Of Related Interest
, Second EditionOverview
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.
About the Author
Kim Sterelny is Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. His books include Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt; second edition, MIT Press, 1999); Thought in a Hostile World, Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest; and The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited (coedited with Brett Calcott; MIT Press, 2011).
Table of Contents
- The Evolved Apprentice
- The Jean Nicod Lectures
- Francois Recanati, editor
- The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics ,
- Jerry A. Fodor (1994)
- Naturalizing the Mind ,
- Fred Dretske (1995)
- Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior ,
- Jon Elster (1999)
- Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness ,
- John Perry (2001)
- Rationality in Action ,
- John R. Searle (2001)
- Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures ,
- Ruth Garrett Millikan (2004)
- Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness ,
- Daniel C. Dennett (2005)
- Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World ,
- Zenon W. Pylyshyn (2007)
- Reliable Reasoning: Induction and Statistical Learning Theory ,
- Gilbert Harman and Sanjeev Kulkarni (2007)
- Origins of Human Communication ,
- Michael Tomasello (2008)
- The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique ,
- Kim Sterelny (2012)
- The Evolved Apprentice :
- How Evolution Made Humans Unique
- Kim Sterelny
- A Bradford Book
- The MIT Press
- Cambridge, Massachusetts
- London, England
- ©
- 2012
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
- For information about special quantity discounts, please e-mail special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu
- This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Graphic Composition, Inc. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
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- Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
- Sterelny, Kim. The evolved apprentice : how evolution made humans unique / Kim Sterelny. p. cm.—(Jean Nicod lectures) “A Bradford book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01679-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Evolutionary psychology. 2. Cooperation. I. Title. BF698.95.S735 2012 155.7—dc23 2011020798
- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
- For my daughter, Kate Nolan Sterelny, with thanks for tolerating my eccentricities and absences
- Contents
- Contents
- Contents
- Series Foreword ix
- Preface xi
- 1 The Challenge of Novelty 1
- 1.1 Introduction 1
- 1.2 The Social Intelligence Hypothesis 6
- 1.3 Cooperative Foraging 10
- 1.4 Cooperative Foraging and Knowledge Accumulation 12
- 1.5 Life in a Changing World 16
- 2 Accumulating Cognitive Capital 23
- 2.1 A Lineage Explanation of Social Learning 23
- 2.2 Feedback Loops 29
- 2.3 The Apprentice Learning Model 34
- 3 Adapted Individuals, Adapted Environments 45
- 3.1 Behavioral Modernity 45
- 3.2 The Symbolic Species 48
- 3.3 Public Symbols and Social Worlds 52
- 3.4 Preserving and Expanding Information 55
- 3.5 Niche Construction and Neanderthal Extinction 62
- 4 The Human Cooperation Syndrome 73
- 4.1 Triggering Cooperation 73
- 4.2 A Cooperation Complex 75
- 4.3 The Grandmother Hypothesis 80
- 4.4 Foragers: Ancient and Modern 89
- 4.5 Hunting: Provisioning or Signaling? 94
- 5 Costs and Commitments 101
- 5.1 Free Riders 101
- 5.2 Control and Commitment 103
- 5.3 Commitment Mechanisms 106
- 5.4 Signals, Investments, and Interventions 109
- 5.5 Hunting and Commitment 113
- 5.6 Commitment through Investment 118
- 5.7 Primitive Trust 122
- 6 Signals, Cooperation, and Learning 125
- 6.1 Sperber’s Dilemma 125
- 6.2 Two Faces of Cultural Learning 130
- 6.3 Honesty Mechanisms 132
- 6.4 The Folk as Educators 143
- 7 From Skills to Norms 151
- 7.1 Norms and Communities 151
- 7.2 Moral Nativism 153
- 7.3 Self-Control, Vigilance, and Persuasion 155
- 7.4 Reactive and Reflective Moral Response 160
- 7.5 Moral Apprentices 163
- 7.6 The Biological Preparation of Moral Development 165
- 7.7 The Expansion of Cultural Learning 169
- 8 Cooperation and Conflict 173
- 8.1 Group Selection 173
- 8.2 Strong Reciprocity and Human Cooperation 178
- 8.3 Children of Strife? 186
- 8.4 The Holocene: A World Queerer Than We Realized? 190
- Notes 199
- References 211
- Index 237
Reviews
“The author's imposing scholarship, skill in philosophical analysis, and conscientious scientific methodology make this work a definitive critical discussion of current controversies concerning how humans evolved.”—H. C. Byerly,Choice
Endorsements
“Kim Sterelny has written a superb account of the evolution of humankind, remarkable for its breadth of vision and the range of evidence on which it draws. He reminds us how much natural selection can achieve, given vast enough stretches of time, from the accumulation of tiny physical and cultural changes too small to seem important to their immediate observers, but collectively adding up to nothing less than a revolution for our species and for our planet.”
—Paul Seabright, Toulouse School of Economics
“In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny casts a sharp philosopher's eye on rather contentious ideas about how we evolved into a highly distinctive species over the last few million years. He wants to make these ideas square with the evidence, sorting genuine contributions of various scholars--from often too-strong claims based on an incomplete consideration--of all the available evidence. His apprentice learning proposal is a judicious distillation of both ideas and empiricism.”
—Peter Richerson, University of California-Davis
“The Evolved Apprentice is first and foremost a hypothesis about the origins of the human mind. Sterelny--arguably the world's leading philosopher of biology--has produced a wonderfully informed and readable treatise detailing how the construction of a nurturing environment in which others can learn has generated the positive feedback that made the difference and rendered humanity cognitively special. And I, for one, think that he is right.”
—Kevin N. Laland, Professor of Biology, University of St. Andrews
Awards
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2012