There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model, (...) together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature. It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations. Key Words: altruism; cognitive empathy ; comparative; emotion; emotional contagion; empathy ; evolution; human; perception-action; perspective taking. (shrink)

The communicative phenomena of tonal music and speech observed in all human societies differ qualitatively from other human sound expressions. This difference consists mainly of the fact that both tonal music and speech are generative, i.e., they are composed of a limited number of discrete, perceptual units organized according to some tacit rules. In the case of tonal music, these units are experienced as pitch classes ordered in time. Listening to tonally organized pitch classes leads to the experience of specific (...) and relative emotions. These emotional qualities are called tonal qualia (often described as different tinges of tension and relaxation, or instability and stability), which are elicited thanks to our predictions concerning musical pitch structure. However, the emotional component of the recognition of musical structure seems to be incomparable with the experience of speech structure or other generative phenomena. Therefore, I propose that emotional reactions to mentally discrete pitches became an important part of the cognitive mechanism designated for music perception. I suggest that the general mechanism of prediction which acts permanently during the perception of the external world was specifically incorporated into the processing of musical pitch structure. As a result, a new, cortico-subcortical loop evolved that enables the recognition of musical pitch structure. The connection and exploitation of separate, evolutionarily old mechanisms for a new adaptive function is accordant with the evolutionary operational rule called “tinkering.” I will also discuss possible adaptive functions of pitch structure and the evolution of the ability to recognize tonal qualia by means of the Baldwin effect. (shrink)

A variety of different arguments have been offered for teaching ‘‘both sides’’ of the evolution/ID debate in public schools. This article reviews five of the most common types of arguments advanced by proponents of Intelligent Design and demonstrates how and why they are founded on confusion and misunderstanding. It argues on behalf of teaching evolution, and relegating discussion of ID to philosophy or history courses.

Sexual size dimorphism is generally associated with sexual selection via agonistic male competition in nonhuman primates. These primate models play an important role in understanding the origins and evolution of human behavior. Human size dimorphism is often hypothesized to be associated with high rates of male violence and polygyny. This raises the question of whether human dimorphism and patterns of male violence are inherited from a common ancestor with chimpanzees or are uniquely derived. Here I review patterns of, and causal (...) models for, dimorphism in humans and other primates. While dimorphism in primates is associated with agonistic male mate competition, a variety of factors can affect male and female size, and thereby dimorphism. The causes of human sexual size dimorphism are uncertain, and could involve several non-mutually-exclusive mechanisms, such as mate competition, resource competition, intergroup violence, and female choice. A phylogenetic reconstruction of the evolution of dimorphism, including fossil hominins, indicates that the modern human condition is derived. This suggests that at least some behavioral similarities with Pan associated with dimorphism may have arisen independently, and not directly from a common ancestor. (shrink)

Competition over reproductive opportunities among members of one sex often harms the opposite sex, creating a conflict of interest between individual males and females. Recently, this battle of the sexes has become a paradigm in the study of intersexual coevolution. Here, we review recent theoretical and empirical advances suggesting that – as in any scenario of intraspecific competition – selfishness (competitiveness) can be influenced by the genetic relatedness of competitors. When competitors are positively related (e.g. siblings), an individual may refrain (...) from harming its competitor(s) and their mate(s) because this can improve the focal individual's inclusive fitness. These findings reveal that population genetic structure might be of paramount importance when studying the battle of the sexes. We conclude by identifying some new lines of research at the interface of sexual selection and social evolution. (shrink)

Management theory and practice are facing unprecedented challenges. The lack of sustainability, the increasing inequity, and the continuous decline in societal trust pose a threat to ‘business as usual’. Capitalism is at a crossroad and scholars, practitioners, and policy makers are called to rethink business strategy in light of major external changes. In the following, we review an alternative view of human beings that is based on a renewed Darwinian theory developed by Lawrence and Nohria. We label this alternative view (...) ‘humanistic’ and draw distinctions to current ‘economistic’ conceptions. We then develop the consequences that this humanistic view has for business organizations, examining business strategy, governance structures, leadership forms, and organizational culture. Afterward, we outline the influences of humanism on management in the past and the present, and suggest options for humanism to shape the future of management. In this manner, we will contribute to the discussion of alternative management paradigms that help solve the current crises. (shrink)

Drawing on insights from evolutionary psychology and modern neuroscience, this paper highlights propositions about human nature that have far reaching consequences, when applied to leadership. We specifically examine the main factors of human survival and extend them to a model for leadership in the twenty-first century. The discussion concludes with an outlook on the organizational and structural conditions that would allow for better and more balanced leadership.

Why has responsible management been so difficult and why is the chorus of stakeholders demanding such responsibility getting louder? We argue that management learning has been framed within the narrative of economism. As such, we argue that managers need to be aware of the paradigmatic frame of the dominant economistic narrative and learn to transcend it. We also argue that for true managerial responsibility, an alternative humanistic narrative is more fit for purpose. This humanistic narrative is based on epistemological metaphors (...) and ontological insights that integrate the latest insights from evolutionists suggesting that humans only survived by being responsible. This understanding has consequences for responsible management learning in that it focuses on dignity literacy, balance orientation, as well as creativity and innovation for the common good. We argue that managerial learning within a humanistic paradigm is more likely to lead to ethical and sustainable business conduct. (shrink)

Philosophical inquiries into morality are as old as philosophy, but it may turn out that morality itself is much, much older than that. At least, that is the main thesis of prima- tologist Frans De Waal, who in this short book based on his Tanner Lectures at Princeton, elaborates on what biologists have been hinting at since Darwin’s (1871) book The Descent of Man and Hamilton’s (1963) studies on the evolution of altruism: morality is yet another allegedly human characteristic that (...) turns out to be built over evolutionary time by natural. (shrink)

Amit's “Attractor Neural Network” perspective on cognition raises difficult technical problems already met by prior dynamical models. This commentary sketches briefly some of them concerning the internal topological structure of attractors, the constituency problem, the possibility of activating simultaneously several attractors, and the different kinds of dynamical structures one can use to model brain activity: point attractors, strange attractors, synchronized arrays of oscillators, synfire chains, and so forth.

Although emotion is closely associated with motivation, and interacts with perception, cognition, and action, many conceptualizations still treat emotion as separate from these domains. Here, a comparative/evolutionary anatomy framework is presented to motivate the idea that long-range, distributed circuits involving the midbrain, thalamus, and forebrain are central to emotional processing. It is proposed that emotion can be understood in terms of large-scale network interactions spanning the neuroaxis that form “functionally integrated systems.” At the broadest level, the argument is made that (...) we need to move beyond a Newtonian view of causation to one involving complex systems where bidirectional influences and nonlinearities abound. Therefore, understanding interactions between subsystems and signal integration becomes central to unraveling the organization of the emotional brain. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have often favoured reductive approaches to how-possibly explanation. This article identifies three alternative conceptions making how-possibly explanation an interesting phenomenon in its own right. The first variety approaches “how possibly X?” by showing that X is not epistemically impossible. This can sometimes be achieved by removing misunderstandings concerning the implications of one’s current belief system but involves characteristically a modification of this belief system so that acceptance of X does not result in contradiction. The second variety offers (...) a potential how-explanation of X. It is usually followed by a range of further potential how-explanations of the same phenomenon. In recent literature the factual claims implied by the second variety have been downplayed whereas the heuristic role of mapping the space of conceptual possibilities has been emphasized. I will focus especially on this truth-bracketing sense of potentiality when looking closer at the second variety in the paper. The third variety has attracted less interest. It presents a partial how-explanation of X. Typically it aims to establish the existence of a mechanism by which X could be and was generated. The third conception stands out as the natural alternative for the advocate of ontic how-possibly explanations. This article transfers Salmon’s view that explanation-concepts can be broadly divided into epistemic, modal, and ontic to the context of how-possibly explanations. Moreover, it is argued that each of the three above-mentioned varieties of how-possibly explanation occurs in science. To recognize this may be especially relevant for philosophers. We are often misled by the promises of various why-explanation accounts, and seem to have forgotten nearly everything about the diversity of how-possibly explanations. (shrink)

Deciphering nonhuman communication – particularly nonhuman vocal communication – has been a longstanding human quest. We are, for example, fascinated by the songs of birds and whales, the grunts of apes, the barks of dogs, and the croaks of frogs; we wonder about their potential meaning and their relationship to human language. Do these utterances express little more than emotional states, or do they convey actual bits and bytes of concrete information? Humans’ numerous attempts to decipher nonhuman systems have, however, (...) progressed slowly. We still wonder why only a small number of species are capable of vocal learning, a trait that, because it allows for innovation and adaptation, would seem to be a prerequisite for most language-like abilities. Humans have also attempted to teach nonhumans elements of our system, using both vocal and nonvocal systems. The rationale for such training is that the extent of success in instilling symbolic reference provides some evidence for, at the very least, the cognitive underpinnings of parallels between human and nonhuman communication systems. However, separating acquisition of reference from simple object-label association is not a simple matter, as reference begins with such associations, and the point at which true reference emerges is not always obvious. I begin by discussing these points and questions, predominantly from the viewpoint of someone studying avian abilities. I end by examining the question posed by Premack: do nonhumans that have achieved some level of symbolic reference then process information differently from those that have not? I suggest the answer is likely “yes,” giving examples from my research on Grey parrots. (shrink)

In our opinion, the discontinuity between extant human and nonhuman minds is much broader and deeper than most researchers admit. We are happy to report that Evans & Levinson's (E&L's) target article strongly corroborates our unpopular hypothesis, and that the comparative evidence, in turn, bolsters E&L's provocative argument. Both a Universal Grammar and the “mental continuity” between human and nonhuman minds turn out to be modern myths.

Work throughout the history and philosophy of biology frequently employs ‘chance’, ‘unpredictability’, ‘probability’, and many similar terms. One common way of understanding how these concepts were introduced in evolution focuses on two central issues: the first use of statistical methods in evolution (Galton), and the first use of the concept of “objective chance” in evolution (Wright). I argue that while this approach has merit, it fails to fully capture interesting philosophical reflections on the role of chance expounded by two of (...) Galton's students, Karl Pearson and W.F.R. Weldon. Considering a question more familiar from contemporary philosophy of biology—the relationship between our statistical theories of evolution and the processes in the world those theories describe—is, I claim, a more fruitful way to approach both these two historical actors and the broader development of chance in evolution. (shrink)

Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate (...) the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds. (shrink)

In our target article, we argued that there is a profound functional discontinuity between the cognitive abilities of modern humans and those of all other extant species. Unsurprisingly, our hypothesis elicited a wide range of responses from commentators. After responding to the commentaries, we conclude that our hypothesis lies closer to Darwin's views on the matter than to those of many of our contemporaries.

Secular change in sex ratios is examined in relation to experience in the family. Two theoretical perspectives are outlined: Guttentag and Secord’s (1983) adaptation of social exchange theory, and sexual selection theory. Because of large-scale change in number of births and typical age differentials between men and women at marriage, low sex ratios at couple formation ages existed in the U.S. between 1965 and the early 1980s. The currently high sex ratios, however, will persist until the end of the century. (...) High sex ratios appear to be associated with lower divorce rates, male commitment to careers that promise economic rewards, male willingness to engage in child care, higher fertility, and higher rates of sexual violence. Sexual selection theory calls attention to intrasexual competition in the numerically larger sex. (shrink)

Why should music be of interest to cognitive scientists, and what role does it play in human cognition? We review three factors that make music an important topic for cognitive scientific research. First, music is a universal human trait fulfilling crucial roles in everyday life. Second, music has an important part to play in ontogenetic development and human evolution. Third, appreciating and producing music simultaneously engage many complex perceptual, cognitive, and emotional processes, rendering music an ideal object for studying the (...) mind. We propose an integrated status for music cognition in the Cognitive Sciences and conclude by reviewing challenges and big questions in the field and the way in which these reflect recent developments. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that the question of the relative importance of innate characteristics and institutional arrangements in explaining human difference was vehemently contested in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus Sir Francis Galton’s work of the 1860s should be seen as an intervention in a pre-existing controversy. The central figure in these earlier debates—as well as many later ones—was the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill. In Mill’s view, human nature was fundamentally shaped by (...) history and culture, factors that accounted for most mental and behavioral differences between men and women and among people of different classes, nationalities, and races. Indeed, Mill’s whole program of social reform depended on the assumption that human differences were not fixed by nature. To identify the leading figures in these disputes about difference and the concrete context in which they occurred, we explore three debates in which Mill played a key role: over the capacities and rights of women, the viability of peasant proprietorship in India and Ireland, and the status of black labor in Jamaica. The last two draw our attention to the important colonial context of the nature–nurture debate. We also show that ideas that for us seem of a piece were not always linked for these earlier thinkers, nor did views on innateness necessarily have the political correlates that we now take for granted. (shrink)

The great majority of species that lived on this earth have gone extinct. These extinctions are often explained by invoking changes in the environment, to which the species has been unable to adapt. Evolutionary suicide is an alternative explanation to such extinctions. It is an evolutionary process in which a viable population adapts in such a way that it can no longer persist. In this paper different models, where evolutionary suicide occurs are discussed, and the theory behind the phenomenon is (...) reviewed. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the main lines of three hypotheses in the current literature concerning the evolutionary pace which characterized the natural history of human language: the “continuist” and gradualist perspective, the “discontinuist” and evolution-free perspective, and the “punctuationist” view. This current debate appears to have a long history, which starts at least from Darwin’s time. The article highlights the similarities between the old and the modern debates in terms of history of ideas, and it shows the current limits of each (...) of these perspectives. In the final part, we present an alternative approach which considers human language not as a single trait, but as the result of a mosaic of different elements, some of which recently evolved, and some others gradually evolved and phylogenetically ancient. When matched with a tree thinking and comparative perspective, this view suggests that expressions of symbolic and linguistic behaviors in other human species could have preceded the more complex and systematic behaviors showed by Homo sapiens. (shrink)

Music is an ancient and ubiquitous form of human expression. One important component for which music is sought after is its aesthetic value, whose appreciation has typically been associated with largely learned, culturally determined factors, such as education, exposure, and social pressure. However, neuroscientific evidence shows that the aesthetic response to music is often associated with automatic, physically- and biologically-grounded events, such as shivers, chills, increased heart rate, and motor synchronization, suggesting the existence of an underlying biological platform upon which (...) contextual factors may act. Drawing on philosophical notions and neuroscientific evidence, I argue that, although there is no denying that social and cultural context play a substantial role in shaping the aesthetic response to music, these act upon largely universal, biological mechanisms involved with neural processing. I propose that the simultaneous presence of culturally-influenced and biologically-determined contributions to the aesthetic response to music epitomizes Baumgarten’s equation of sensory perception with taste. Taking the argument one step further, I suggest that the heavily embodied aesthetic response to music bridges the cleavage between the two discrepant meanings—the one referring to sensory perception, the other referring to judgments of taste—traditionally attributed to the word “aesthetics” in the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

The position advanced in this paper is that the bedrock of emotional feelings is contained within the evolved emotional action apparatus of mammalian brains. This dual-aspect monism approach to brain–mind functions, which asserts that emotional feelings may reflect the neurodynamics of brain systems that generate instinctual emotional behaviors, saves us from various conceptual conundrums. In coarse form, primary process affective consciousness seems to be fundamentally an unconditional “gift of nature” rather than an acquired skill, even though those systems facilitate skill (...) acquisition via various felt reinforcements. Affective consciousness, being a comparatively intrinsic function of the brain, shared homologously by all mammalian species, should be the easiest variant of consciousness to study in animals. This is not to deny that some secondary processes cannot be evaluated in animals with sufficiently clever behavioral learning procedures, as with place-preference procedures and the analysis of changes in learned behaviors after one has induced re-valuation of incentives. Rather, the claim is that a direct neuroscientific study of primary process emotional/affective states is best achieved through the study of the intrinsic , albeit experientially refined, emotional action tendencies of other animals. In this view, core emotional feelings may reflect the neurodynamic attractor landscapes of a variety of extended trans-diencephalic, limbic emotional action systems—including SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. Through a study of these brain systems, the neural infrastructure of human and animal affective consciousness may be revealed. Emotional feelings are instantiated in large-scale neurodynamics that can be most effectively monitored via the ethological analysis of emotional action tendencies and the accompanying brain neurochemical/electrical changes. The intrinsic coherence of such emotional responses is demonstrated by the fact that they can be provoked by electrical and chemical stimulation of specific brain zones—effects that are affectively laden. For substantive progress in this emerging research arena, animal brain researchers need to discuss affective brain functions more openly. Secondary awareness processes, because of their more conditional, contextually situated nature, are more difficult to understand in any neuroscientific detail. In other words, the information-processing brain functions, critical for cognitive consciousness, are harder to study in other animals than the more homologous emotional/motivational affective state functions of the brain. (shrink)

Recent work by Stout and colleagues indicates that the neural correlates of language and Early Stone Age toolmaking overlap significantly. The aim of this paper is to add computational detail to their findings. I use an error minimisation model to outline where the information processing overlap between toolmaking and language lies. I argue that the Early Stone Age signals the emergence of complex structured representations. I then highlight a feature of my account: It allows us to understand the early evolution (...) of syntax in terms of an increase in the number and complexity of models in a cognitive system, rather than the development of new types of processing. (shrink)

Flanagan (1991) was the first contemporary philosopher to suggest that a modularity of morals hypothesis (MMH) was worth consideration by cognitive science. There is now a serious empirically informed proposal that moral competence is best explained in terms of moral modules-evolutionarily ancient, fast-acting, automatic reactions to particular sociomoral experiences (Haidt & Joseph, 2007). MMH fleshes out an idea nascent in Aristotle, Mencius, and Darwin. We discuss the evidence for MMH, specifically an ancient version, “Mencian Moral Modularity,” which claims four innate (...) modules, and “Social Intuitionist Modularity,” which claims five innate modules. We compare these two moral modularity models, discuss whether the postulated modules are best conceived as perceptual/Fodorian or emotional/Darwinian, and consider whether assuming MMH true has any normative ethical consequences whatsoever. The discussion of MMH reconnects cognitive science with normative ethics in a way that involves the reassertion of the “is-ought” problem. We explain in a new way what this problem is and why it would not yield. The reason does not involve the logic of “ought,” but rather the plasticity of human nature and the realistic options to “grow” and “do” human nature in multifarious legitimate ways. (shrink)

In War Before Civilization, Lawrence H. Keeley argues that prehistoric as well as primitive mankind was more warlike than has been recognized by most scholars. Such scholars subscribe, according to Keeley, to “the myth of the peaceful savage,” the subtitle of his book. But Keeley, who leads a long list of Hawks, has replaced this myth with another, the “myth of the warlike savage.” Anthropologists who argue that serious warfare arose only after the rise of the state and civilization understate (...) the extent of serious warfare in prehistory. The evidence for warfare among primates, prehistoric mankind, early agriculturalists, and primitive peoples suggests that the truth lies somewhere between the myth of the peaceful savage and the myth of the warlike savage. (shrink)

If we arrange in chronological order the various statements Darwin made about God, creation, design, plan, law, and so forth, that I have discussed, there emerges a picture of a consistent development in Darwin's religious views from the orthodoxy of his youth to the agnosticism of his later years. Numerous sources attest that at the beginning of the Beagle voyage Darwin was more or less orthodox in religion and science alike.78 After he became a transmutationist early in 1837, he concluded (...) that the doctrine of secondary causes must be extented even to the history of life and that after the first forms of life were created, there was no further need for divine intervention, except where man was concerned. Man's body, he thought, was produced by the process of transmutation, but he believed for a time that man's soul was “superadded.” By mid-1838 he had become convinced that nothing, after the creation of life, was due to miracles. God works only through laws, which are capable of producing “every effect of evey kind which surrounds us.” The existence of man, the idea of God in man's mind, and the harmony of the whole system were in his eyes prearranged goals of deterministic laws imposed by God. Such a conception excludes the miracles on which Christianity depends; but it is not possible to say whether Darwin's loss of Christian faith, which occurred at about this same time, preceded and made possible his “materialism” or was rather caused or hastened by it.79 In the weeks after his reading of Malthus, Darwin's belief in a plan of creation gave way to the belief that God created matter and life and designed their laws, leaving the details, however, to the workings of chance. This remained his view until the 1860s.There is no exact parallel between this development of Darwin's religious views and the development of his ideas on evolution, but there is a general correspondence. When he believed in a plan of creation, Darwin's theory of transmutation did not depend on struggle or the selection of chance variations. Adaptation was, for him, an automatic response to environmental chance. From late 1838 to 1859 he believed in designed laws and chance, and this belief, too, has its parallel in his theory. The element of chance in natural selection meant that there could be no detailed plan,in which even man's idea of God would be a necessary outcome of nature's laws (man himself is not a necessary outcome of the working of natural selection).80 But Darwin still believed nature was programmed to achieve certain general ends. We might say that he believed in a general, though not a special, teleology. Natural selection was for him a law to maximize utility, creating useful organs, retaining vestiges for future use. For many years it was a law designed to produce organisms perfectly adapted to their environments. Only later did Darwin come to doubt even this sort of design in nature.81 One way of describing the development of Darwin's evolutionary thought is to say that it shows a gradual abandoning of his “theistic” assumptions, so that by the late 1860s his theory was informed to a slighter extent by notions of purpose and design than it was in 1838 or 1844 or 1859. (shrink)

For a number of years, the debate in evolutionary biology over the ’levels of selection’ has attracted intense interest from philosophers of science. The main question concerns the level of the biological hierarchy at which natural selection occurs. Does selection act on organisms, genes, groups, colonies, demes, species, or some combination of these? According to traditional Darwinian theory the answer is the organism -- it is the differential survival and reproduction of individual organisms that drives the evolutionary process. But there (...) are alternative views too, including pluralist views which say that the choice between different levels of selection is often a matter of perspective, not empirical fact. (shrink)

My comments will focus on the second and third chapters of Sober’s book , which explore Darwin’s ideas about altruism, group selection and kin selection , and sex-ratio evolution . Sober makes a persuasive argument for his main claim: that Darwin was a subtler thinker on these topics than he is often taken to be. While there is much that I admire in Sober’s lucid discussion, I will focus on points of disagreement. Readers should note that this is not the (...) first time that Sober and I have disagreed on these issues .Sober begins his chapter on group selection with a brief history of the modern debate on the topic, which began in earnest in the 1960s. One of the key figures in this debate was George Williams, whose book Adaptation and Natural Selection helped convince many biologists that group selection was unlikely to be an important factor in evolution. Sober is critical of many of Williams’ arguments, though .. (shrink)

Music and language are universal human abilities with many apparent similarities relating to their acoustics, structure, and frequent use in social situations. We might therefore expect them to be understood and processed similarly, and indeed an emerging body of research suggests that this is the case. But the focus has historically been on the individual, looking at the passive listener or the isolated speaker or performer, even though social interaction is the primary site of use for both domains. Nonetheless, an (...) important goal of emerging research is to compare music and language in terms of acoustics and structure, social interaction, and functional origins to develop parallel accounts across the two domains. Indeed, a central aim of both of evolutionary musicology and language evolution research is to understand the adaptive significance or functional origin of human music and language. An influential proposal to emerge in recent years has been referred to as the social bonding hypothesis. Here, within a comparative approach to animal communication systems, I review empirical studies in support of the social bonding hypothesis in humans, non-human primates, songbirds, and various other mammals. In support of this hypothesis, I review six research fields: (i) the functional origins of music; (ii) the functional origins of language; (iii) mechanisms of social synchrony for human social bonding; (iv) language and social bonding in humans; (v) music and social bonding in humans; and (vi) pitch, tone and emotional expression in human speech and music. I conclude that the comparative study of complex vocalizations and behaviors in various extant species can provide important insights into the adaptive function(s) of these traits in these species, as well as offer evidence-based speculations for the existence of “musilanguage” in our primate ancestors, and thus inform our understanding of the biology and evolution of human music and language. (shrink)

Despite the harsh scientific basis of Social Darwinism, its followers strove to unify nature with humane feelings—for world views necessarily attempt such reconciliations. To answer the difficult “problem of evil” posed by natural selection and survival of the fittest, Social Darwinists such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Herbert Spencer resorted to three kinds of theodicy: sentimental denial of the problem, belief in progress, and belief in perfection. Spencer's writings particulary display at different times both a rigid individualism and (...) a softer organicism. Eventually, however, T. H. Huxley would abandon the attempt, acknowledging in effect that no complete world view was possible. (shrink)

There is long-standing conflict between genealogical and developmental accounts of homology. This paper provides a general framework that shows that these accounts are compatible and clarifies precisely how they are related. According to this framework, understanding homology requires both an abstract genealogical account that unifies the application of the term to all types of characters used in phylogenetic systematics and locally enriched accounts that apply only to specific types of characters. The genealogical account serves this unifying role by relying on (...) abstract notions of ‘descent’ and ‘character’. As a result, it takes for granted the existence of such characters. This requires theoretical justification that is provided by enriched accounts, which incorporate the details by which characters are inherited. These enriched accounts apply to limited domains, providing the needed theoretical justification for recognizing characters within that domain. Though connected to the genealogical account of homology in this way, enriched accounts include phenomena that fall outside the scope of the genealogical account. They therefore overlap, but are not nested within, the genealogical account. Developmental accounts of homology are to be understood as enriched accounts of body part homology. Once they are seen in this light, the conflict with the genealogical account vanishes. It is only by understanding the fine conceptual structure undergirding the many uses of the term ‘homology’ that we can understand how these uses hang together. (shrink)

ArgumentThe spread of Darwinian ideas by the late nineteenth century in Argentina transformed the intellectual elites' notion of progress and civilization. While before Darwin, union, harmony, and assimilation were the ideas most commonly associated with the civilizatory process; variation, struggle, and divergence dominated the post-Darwin discussion. More importantly, unlike in Europe, in Argentina the theory not only triggered interest in the process of speciation, but also its relationship with extinction. Extinction became the benchmark of progress, and the sign of success (...) for the nation. If the country was civilizing itself, the “natural” elimination of inferior individuals, unfit for the struggle for existence, had to be proved and displayed. The origin of modernity was here associated with the existence of evolutionary waste that revealed the work of natural selection on behalf of national improvement. (shrink)