The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique

by Sterelny, Kim

• ISBN13: 9780262016797
• ISBN10: 0262016796
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-27
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from other great apes. No other great ape lineage--including those of chimpanzees and gorillas--seems to have undergone such a profound transformation. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes. Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information sharing practices across generations and how information sharing transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging, which led to positive feedback linking ecological cooperation, cultural learning, and environmental change. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
The Challenge of Novelty	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
The Social Intelligence Hypothesis	p. 6
Cooperative Foraging	p. 10
Cooperative Foraging and Knowledge Accumulation	p. 12
Life in a Changing World	p. 16
Accumulating Cognitive Capital	p. 23
A Lineage Explanation of Social Learning	p. 23
Feedback Loops	p. 29
The Apprentice Learning Model	p. 34
Adapted Individuals, Adapted Environments	p. 45
Behavioral Modernity	p. 45
The Symbolic Species	p. 48
Public Symbols and Social Worlds	p. 52
Preserving and Expanding Information	p. 55
Niche Construction and Neanderthal Extinction	p. 62
The Human Cooperation Syndrome	p. 73
Triggering Cooperation	p. 73
A Cooperation Complex	p. 75
The Grandmother Hypothesis	p. 80
Foragers: Ancient and Modern	p. 89
Hunting: Provisioning or Signaling?	p. 94
Costs and Commitments	p. 101
Free Riders	p. 101
Control and Commitment	p. 103
Commitment Mechanisms	p. 106
Signals, Investments, and Interventions	p. 109
Hunting and Commitment	p. 113
Commitment through Investment	p. 118
Primitive Trust	p. 122
Signals, Cooperation, and Learning	p. 125
Sperber's Dilemma	p. 125
Two Faces of Cultural Learning	p. 130
Honesty Mechanisms	p. 132
The Folk as Educators	p. 143
From Skills to Norms	p. 151
Norms and Communities	p. 151
Moral Nativism	p. 153
Self-Control, Vigilance, and Persuasion	p. 155
Reactive and Reflective Moral Response 1	p. 60
Moral Apprentices	p. 163
The Biological Preparation of Moral Development	p. 165
The Expansion of Cultural Learning	p. 169
Cooperation and Conflict	p. 173
Group Selection	p. 173
Strong Reciprocity and Human Cooperation	p. 178
Children of Strife?	p. 186
The Holocene: A World Queerer Than We Realized?	p. 190
Notes	p. 199
References	p. 211
Index	p. 237
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