Cognitive Gadgets Quotes

“although the vast majority of adult humans have these Big Special cognitive mechanisms, we do not genetically inherit programs for their development. Rather, we genetically inherit “Small Ordinary” psychological attributes: the propensity to develop relatively simple mechanisms that closely resemble those found in other animals, including chimpanzees. Genetic evolution has tweaked the human mind. The genetically inherited differences between our minds and those of our ancestors are small but very important. They enable the development of Big Special cognitive mechanisms in three ways.”
― Cecilia Heyes, 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).”
― Cecilia Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

“Information that we inherit from others through social interaction (via certain kinds of social learning) has such powerful effects that this information—“culture”—ranks alongside “nature” (genetically inherited information) and “nurture” (information derived from direct interaction between the developing system and its environment) as a determinant of human development.”
― Cecilia Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

“In contrast with cognitive gadgets, the components of the starter kit (Chapter 3) are ripe for genetic assimilation because they do nonspecific jobs that continue to be worth doing in spite of rapid and radical change in human social environments. Social tolerance and motivation promote the development of cooperation whether people are shifting rocks or designing rockets together. Attending closely to faces and voices opens a floodgate of information from other people, whether the information is about the value of a root or a roux, and high power associative learning and executive function improve problem ­solving across a huge range of social and asocial problems. Changes to cognitive mechanisms that increase the supply of infor­mation from social sources, and the efficiency of problem­solving across domains, are good targets for genetic assimilation because they remain adaptive as long as the developmental environment contains knowledgeable agents and tricky problems to be solved. But changes to cognitive mechanisms that tune human development to specific features of the culture­soaked environment—cognitive gadgets—are poor targets for genetic assimilation because they re­ main adaptive only until those features change.”
― Cecilia Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

“In short, distinctively human cognitive mechanisms are tracking targets that move too fast for genetic evolution. In a stable phase, “as­ similative alleles”—genes that reduce the experience­dependence of a cognitive gadget’s development—may increase in frequency. But when the environment shifts, there will be selection against assimi­lative alleles because their bearers will be slower to adjust to the new conditions (Chater et al., 2009). Once again, let’s take imitation as an example. As long as gestural markers of group membership, bonding rituals, and technologies remain constant, alleles that privilege and accelerate learning of particular matching vertical associations could be targets of positive selection. For example, people who more readily associate matching trunk movements (for example, you lean forward, I lean forward) than complementary trunk movements (you lean forward, I lean back), might have higher reproductive fitness than people who learn matching and complementary trunk movements at the same rate. But when conventions or technologies change, those assimilative alleles would hamper the development of imitation mechanisms with a now more effective repertoire of matching vertical associations. The people who had once been such effective social op­erators would now be losing social capital by leaning in when they should be leaning back. This kind of problem could be avoided if mu­tation produced a universal imitation mechanism, like the cognitive instinct postulated by Meltzof and Moore (1997), which could copy the topography of any body movement. However, this would be stan­dard genetic evolution, not genetic assimilation, and, given that no one has worked out how such a mechanism could operate (Chapter 6), it is plausible that—like wheels (Dennett, 1984)—it lies outside the range of available genetic variation.”
― Cecilia Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

“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”
― Cecilia Heyes, 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?”
― Cecilia Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

“Many cognitive mechanisms, like imitation and mindreading, not only do their jobs well, but do jobs that, when done well, seem likely to en­ hance reproductive tness—to increase the number of babies pro­ duced by the bearers of the cognitive mechanisms. This has led some researchers to assume that, even if new cognitive mechanisms are produced by learning in a culture­soaked environment, they will later become genetically assimilated. In other words, they may start out as cognitive gadgets, constructed in the course of development through social interaction, but then selection will progressively favor genetic mutations that reduce the experience­dependence of the gadgets’ de­ velopment, converting them into cognitive instincts (Henrich, 2015).”
― Cecilia Heyes, Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking