Homo erectus) and got more and more speed with the species Homo sapiens and later. The consequences for the evolutionary stratification of human languages will be drawn in the last section of the paper. The basic aim of the paper is to provide a semiotic (and not just a linguistic) explanation of the origin of language which can be linked to relevant models in evolutionary biology and which exploits the possibilities contained in self-organizing systems. (shrink)

Human beings persist in an extraordinary range of ecological settings, in the process exhibiting enormous behavioural diversity, both within and between populations. People vary in their social, mating and parental behaviour and have diverse and elaborate beliefs, traditions, norms and institutions. The aim of this theme issue is to ask whether, and how, evolutionary theory can help us to understand this diversity. In this introductory article, we provide a background to the debate surrounding how best to understand (...) behavioural diversity using evolutionary models of human behaviour. In particular, we examine how diversity has been viewed by the main subdisciplines within the human evolutionary behavioural sciences, focusing in particular on the human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution approaches. In addition to differences in focus and methodology, these subdisciplines have traditionally varied in the emphasis placed on human universals, ecological factors and socially learned behaviour, and on how they have addressed the issue of genetic variation. We reaffirm that evolutionary theory provides an essential framework for understanding behavioural diversity within and between human populations, but argue that greater integration between the subfields is critical to developing a satisfactory understanding of diversity. (shrink)

Children seem to have a profound implicit knowledge of human behaviour, because they laugh at Bugs Bunny cartoons where much of the humour depends on animals behaving like humans and our intuitive recognition that this is absurd. Scientists, on the other hand, have problems defining what this 'human difference' is. I suggest these problems are of cultural origin. For example, the industrial revolution and the protestant work ethic have created a world in which work is valued over (...) play, object intelligence over social intelligence, and science and technology over the arts. This may explain why we have so many imaging studies of tool-use and object manipulation, but only four studies of dance, two of pretend play, and one of role-play. Yet in order to understand child development, the evolution of the brain, and the emergence of human self-consciousness, we need to look at social displays-- such as dance, song, image-making and role-play-- which underpin human culture, cooperation and the arts. I will discuss recent brain imaging research on playful versus instrumental behaviour and show how, in conjunction with archaeological data, we can use this to make sense of human evolution. (shrink)

Society is the ensemble/the whole of the relations with the others, it is their form based on the natural needs : the perpetuation of the species, the playful expression, the language, the thinking, the communication, the inter-subjectivity report. In the evolution of psychology of human development, sport contributes to the improvement of the body in relation to the environment; of the cognitive, moral development of language, that of complex skills, sensory integrations, games with body schematics, which mobilize self-awareness (...) and structure through learning and experience. Thus, social and communication behaviours generate a mutually advantageous social repertoire. (shrink)

Evolution of Human Behavior is the first text to synthesize and compare the major proposals for human behavioral evolution from an anthropological perspective. Ideal for courses in the evolution of human behavior, human evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, and biological anthropology, this unique volume reviews a wide array of approaches on how and why humans evolved behaviorally.

International human rights law and international humanitarian law (IHL) contain few obligations for rebel groups, yet those groups are nonetheless under pressure to comply with their foundational international norms. This case study of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) analyzes the evolution of its discourse and behavior related to human rights and IHL. It then compares changes in the group’s discourse to evidence of changes in behavior. The study finds that the KLA does significantly change its language, gradually (...) incorporating such language over time, but it also demonstrates that this change is not accompanied by improvements in human rights and IHL adherence in its behavior. The study considers whether greater adoption of these norms is better explained by a constructivist or a rationalist approach and, in particular, looks at the role of legitimacy. In addition, it offers insight into how groups may respond to future pressure to follow these norms. (shrink)

The biological and neurological capacity to symbolize, and the products of behavioral, cognitive, sociocultural, linguistic, and technological uses of symbols (symbolism), are fundamental to every aspect of human life. The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution explores the origins of our characteristically human abilities - our ability to speak, create images, play music, and read and write. The book investigates how symbolization evolved in human evolution and how symbolism is expressed across the various areas (...) of human life. The field is intrinsically interdisciplinary - considering findings from fossil studies, scientific research from primatology, developmental psychology, and of course linguistics. Written by world leading experts, thirty-eight topical chapters are grouped into six thematic parts that respectively focus on epistemological, psychological, anthropological, ethological, linguistic, and social-technological aspects of human symbolic evolution. The handbook presents an in-depth but comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the of the state of the art in the science of human symbolic evolution. This work will be of interest to academics and students active in all fields contributing to the study of human evolution. (shrink)

This article sets out and comments on the arguments of Binmore 's Natural Justice, and specifically on the empirical hypotheses that underpin his social contract view of the foundations of justice. It argues that Binmore 's dependence on the hypothesis that individuals have purely self-regarding preferences forces him to claim that mutual monitoring of free-riding behavior was sufficiently reliable to enforce cooperation in hunter-gatherer societies, and that this makes it hard to explain why intuitions about justice could have evolved, (...) since in such a society intuitions about justice would have had no adaptive advantage. I argue that it is empirically plausible that human beings display systematic other-regarding preferences. These could be incorporated into Binmore 's general framework in a way that would enrich it and make it more useful for solving practical problems about justice. Key Words: natural justice • fairness • norms • evolution • self-regarding preferences • Rawls • social contract. (shrink)

As proposed for the emergence of modern languages, we argue that modern uses of languages (pragmatics) also evolved gradually in our species under the effects of human self‐domestication, with three key aspects involved in a complex feedback loop: (a) a reduction in reactive aggression, (b) the sophistication of language structure (with emerging grammars initially facilitating the transition from physical aggression to verbal aggression); and (c) the potentiation of pragmatic principles governing conversation, including, but not limited to, turn‐taking and inferential (...) abilities. Our core hypothesis is that the reduction in reactive aggression, one of the key factors in self‐domestication processes, enabled us to fully exploit our cognitive and interactional potential as applied to linguistic exchanges, and ultimately to evolve a specific form of communication governed by persuasive reciprocity—a trait of human conversation characterized by both competition and cooperation. In turn, both early crude forms of language, well suited for verbal aggression/insult, and later more sophisticated forms of language, well suited for persuasive reciprocity, significantly contributed to the resolution and reduction of (physical) aggression, thus having a return effect on the self‐domestication processes. Supporting evidence for our proposal, as well as grounds for further testing, comes mainly from the consideration of cognitive disorders, which typically simultaneously present abnormal features of self‐domestication (including aggressive behavior) and problems with pragmatics and social functioning. While various approaches to language evolution typically reduce it to a single factor, our approach considers language evolution as a multifactorial process, with each player acting upon the other, engaging in an intense mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Moreover, we see language evolution as a gradual process, continuous with the pre‐linguistic cognitive abilities, which were engaged in a positive feedback loop with linguistic innovations, and where gene‐culture co‐evolution and cultural niche construction were the main driving forces. (shrink)

Evolutionary change occurs most often through the modification of pre-existing structures. What were the pre-existing circuits in our primate ancestors that paved the way for human language, and how did they change in the lineages leading to our present condition? Among the neural modifications that were critical for human language, there are two of special interest: The origin and evolution of the remarkably rich conceptual world that humans share to the exclusion of other primates, and the origin (...) of neural circuitry that underlies various sequential and hierarchical aspects of language, as utilized for example in syntax and word morphology. The fossil record of brain evolution and the archaeological record provide intriguing clues about these processes. (shrink)

Moral behaviour, based on social norms, is commonly regarded as a hallmark of humans. Hitherto, humans are perceived to be the only species possessing social norms and to engage in moral behaviour. There is anecdotal evidence suggesting their presence in chimpanzees, but systematic studies are lacking. Here, we examine the evolution of human social norms and their underlying psychological mechanisms. For this, we distinguish between conventions, cultural social norms and universal social (...) norms. We aim at exploring whether chimpanzees possess evolutionary precursors of universal social norms seen in humans. Chimpanzees exhibit important preconditions for their presence and enforcement: tolerant societies, well-developed social-cognitive skills and empathetic competence. Here, we develop a theoretical framework for recognizing different functional levels of social norms and distinguish them from mere statistical behavioural regularities. Quasi social norms are found where animals behave functionally moral without having moral emotions. In proto social norms, moral emotions might be present but cannot be collectivized due to the absence of a uniquely human psychological trait, i.e. shared intentionality. Human social norms, whether they are universal or cultural, involve moral emotions and are collectivized. We will discuss behaviours in chimpanzees that represent potential evolutionary precursors of human universal social norms, with special focus on social interactions involving infants. We argue that chimpanzee infants occupy a special status within their communities and propose that tolerance towards them might represent a proto social norm. Finally, we discuss possible ways to test this theoretical framework. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The paper seeks to prove the thesis of the significance and importance of the theories and methodological approaches of historical anthropology, which are aimed at understanding the meanings, essence and value systems of human existence in the past for philosophical anthropology. The study of this problem is relevant for understanding the evolution of human identity with philosophical and anthropological concepts, understanding the essence of one’s own existence and attitude to the world. _Theoretical basis._ The author conducts (...) research in the analysis of the reflexive field of philosophical anthropology and related disciplines, in particular historical anthropology, implemented in the philosophical literature of recent centuries, that is, in the space of non-classical and modern philosophical thought. _Originality._ I raise and substantiate the theoretical question of the scientific significance of the analysis of human existence in the past thanks to the involvement of theoretical approaches and concepts formed in the reflexive field of modern historical and anthropological research. This forms the prerequisites for understanding complex and interdisciplinary explorations of the essence and cultural and spiritual values of human existence. I analyse the problems of the work in the context of the concept of the incompleteness of the project of philosophical anthropology without its involvement in the theoretical achievements of historical-anthropological investigations. _Conclusions._ In my opinion, modern historical and anthropological studies of the essence and meanings of being a person of the past form an extensive theoretical system. It is realized through such theoretical aspects of comprehension of human existence by historical and anthropological studies as "history of mentalities", "microhistory", "history of women", "new cultural history", "history of identity", "history of memory", history of mental aspects of political processes. Methodological approaches and concepts of modern historical anthropology form the basis of mental reconstruction and understanding of the mental and cultural causes and factors of human existence, thanks to the analysis of the evolution of the worldview, behaviour, outlook, various forms of individual and social activity of the individual. (shrink)

Cognitive gadgets are distinctively human cognitive mechanisms – such as imitation, mind reading, and language – that have been shaped by cultural rather than genetic evolution. New gadgets emerge, not by genetic mutation, but by innovations in cognitive development; they are specialised cognitive mechanisms built by general cognitive mechanisms using information from the sociocultural environment. Innovations are passed on to subsequent generations, not by DNA replication, but through social learning: People with new cognitive mechanisms pass them on (...) to others through social interaction. Some of the new mechanisms, like literacy, have spread through human populations, while others have died out, because the holders had more students, not just more babies. The cognitive gadgets hypothesis is developed through four case studies, drawing on evidence from comparative and developmental psychology, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. The framework employed – cultural evolutionary psychology, a descendant of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory – addresses parallel issues across the cognitive and behavioural sciences. In common with evolutionary developmental biology and the extended evolutionary synthesis, cultural evolutionary psychology underlines the importance of developmental processes and environmental factors in the emergence of human cognition. In common with computational approaches, it emphasises the power of general-purpose mechanisms of learning. Cultural evolutionary psychology, however, also challenges use of the behavioural gambit in economics and behavioural ecology, and rejects the view that human minds are composed of “innate modules” or “cognitive instincts.”. (shrink)