In the Light of Evolution Volume IV: The Human Condition (2010) / Chapter Skim
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13 The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language--Steven Pinker
13 The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language--Steven Pinker
Pages 257-274
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From page 257... ...
The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, divi sion into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowl edge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation)
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From page 258... ...
T he bicentennial of Darwin's birth and sesquicentennial of the publi cation of the Origin of Species have focused the world's attention on the breathtaking scope of the theory of natural selection, not least its application to the human mind. "Psychology will be based on a new foundation," Darwin famously wrote at the end of the Origin, "that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.
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From page 259... ...
The first is that humans evolved to fill the "cognitive niche," a mode of survival characterized by manipulating the environment through causal reason ing and social cooperation. The second is that the psychological faculties that evolved to prosper in the cognitive niche can be coopted to abstract domains by processes of metaphorical abstraction and productive combi nation, both vividly manifested in human language.
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From page 260... ...
They arise by mental design and are deployed, tested, and fine-tuned by feedback in the lifetimes of individuals, rather than arising by random mutation and being tuned over generations by the slow feedback of differential survival and reproduction. Because humans develop offenses in real time that other organisms can defend themselves against only in evolutionary time, humans have a tremendous advantage in evolutionary arms races.
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From page 261... ...
. Because humans cooperate by at least three different kinds of relationship, governed by incompatible rules for the distribution of resources -- reciprocal altruism, mutualistic sharing, deferring to dominant individuals -- dyads can dynamically switch among kinds of relationship according to their history, kinship, social support, the resource at stake, and the context (Fiske, 1991)
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From page 262... ...
. Anyone who is skeptical that sophisticated reasoning, collaboration, and communication can bring survival advantages in a prehistoric lifestyle need only read ethnographic accounts of hunting or gathering in contemporary foraging peoples.
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From page 263... ...
, nor as a particu lar combination of other organisms, but rather the opportunity that any environment provides for exploitation via internal modeling of its causal contingencies. our extended childhoods may serve as an apprenticeship in a species that lives by its wits, and our long lives may reflect a tilt in the tradeoff between reproduction and somatic maintenance toward the latter so as to maximize the returns on the investment during childhood.
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From page 264... ...
sapiens precludes statistical tests of correlations between the relevant traits and environments across species. But if we consider the cognitive niche as a suite of mutually reinforcing selection pressures, each of which exists individually in weaker form for other species, we can test whether variation in intelligence within a smaller range, together with a consideration of the traits that were likely possessed by extinct human ancestors, supports particular conjectures.
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From page 265... ...
A third may have been group living, again with the possibility of positive feedback: groups allow acquired skills to be shared but also select for the social intelligence needed to prosper from cooperation without being exploited. indirect support for the hypothesis that sociality and carnivory contributed to the evolution of human intelligence comes from comparative studies showing that greater intelligence across animal species is correlated with brain size, carnivory, group size, and extended childhoods and life spans (Boyd and silk, 2006; lee, 2007)
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From page 266... ...
As far as timing is concerned, we would expect that the corresponding adaptations coevolved gradually, beginning with the first hominid species that possessed some minimal combination of preconditions (e.g., bipedality, group living, omnivory) , increasing in
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From page 267... ...
EVALUATING THE THEORY OF THE COGNITIVE NICHE The theory of the cognitive niche, i believe, has several advantages as an explanation of the evolution of the human mind. it incorporates facts about the cognitive, affective, and linguistic mechanisms discovered by modern scientific psychology rather than appealing to vague, prescientific black boxes like "symbolic behavior" or "culture." To be specific: the cognitive adaptations comprise the "intuitive theories" of physics, biology, and psychology; the adaptations for cooperation comprise the moral emotions and mechanisms for remembering individuals and their actions; the linguistic adaptations comprise the combinatorial apparatus for grammar and the syntactic and phonological units that it manipulates.
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From page 268... ...
Working backward, it predicts that any genes discovered in modern humans to have disproportionate effects in intelligence, language, or sociality (that is, that do not merely affect overall growth or health) will be found to have been a target of selection.
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From page 269... ...
so we still need an explanation of how our cognitive mechanisms are capable of embracing this abstract reasoning. The key may lie in a psycholinguistic phenomenon that may be called metaphorical abstraction (Jackendoff, 1978; lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Talmy, 2000; Pinker, 2007)
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From page 270... ...
But several phenomena suggest that they reflect an ability of the human mind to readily connect abstract ideas with concrete scenarios. First, children occasionally make errors in their spontaneous speech, which suggest they grasp parallels between space and other domains and extend them in metaphors they could not have memorized from their parents.
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From page 271... ...
This suggests that a mind that evolved cognitive mechanisms for reasoning about space and force, an analogical memory that encourages concrete concepts to be applied to abstract ones with a similar logical structure, and mechanisms of productive combination that assemble them into complex hierarchical data structures, could engage in the mental activity required for modern science (Pinker, 1997, 2007; Gentner, 2003)
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From page 272... ...
Just as successful science requires people to reassign their cognitive faculties in unprecedented ways, successful organizations require people to reassign their social faculties in evolutionarily unprecedented ways. in universities, for example, the mindset of communal sharing (which is naturally applied to food distribution within the family or village)
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From page 273... ...
Although adaptations to the cognitive niche confer obvious advan tages in any natural environment, they are insufficient for reasoning in modern institutions such as science and government. over the course of history and in their own educations, people accommodate themselves to these new skills and bodies of knowledge via the process of metaphorical abstraction, in which cognitive schemas and social emotions that evolved for one domain can be pressed into service for another and assembled into increasingly complex mental structures.
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