Deacon’s challenge: from calls to words

A Darwinian theory of the evolution of language must be incremental: to explain the transition from a hominin baseline with great ape grade communicative capacities to language-equipped hominins as a series of small steps. This paper takes up that project for the special case of words, giving an incremental model of the call to word transition. The model is embedded in a general conception of human social evolution with independent empirical support, but it also depends on some more specific assumptions about language and about the earlier forms of hominin communication. Given these assumptions, the paper can be no more than a working draft of a more complete theory

Morality’s Dark Past

Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project tries to vindicates ethics through an analysis of its evolutionary and cultural history, a history which in turn, he thinks, supports a particular conception of the role of moral thinking and normative practices in human social life. As Kitcher sees it, that role could hardly be more central: most of what makes human life human, and preferable to the fraught and impoverished societies of the great apes, depends on moral cognition. From this view of the role of the ethical project as a social technology, Kitcher derives an account of moral progress and even moral truth; a normative analogue of the idea that truth is the convergence of rational enquiry. To Kitcher’s history, I present an anti-history. Most of what is good about human social life depends on the expansion of our social emotions, not on our capacities to articulate and internalise explicit norms. Indeed, since the Holocene and the origins of complex society, normative thought and normative institutions have been more prominent as tools of exploitation and oppression than as mechanisms of a social peace that balances individual desire with collective co-operation. I argue that the vindication project fails in its own terms: even given Kitcher’s distinctive pragmatic concept of vindication, history debunks rather than vindicates moral cognition

In defence of story-telling

We argue that narratives are central to the success of historical reconstruction. Narrative explanation involves tracing causal trajectories across time. The construction of narrative, then, often involves postulating relatively speculative causal connections between comparatively well-established events. But speculation is not always idle or harmful: it also aids in overcoming local underdetermination by forming scaffolds from which new evidence becomes relevant. Moreover, as our understanding of the past’s causal milieus become richer, the constraints on narrative plausibility become increasingly strict: a narrative’s admissibility does not turn on mere logical consistency with background data. Finally, narrative explanation and explanation generated by simple, formal models complement one another. Where models often achieve isolation and precision at the cost of simplification and abstraction, narratives can track complex changes in a trajectory over time at the cost of simplicity and precision. In combination both allow us to understand and explain highly complex historical sequences

In defence of story-telling

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordWe argue that narratives are central to the success of historical reconstruction. Narrative explanation involves tracing causal trajectories across time. The construction of narrative, then, often involves postulating relatively speculative causal connections between comparatively well-established events. But speculation is not always idle or harmful: it also aids in overcoming local underdetermination by forming scaffolds from which new evidence becomes relevant. Moreover, as our understanding of the past's causal milieus become richer, the constraints on narrative plausibility become increasingly strict: a narrative's admissibility does not turn on mere logical consistency with background data. Finally, narrative explanation and explanation generated by simple, formal models complement one another. Where models often achieve isolation and precision at the cost of simplification and abstraction, narratives can track complex changes in a trajectory over time at the cost of simplicity and precision. In combination both allow us to understand and explain highly complex historical sequences.European CommissionTempleton World Charity Foundatio

Traits, Genes, and Coding

According to the received view in biology, genes code for phenotypic traits during development. However, there are reasons to think that the massively distributed character of the causal systems underlying development is in tension with such representational talk about genes. The main contenders from the literature that purport to establish that genes are genuine coding elements in development fail to meet this challenge. An alternative and superior strategy for understanding and justifying coding talk in development turns on the fact that the process of protein synthesis exhibits the interlocking architectural features of arbitrariness and homuncularity. However, this proposal turns out to have the radical implication that it is mRNA, not DNA, that codes. Moreover, for any of the available strategies, including the one recommended here, there is a serious and unresolved issue surrounding the attempt to extend the reach of coding talk from proteins to traits

Evolutionary Roots of Property Rights; The Natural and Cultural Nature of Human Cooperation

Debates about the role of natural and cultural selection in the development of prosocial, antisocial and socially neutral mechanisms and behavior raise questions that touch property rights, cooperation, and conflict. For example, some researchers suggest that cooperation and prosociality evolved by natural selection (Hamilton 1964, Trivers 1971, Axelrod and Hamilton 1981, De Waal 2013, 2014), while others claim that natural selection is insufficient for the evolution of cooperation, which required in addition cultural selection (Sterelny 2013, Bowles and Gintis 2003, Seabright 2013, Norenzayan 2013). Some scholars focus on the complexity and hierarchical nature of the evolution of cooperation as involving different tools associated with lower and the higher levels of competition (Nowak 2006, Okasha 2006); others suggest that humans genetically inherited heuristics that favor prosocial behavior such as generosity, forgiveness or altruistic punishment (Ridley 1996, Bowles and Gintis 2004, Rolls 2005). We argue these mechanisms are not genetically inherited; rather, they are features inherited through cultural selection. To support this view we invoke inclusive fitness theory, which states that individuals tend to maximize their inclusive fitness, rather than maximizing group fitness. We further reject the older notion of natural group selection - as well as more recent versions (West, Mouden, Gardner 2011) – which hold that natural selection favors cooperators within a group (Wynne-Edwards 1962). For Wynne-Edwards, group selection leads to group adaptations; the survival of individuals therefore depends on the survival of the group and a sharing of resources. Individuals who do not cooperate, who are selfish, face extinction due to rapid and over-exploitation of resources

Cultural longevity: Morin on cultural lineages

Morin has written a rich and valuable book. Its main aim is to isolate the factors involved in maintaining behavioural lineages over time, and to understand how these factors might interact. In doing so, it takes issue with the abstract and idealised models and arguments of dual-inheritance theorists, which are alleged in this account to rely on an overly simplistic notion of imitative learning. Morin’s book is full of ethnographic, anthropological, and psychological research, and there is much to commend in it. However, Morin’s arguments against the dual-inheritance theorists are less convincing when put under scrutiny, and his positive picture which includes appeals to ostensive communication, intrinsic appeal and cultural attraction has some difficulties. I argue that when we contrast dual-inheritance theorists and Morin, we find that there may be fewer differences and greater commonalities than Morin’s book might suggest.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-015-9506-

Humans as model organisms

Like every other species, our species is the result of descent with modification under the influence of natural selection; a tip in an increasingly large and deep series of nested clades, as we trace its ancestry back to increasingly remote antecedents. As a consequence of shared history, our species has much in common with many others; as a consequence of its production by the general mechanisms of evolution, our species carries information about the mechanisms that shaped other species as well. For reasons unconnected to biological theory, we have far more information about humans than we do about other species. So in principle and in practice, humans should be usable as model organisms, and no one denies the truth of this for mundane physical traits, though harnessing human data for more general questions proves to be quite challenging. However, it is also true that human cognitive and behavioural characteristics, and human social groups, are apparently radically unlike those of other animals. Humans are exceptional products of evolution and perhaps that makes them an unsuitable model system for those interested in the evolution of cooperation, complex cognition, group formation, family structure, communication, cultural learning and the like. In all these respects, we are complex and extreme cases, perhaps shaped by mechanisms (like cultural evolution or group selection) that play little role in other lineages. Most of the papers in this special issue respond by rejecting or downplaying exceptionalism. I argue that it can be an advantage: understanding the human exception reveals constraints that have restricted evolutionary options in many lineages.The research for this paper was supported by the Australian Research Council grant FL1