What makes fast, cumulative cultural evolution work? Where did it come from? Why is it the sole preserve of humans? We set out a self-assembly hypothesis: cultural evolution evolved culturally. We present an evolutionary account that shows this hypothesis to be coherent, plausible, and worthy of further investigation. It has the following steps: (0) in common with other animals, early hominins had significant capacity for social learning; (1) knowledge and skills learned by offspring from their parents began to spread because (...) bearers had more offspring, a process we call CS1 (or Cultural Selection 1); (2) CS1 shaped attentional learning biases; (3) these attentional biases were augmented by explicit learning biases (judgements about what should be copied from whom). Explicit learning biases enabled (4) the high-fidelity, exclusive copying required for fast cultural accumulation of knowledge and skills by a process we call CS2 (or Cultural Selection 2), and (5) the emergence of cognitive processes such as imitation, mindreading and metacognition – ‘cognitive gadgets’ specialised for cultural learning. This self-assembly hypothesis is consistent with archaeological evidence that the stone tools used by early hominins were not dependent on fast, cumulative cultural evolution, and suggests new priorities for research on ‘animal culture’. (shrink)

"No human now gathers for himself or herself the essential resources for life: food, shelter, clothing, and the like. Humans are obligate co-operator, and this has been true for tens of thousands of years; probably much longer. In this regard, humans are very unusual. Cooperation outside the family is rare: though it can be very profitable, it is also very risky, as cooperation makes an agent vulnerable to incompetence and cheating. This book presents a new picture of the emergence of (...) cooperation in our lineage, developing through four fairly distinct phases from a baseline that was probably fairly similar to living great apes, who cooperate, but in fairly minimal ways. As adults, they rarely depend on others when the outcome really matters. This book suggests that cooperation began to be more important for humans through an initial phase of cooperative foraging generating immediate returns from collective action in small mobile bands. This established in our lineage about 1.8 million years ago, perhaps earlier. Over the rest of the Pleistocene, cooperation became more extended in its social scale, with forms of cooperation between bands gradually establishing, and in spatial and temporal scale too, with various forms of reciprocation becoming important. The final phase was the emergence of cooperation in large scale, hierarchical societies in the Holocene, beginning about 12,000 years ago. This picture is nested in a reading of the archaeological and ethnographic record, and twinned to an account of the gradual elaboration of cultural learning in our lineage, making cooperation both more profitable and more stable"--. (shrink)

Acknowledgments 1. Culture Is Essential 2. Culture Exists 3. Culture Evolves 4. Culture Is an Adaptation 5. Culture Is Maladaptive 6. Culture and Genes Coevolve 7. Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution.

This article has both substantive and methodological goals. Methodologically, it shows that rational choice theory is an especially important tool for guiding research in contexts in which agents appear to be acting against their best interests. The Neolithic transition is one such case, and the article develops a substantive conception of that transition, illustrating the heuristic power of behavioral ecology.

Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Here, Kitcher elaborates his radical vision of this millennia-long ethical project.

At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation.".

Against the background of “arms race” style competitive explanations for complex human cognition, such as the Social Intelligence Hypothesis Growing points in ethology, Cambridge University Press, pp 303–317, 1976; Jolly in Science, 10.1126/science.153.3735.501, 1966), and theories that tie complex cognition with environmental variability more broadly The evolution of intelligence, Lawrence Earlbaum and Associates, 2001), the idea that culturally inherited mechanisms for social cognition would be more capable of responding to the labile social environment is a compelling one. Whilst it is (...) tempting to think that the evolvability of culturally inherited cognitive mechanisms such as Cecilia Heyes’ cognitive gadgets would be akin to culturally inherited tools like axes or canoes, I draw on established theory in evolutionary developmental biology to show that this is a mistake. Their causal translucency, along with the degree to which they would be integrated within the organism, make cognitive gadgets far more like genetically inherited traits with respect to their evolvability. Consequently, their evolution is unlikely to be particularly fast or nimble. In making clear the constraints on the evolution of culturally inherited cognition and how they must influence our theorising the discussion also highlights the value of thinking about evolvability in this domain. (shrink)

(From the Press's Website) -/- Winner of the 2004 Lakatos Prize, Thought in a Hostile World is an exploration of the evolution of cognition, especially human cognition, by one of today's foremost philosophers of biology and of mind. Features an exploration of the evolution of human cognition. Written by one of today’s foremost philosophers of mind and language. Presents a set of analytic tools for thinking about cognition and its evolution. Offers a critique of nativist, modular versions of evolutionary psychology, (...) rejecting the example of language as a model for thinking about human cognitive capacities. Applies to the areas of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and evolutionary psychology. -/- . (shrink)