Did social cognition evolve by cultural group selection?

Abstract Cognitive gadgets puts forward an ambitious claim: language, mindreading, and imitation evolved by cultural group selection. Defending this claim requires more than Heyes' spirited and effective critique of nativist claims. The latest human “cognitive gadgets,” such as literacy, did not spread through cultural group selection. Why should social cognition be different? The book leaves this question pending. It also makes strong assumptions regarding cultural evolution: it is moved by selection rather than transformation; it relies on high-fidelity imitation; it requires specific cognitive adaptations to cultural learning. Each of these assumptions raises crucial yet unaddressed difficulties

Metamimetic Games : Modeling Metadynamics in Social Cognition

Imitation is fundamental in the understanding of social system dynamics. But the diversity of imitation rules employed by modelers proves that the modeling of mimetic processes cannot avoid the traditional problem of endogenization of all the choices, including the one of the mimetic rules. Starting from the remark that human reflexive capacities are the ground for a new class of mimetic rules, I propose a formal framework, metamimetic games, that enable to endogenize the distribution of imitation rules while being human specific. The corresponding concepts of equilibrium - counterfactually stable state - and attractor are introduced. Finally, I give an interpretation of social differentiation in terms of cultural co-evolution among a set of possible motivations, which departs from the traditional view of optimization indexed to criteria that exist prior to the activity of agents.Social cognition, imitation, cultural co-evolution, differentiation, reflexivity, metacognition, stochastic game theory, endogenous distributions, metamimetic games, counterfactual equilibrium.

Cultural group selection and holobiont evolution – a comparison of structures of evolution

The notion of structure of evolution is proposed to capture what it means to say that two situations exhibit the same or similar constellations of factors affecting evolution. The key features of holobiont evolution and the hologenome theory are used to define a holobiont structure of evolution. Finally, Cultural Group Selection, a set of hypotheses regarding the evolution of human cognition, is shown to match the holobiont structure closely though not perfectly

Metamimetic Games: Modeling Metadynamics in Social Cognition

Imitation is fundamental in the understanding of social systems' dynamics. But the diversity of imitation rules employed by modelers proves that the modeling of mimetic processes cannot avoid the traditional problem of endogenization of all the choices, including the one of the mimetic rules. Starting from the remark that metacognition and human reflexive capacities are the ground for a new class of mimetic rules, we propose a formal framework, metamimetic games, that enables to endogenize the distribution of imitation rules while being human specific. The corresponding concepts of equilibrium — counterfactually stable state — and attractor are introduced. Finally, we give an interpretation of social differenciation in terms of cultural co-evolution among a set of possible motivations, which departs from the traditional view of optimization indexed to immutable criteria that exist prior to the activity of agents.Social Cognition, Imitation, Cultural Co-Evolution, Differentiation, Reflexivity, Metacognition, Stochastic Game Theory, Endogenous Distributions, Metamimetic Games, Counterfactual Equilibrium

Language and Cognition Interaction Neural Mechanisms

How language and cognition interact in thinking? Is language just used for communication of completed thoughts, or is it fundamental for thinking? Existing approaches have not led to a computational theory. We develop a hypothesis that language and cognition are two separate but closely interacting mechanisms. Language accumulates cultural wisdom; cognition develops mental representations modeling surrounding world and adapts cultural knowledge to concrete circumstances of life. Language is acquired from surrounding language “ready-made” and therefore can be acquired early in life. This early acquisition of language in childhood encompasses the entire hierarchy from sounds to words, to phrases, and to highest concepts existing in culture. Cognition is developed from experience. Yet cognition cannot be acquired from experience alone; language is a necessary intermediary, a “teacher.” A mathematical model is developed; it overcomes previous difficulties and leads to a computational theory. This model is consistent with Arbib's “language prewired brain” built on top of mirror neuron system. It models recent neuroimaging data about cognition, remaining unnoticed by other theories. A number of properties of language and cognition are explained, which previously seemed mysterious, including influence of language grammar on cultural evolution, which may explain specifics of English and Arabic cultures

Action-Perception Matching in Human Cultural Evolution: Updates from the Cognitive Science Debate

Analyses of action-perception matching mechanisms, such as the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), have been prominent in evolutionary accounts of human cognition. Some scholars have interpreted data on the MNS to suggest that the human capacity to acquire and transmit cultural information is a learned product of cultural evolution (the Culture not Biology Account of cultural learning). Others have interpreted results related to the MNS to suggest that cultural learning in humans result from both cultural and biological evolution (the Culture per biology Account of cultural learning). In this paper, we analyse action-perception matching mechanisms considering evolutionary models and novel experimental findings about the MNS. We review the Culture not biology account plausibility within evolutionary theory and argue that as it stands this account is theoretically unsound. We finally argue for the plausibility of the Biology per culture account and discuss how it paves the way to further neurobiological investigations about the evolution of our capacity to learn, understand and transmit cultural information