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Cecilia Heyes’s Followers (12)
Cecilia Heyes
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“There are a number of potential answers. It could be that cognitive gadgets have not been genetically assimilated because they are locally but not globally optimal, or that genetic assimilation has been obstructed by fitness valleys, or by lack of appropriate genetic variance (WestEberhard, 2003; 2005). But my guess is that the most important factor is the speed of environmental change. Distinctively human cognitive mechanisms need to be nimble, capable of changing faster than genetic evolution allows, because their job is to track specific, labile features of the environment. For example, social learning strategies track “who knows” in a particular social group, something that changes with shifting patterns in the division of labor and, there fore, of expertise. Imitation tracks communicative gestures, ritual movements, and manual skills that change as groups and, through the cultural evolution of grist, new group markers, bonding rituals, and technologies. And mindreading, like language, must not only track externally driven change in the phenomena it seeks to describe—for example, economically and politically driven fluctuations in the degree to which behavior really is controlled by social roles and situa tions rather than beliefs and desires—but also selfgenerated change. Because it has regulative as well as predictive functions (McGeer, 2007), changes in mindreading can alter their explanatory target—the way the mind actually works”
― Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
― Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
“The mechanisms for introducing variation—the cultural equivalent of mutations—are generators of “error” or of “innovation” in social learning. For example, a new cultural variant could be produced by one person or group making a mistake while learning from another; trying through their own efforts to improve something acquired through social learning (using four rather than three knots to secure a fishing line, deliberately or in error); or combining information from different sources (after observing one person using three knots of type A, and another person using one knot of type B, the learner uses three knots of type B).”
― Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
― Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
“As I stated in Chapter 4, and justified in Chapters 5–8, I believe the genetic assimilation hypothesis is at odds with the evidence from cognitive science. Time and again the evidence indicates wealth, not poverty, of the stimulus: covariation between the development of distinctively human cognitive mechanisms and opportunities for learning (Chapter 2). This covariation does not rule out, in principle, the possibility that genetic evolution has speeded up the relevant learning processes. However, I have not been able to find positive evidence that this kind of genetic assimilation has occurred—for example, evidence that learning is faster in natural than unnatural conditions, or that identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins. Indeed, in cases where positive evidence of genetic influence has been sought, the signs have pointed in the opposite direction. For example, people are not slower to associate body movements with unnatural stimuli, events that our ancestors would not have encountered, and identical twins are no more alike in their imitative ability than fraternal twins (McEwen et al., 2007; see Chapter 6). So, the current evidence suggests that our cognitive gadgets have not been genetically assimilated. But if this is true, why is it true?”
― Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
― Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
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