The human challenge in understanding animal cognition

Animal cognition studies have progressively moved themselves to an impasse due to an overemphasis on controlled experiments on captive animals that are completely detached from species-typical socio-ecologies. If progresses in studies on wild-living animals have provided a wealth of detailed observations on sophisticated cognitive achievements, captive experimental studies have concentrated on the “failure” of nonhuman species to demonstrate so-called uniquely human cognitive skills. In the present chapter, I stress the need to better understand what “cognition” is and to perform valid comparisons on chimpanzees if we want to understand the evolution of human cognitive abilities. Cognition is not just an innate property of a species, but an adaptation of individuals to their living conditions. As such, cognitive studies need ecological validity to explore the adaptations to the environments typical to the studied species. New understanding about brain plasticity and the effect of environmental enrichment in different species, including humans, confirm the importance of environment on the development of cognitive abilities. This invalidates the assumption of most experimental captive studies that one can generalize from such atypical conditions to the whole of the species. Furthermore, observations on wild chimpanzees stress the importance of population differences, thereby illustrating how cognition develops over the lifespan as individuals solve the daily challenges faced in their social and physical environment. Combining the information about brain plasticity, environmental validity, and population differences will permit cognitive studies to progress and finally contribute to our understanding of the evolution of human and human-like cognitive abilities

Teaching Bioeconomics

Bioeconomics is a relatively young field that uses an expanded microeconomics to examine animal behavior, human behavior, and animal and human social institutions. A voluminous literature is rapidly accumulating. There are as yet no standard textbooks, but there are several excellent books and/or articles that can be used in combination with videos and other aids to make a course that students will enjoy and that teachers can use to advance the frontiers of scholarship in economics and biology. Copyright Springer 2005altruism, conflict, cooperation, evolution, game theory, institutions, rationality,