The Evolution of Cognition

Cecilia M. Heyes, Ludwig Huber

MIT Press, 2000 - Psychology - 386 pages

In the last decade, "evolutionary psychology" has come to refer exclusively to research on human mentality and behavior, motivated by a nativist interpretation of how evolution operates. This book encompasses the behavior and mentality of nonhuman as well as human animals and a full range of evolutionary approaches. Rather than a collection by and for the like-minded, it is a debate about how evolutionary processes have shaped cognition.

The debate is divided into five sections: Orientations, on the phylogenetic, ecological, and psychological/comparative approaches to the evolution of cognition; Categorization, on how various animals parse their environments, how they represent objects and events and the relations among them; Causality, on whether and in what ways nonhuman animals represent cause and effect relationships; Consciousness, on whether it makes sense to talk about the evolution of consciousness and whether the phenomenon can be investigated empirically in nonhuman animals; and Culture, on the cognitive requirements for nongenetic transmission of information and the evolutionary consequences of such cultural exchange.

ContributorsBernard Balleine, Patrick Bateson, Michael J. Beran, M. E. Bitterman, Robert Boyd, Nicola Clayton, Juan Delius, Anthony Dickinson, Robin Dunbar, D.P. Griffiths, Bernd Heinrich, Cecilia Heyes, William A. Hillix, Ludwig Huber, Nicholas Humphrey, Masako Jitsumori, Louis Lefebvre, Nicholas Mackintosh, Euan M. Macphail, Peter Richerson, Duane M. Rumbaugh, Sara Shettleworth, Martina Siemann, Kim Sterelny, Michael Tomasello, Laura Weiser, Alexandra Wells, Carolyn Wilczynski, David Sloan Wilson

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Contents

• Evolutionary Psychology in the Round: 3
• CATEGORIZATION: 81
• CAUSALITY: 163
• Causal Cognition and GoalDirected Action: 185
• Causal Reasoning Mental Rehearsal and the Evolution: 205
• CauseEffect Reasoning in Humans and Animals: 221
• CONSCIOUSNESS: 239
• The Search for a Mental Rubicon: 253
• Personal Musings: 273
• CULTURE: 307
• Climate Culture and the Evolution of Cognition: 329
• Gossip and Other Aspects of Language as GroupLevel Adaptations: 347
• Contributors: 367

Popular passages

Page 123 - WHITENESS, it by that sound signifies the same quality wheresoever to be imagined or met with; and thus universals, whether ideas or terms, are made.‎

Page 123 - ... the mind makes the particular ideas, received from particular objects, to become general; which is done by considering them as they are in the mind such appearances separate from all other existences, and the circumstances of real existence, as time, place, or any other concomitant ideas. This is called " abstraction," whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all of the same kind; and their names, general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to...‎

Page 246 - The form of the expression, I feel pain, might seem to imply, that the feeling is something distinct from the pain felt ; yet in reality, there is no distinction. As thinking a thought is an expression which could signify no more than thinking, so feeling a pain signifies no more than being pained.‎

Page 123 - ... should have a distinct name, names must be endless. To prevent this, the mind makes the particular ideas, received from particular objects, to become general ; which is done by considering them as they are in the mind, such appearances...‎

Page 241 - barking dogs,' on this view, are of two sorts ; those who merely relieve themselves against the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up. I myself, I must confess, aspire to the second of these classes ; unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me, a sense that this would be a good place to scratch...‎

Page 244 - ... the same object should produce in several men's minds different ideas at the same time; vg if the idea that a violet produced in one man's mind by his eyes were the same that a marigold produced in another man's, and vice versa.‎

Page 34 - STATEMENTS. (1) Instinct and structure are to be studied from the common standpoint of phyletic descent, and that not the less because we may seldom, if ever, be able to trace the whole development of an instinct.‎

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Evolution of Cognition; A Bradford book; Vienna series in theoretical biology
• Editors: Cecilia M. Heyes, Ludwig Huber
• Contributor: M.I.T. Press
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: MIT Press, 2000
• ISBN: 0262082861, 9780262082860
• Length: 386 pages
• Subjects: Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition; Science / Life Sciences / Biology