Heyes, Cecilia M. (Author)
Harvard University Press
Physical Details: 293
Language: English
How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language.Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.
...MoreReview Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera (2020) Review of "Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking". History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (p. 13).
Similar Citations
Book
James R. Flynn;
(2016)
Does your Family Make You Smarter?: Nature, Nurture, and Human Autonomy
Article
Yulia Frumer;
(2018)
Cognition and Emotions in Japanese Humanoid Robotics
Article
Stefaan Blancke;
Gilles Denis;
(2018)
Bringing Darwin into the Social Sciences and the Humanities: Cultural Evolution and Its Philosophical Implications
Article
Armin W. Schulz;
(2016)
Altruism, egoism, or neither: A cognitive-efficiency-based evolutionary biological perspective on helping behavior
Book
Frank C. Keil;
(2022)
Wonder: Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science
Article
Michelle Gibbons;
(2019)
Attaining landmark status: Rumelhart and McClelland's PDP Volumes and the Connectionist Paradigm
Essay Review
Mameli, Matteo;
(2001)
Modules and Mindreaders
Book
Harnish, Robert M.;
(2002)
Minds, Brains, Computers: An Historical Introduction to the Foundations of Cognitive Science
Article
Grush, Rick;
(2003)
In Defense of Some “Cartesian” Assumptions Concerning the Brain and Its Operation
Article
Fosse, Sébastien de la;
(2013)
Media and Cognition: The Relationship between Thought Structures and Media Structures
Article
Yamalidou, Maria;
(2001)
Molecular Representations: Building Tentative Links between the History of Science and the Study of Cognition
Chapter
Zittel, Claus;
(2010)
The Politics of Cognition: Genesis and Development of Ludwik Fleck's “Comparative Epistemology”
Article
Jean-Baptiste Grodwohl;
(2017)
Modeling Social Evolution, 1964–1973: Inclusive Fitness Meets Population Structure
Article
Angner, Erik;
(2002)
The History of Hayek's Theory of Cultural Evolution
Article
Marciano, Alain;
Koppl, Roger;
(2009)
Darwin, Darwinism and Social Darwinism: What Do We Learn from Darwin's Theory of Social Evolution?
Chapter
Gissis, Snait B.;
(2011)
Lamarckism and the Constitution of Sociology
Article
Cédric Paternotte;
(2020)
Social evolution and the individual-as-maximising-agent analogy
Article
Wilson, David Sloan;
(2001)
Religious Groups as Adaptive Units
Article
Alter, Stephen G.;
(2007)
Race, Language, and Mental Evolution in Darwin's Descent of Man
Article
Marmefelt, Thomas;
(2009)
Human Knowledge, Rules, and the Spontaneous Evolution of Society in the Social Thought of Darwin, Hayek, and Boulding
Biology and Philosophy
History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Be the first to comment!