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Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind Hardcover – Illustrated, 21 Mar. 2017
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- ISBN-100691151180
- ISBN-13978-0691151182
- EditionIllustrated
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication date21 Mar. 2017
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions16.51 x 3.81 x 24.13 cm
- Print length464 pages
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Review
"An excellent and thorough discussion of how human culture in feedback loops adapted the mind to tackle ever increasing complex social and technological problems. . . . I highly recommend Kevin N. Lala's book Darwin's Unfinished Symphony for biologists and students in the humanities alike. After decades of work and thought the book captures and explains in detailed, lucid prose important findings in cultural evolution and the extended evolutionary synthesis."---Gregory F. Tague, Consciousness Literature and the Arts
"As Lala reveals, human endeavour is a vast, cooperative effort that cannot be explained by natural selection alone. . . . Our success, he argues, is not down to language, tool-use, empathy or any other single factor, but rather a 'whirlpool' of cultural and biological processes. In this book, he scours the animal kingdom for clues to why we are a species apart."---Stuart Blackman, BBC Wildlife Magazine
"Behavioural and evolutionary biologist, Kevin N. Lala shows how learned and socially transmitted activities of our ancestors shaped our intellectual abilities through accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback. Drawing on his own research, Professor Lala explains how animals imitate, innovate, and have remarkable traditions of their own. . . . This engaging book will appeal to people who wish to understand human nature and civilization, whether philosophers, scientists and those with a curious mind."---Forbes.com
"Darwin was certainly aware of the importance of human culture, but under Mr. Lala's sophisticated interpretation, cultural innovations did not merely respond to environmental challenges but also helped create the elaborate surroundings within which natural selection made us what we are today. Besides illuminating the interaction between biological and cultural evolution, he gives suitable attention to recent discoveries in the new field of 'cognitive ethology, ' which has revealed astounding mental capacities on the part of our animal relatives. . . . Mr. Lala is one of those rare biologists who have personally studied the processes--notably in fishes and rats--whereby animals learn and transmit their learning and who has also applied mathematical models to the spread of cultural traditions among human beings and other species. The evolution of learning is a well-trodden research path, but Darwin's Unfinished Symphony may be the first book-length integrated account of the evolution of teaching."---David Barash, Wall Street Journal
"In Darwin's Unfinished Symphony Kevin N. Lala makes a powerful case that culture drove much of our species' genetic evolution over the past few million years. . . . Darwin's Unfinished Symphony makes a compelling case that elegantly seats humans within the natural world, while at the same time explaining our peculiar uniqueness."---Joseph Henrich, Science
"Kevin N. Lala's ambitious new book is, to my mind, the best account yet. . . . A richly rewarding and powerfully argued book."---Steven Rose, Times Higher Education
"This well-researched book establishes how cognitive processes are essential for 'cumulative' learning, finding links 'between teaching, language, and cumulative culture.' After years of studying human culture and the human mind, Lala concludes that other evolutionarily advanced animals do not possess human attributes, as is often claimed."-- "Choice"
"Darwin's Unfinished Symphony is accessible to the general reader and well researched. It is an enjoyable and valuable place to begin or to top up your understanding of our enigmatic existence."---Mark Pagel, New Scientist
"[B]rilliant."---Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, The Jerusalem Post
"A persuasively comprehensive account that not only brings forward exciting and thought-provoking new theses but is also accessible to a wider public."---Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Journal of Cognitive Historiography
"All Human Ethologists should read this book. It is not that it is just well written but that the quality, style and creativity of thought behind it is an object lesson in how this area of science ought to be conducted."---John Richer, Human Ethology
"One of Forbes.com's 10 Best Biology Books of 2017, chosen by GrrlScientist"
"Selected for Askblog's Books of the year 2017"
"This is a very impressive interdisciplinary work about cultural evolution that draws on the author's research over a 30-year period about the ways in which culture drives the development of the human mind, addressing the fundamental question about how evolutionary processes have resulted in our unique human heritage."---David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer
"Winner of the 2017 British Psychological Society Book Awards, Best Academic Monograph"
"Winner of the 2018 PROSE Award in Biological Science, Association of American Publishers"
From the Back Cover
"With relentless determination and passion, Laland has accumulated a wealth of data and ideas from his experimental studies of social learning in many species. Spanning many disciplines, he weaves a rich, sophisticated, and ever-changing tapestry, showing us how the coevolution of cultural practices and products has shaped both the most mundane and extraordinary aspects of human life."--Eva Jablonka, Tel Aviv University
"A most enjoyable and rewarding book that investigates many of humans' greatest achievements--from language to art--from the perspective of animals and evolution. Ranging across many different topics, Laland brings together processes of biological and cultural evolution in unique and fascinating ways to explain what it means to be human."--Michael Tomasello, codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
"Kevin Laland's wonderful book explores the evolutionary origins of human culture. He argues that what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is our particular talent for precisely imitating others, coupled with our ability to transfer potentially huge amounts of information across time and space. As such, culture is the key to explaining the 'entangled bank' of human nature--Darwin would be proud."--Nicky Clayton, University of Cambridge
"Kevin Laland is one of the pioneers in the modern study of cultural evolution. Darwin's Unfinished Symphony draws on his large and important body of work, showing how culture--socially transmitted knowledge--is what has made humans so successful as a species."--Robert Boyd, coauthor of Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
"Truly impressive. Laland presents a new theory of cognitive evolution that is deeply grounded in evolutionary theory and comparative analyses, but which doesn't make the twin mistakes of exalting humans at the expense of other species or overplaying the continuity between the two. He also demonstrates beautifully why human cultural evolution has remained an evolutionary puzzle for so long."--Louise Barrett, author of Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Darwin's Unfinished Symphony
How Culture Made the Human Mind
By Kevin N. LalandPRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15118-2
Contents
Foreword, ix,PART I: FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURE,
1 Darwin's Unfinished Symphony, 1,
2 Ubiquitous Copying, 31,
3 Why Copy?, 50,
4 A Tale of Two Fishes, 77,
5 The Roots of Creativity, 99,
PART II: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND,
6 The Evolution of Intelligence, 123,
7 High Fidelity, 150,
8 Why We Alone Have Language, 175,
9 Gene-Culture Coevolution, 208,
10 The Dawn of Civilization, 234,
11 Foundations of Cooperation, 264,
12 The Arts, 283,
Epilogue: Awe Without Wonder, 315,
Notes, 323,
References, 385,
Index, 443,
CHAPTER 1
DARWIN'S UNFINISHED SYMPHONY
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and so dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.... Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.
— CHARLES DARWIN, ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
As he looked out on the English countryside from his study at Down House, Charles Darwin could reflect with satisfaction that he had gained a compelling understanding of the processes through which the complex fabric of the natural world had come into existence. In the final, perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most evocative, passage of The Origin of Species, Darwin contemplated an entangled bank, replete with plants, birds, insects, and worms, all functioning with intricate coherence. The tremendous legacy of Darwin is that so much of that interwoven majesty can now be explained through the process of evolution by natural selection.
I look out of my window and see the skyline of St Andrews, a small town in southeastern Scotland. I see bushes, trees, and birds too, but the view is dominated by stone buildings, roofs, chimneys, and a church steeple. I see telegraph poles and electricity pylons. I look south, and in the distance is a school, and just to the west, a hospital fed by roads dotted with busy commuters. I wonder, can evolutionary biology explain the existence of chimneys, cars, and electricity in as convincing a fashion as it does the natural world? Can it describe the origin of prayer books and church choirs, as it does the origin of species? Is there an evolutionary explanation for the computer on which I type, for the satellites in the sky, or for the scientific concept of gravity?
At first sight, such questions may not appear particularly troubling. Clearly human beings have evolved, and we happen to be unusually intelligent primates that are good at science and technology. Darwin claimed, "the most exalted higher animals" had emerged "from the war of nature," and our own species is surely as high and exalted as species come. Isn't it apparent that our intelligence, our culture, and our language are what has allowed us to dominate and transform the planet so dramatically?
With a little more thought, however, this type of explanation unravels with disturbing rapidity, in the process generating a barrage of even more challenging questions. If intelligence, language, or the ability to construct elaborate artifacts evolved in humans because they enhance the ability to survive and reproduce, then why didn't other species acquire these capabilities? Why haven't other apes, our closest relatives, who are genetically similar to us, built rockets and space stations and put themselves on the moon? Animals have traditions for eating specific foods, or singing the local song, which researchers call "animal cultures," but these possess no laws, morals, or institutions, and are not imbued with symbolism, like human culture. Nor do animal tool-using traditions constantly ratchet up in complexity and diversity over time as our technology does. There seems a world of difference between a male chaffinch's song and Giacomo Puccini's arias, between fishing for ants by chimpanzees and haute cuisine restaurants, or between the ability of animals to count to three and Isaac Newton's derivation of calculus. A gap, an ostensibly unbridgeable gap, exists between the cognitive capabilities and achievements of humanity and those of other animals.
This book explores the origins of the entangled bank of human culture, and the animal roots of the human mind. It presents an account of the most challenging and mysterious aspect of the human story, an explanation for how evolutionary processes resulted in a species so entirely different from all others. It relates how our ancestors made the journey from apes scavenging a living on ants, tubers, and nuts, to modern humans able compose symphonies, recite poetry, perform ballet, and design particle accelerators. Yet Rachmaninoff's piano concertos did not evolve by the laws of natural selection, and space stations didn't emerge through the "famine and death" of the Darwinian struggle. The men and women who design and build computers and iPhones have no more children than those in other professions.
So, what laws account for the relentless progress and diversification of technology, or the changing fashions of the arts? Explanations based on cultural evolution, whereby competition between cultural traits generates changes in behavior and technology, can only begin to be considered satisfactory with clarification of how minds capable of generating complex culture evolved in the first place. Yet, as later chapters in this book reveal, our species' most cherished intellectual faculties were themselves fashioned in a whirlpool of coevolutionary feedbacks in which culture played a vital role. Indeed, my central argument is that no single prime mover is responsible for the evolution of the human mind. Instead, I highlight the significance of accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback, whereby an interwoven complex of cultural processes to reinforce each other in an irresistible runaway dynamic that engineered the mind's breathtaking computational power.
Comprehending the distinguishing features of humanity through comparison with similar characteristics in other animals is another central theme in this book, and a distinctive feature of my research group's approach to investigating human cognition and culture. Such comparisons not only help to put our species' achievements in perspective, but help us to reconstruct the evolutionary pathways to humanity's spectacular achievements. We not only seek a scientific explanation for the origins of technology, science, language, and the arts, but endeavor to trace the roots of these phenomena right back to the realm of animal behavior.
Consider, for illustration, the school that I see from my window. How could it have come into existence? To most people the answer to this question is trivial; that is, workers from a building company contracted by the Fife Council built it. Yet to an evolutionary biologist the construction represents an enormous challenge. The immediate mechanical explanation is not the problem; rather, the dilemma is to understand how humans are even capable of such undertakings. With a little training, the same people could build a shopping mall, bridge, canal, or dock, but no bird ever built anything other than a nest or bower, and no termite worker deviated from constructing a mound.
When one starts to reflect, the scale of cooperation necessary to build a school is astounding. Imagine all of the workers who had to coordinate their actions in the right place at the right time to ensure that foundations are safely laid, windows and doors are put in place, piping and electricity wires are suitably positioned, and woodwork is painted. Imagine the companies with whom the contractor had to engineer transactions, buy the building materials, arrange for delivery, purchase or loan the tools, subcontract jobs, and organize finances. Think of the businesses that had to make the tools, nuts, bolts, screws, washers, paint, and windowpanes. Imagine the people who designed the tools; smelted the iron; logged the trees; and made the paper, ink, and plastic. So it goes on, endlessly, in a voracious multidimensional expansion. All of those interactions, that endless web of exchanges, transactions, and cooperative endeavors — the vast majority carried out by unrelated individuals on the basis of promises of future remuneration — had to function for the school to be built. Not only did these cooperative transactions work, but they repeatedly operate with seamless efficiency day in and day out, as new schools, hospitals, shopping malls, and leisure centers are put together all across the country and around the world. Such procedures are so commonplace that we now entirely take it for granted that the school will be built, and even complain if completion is a little late.
I earn my living in part by studying animals, and I am captivated with the complexity of their social behavior. Chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, crows, and countless other animals, exhibit rich and sophisticated cognition that reveals an often impressive level of intelligence that through the process of natural selection has become suited to the worlds they each inhabit. Yet if we ever wanted a lesson in what an achievement of creativity, cooperation, and communication the construction of a building is, we only have to give a group of animals the materials, tools, and equipment to build such a structure, and then see what happens. I would imagine the chimpanzees might grasp pipes or stones to throw or wave about in dominance displays. The dolphins might plausibly play with materials that floated. Corvids or parrots would perhaps pick out some novel items with which to decorate their nests. I do not wish to disparage the abilities of other animals, whose achievements are striking in their own domains. Yet science has accrued a strong understanding of the evolution of animal behavior, while the origins of human cognition and the complexities of our society, technology, and culture remain poorly understood. For most of us in the industrialized world, every aspect of our lives is utterly reliant on thousands of cooperative interactions with millions of individuals from hundreds of countries, the vast majority of whom we never see, don't know, and indeed never knew existed. Just how exceptional such intricate coordination is remains hard to appreciate; nothing remotely like it is found in any of the other 5–40 million species on the planet.
The inner workings of the school and the activities of children and staff are just as astonishing to an evolutionary biologist like myself. There is no compelling evidence that other apes will go out of their way to teach their friends or relatives anything at all, let alone build elaborate institutions that dispense vast amounts of knowledge, skills, and values to hordes of children with factory-like efficiency. Teaching, by which I mean actively setting out to educate another individual, is rare in nature. Nonhuman animals assist one another in alternative ways, such as provisioning with food or collaborating in an alliance, but they mostly aid their offspring or close relatives, who share their genes and hence also possess their tendency to help. Yet in our species, dedicated teachers devote vast amounts of time and effort with children entirely unrelated to them, helping them to acquire knowledge, in spite of the fact that this does not inherently increase a teacher's evolutionary fitness. Pointing out that teachers are paid, which might be regarded as a form of trade (i.e., goods for work), only trivializes this mystery. The pound coin or dollar bill have no intrinsic value, the money in our bank account has a largely virtual existence, and the banking system is an unfathomably complex institution. Explaining how money or financial markets came into existence is no easier than explaining why schoolteachers will coach unrelated pupils.
As I gaze at the school, I imagine the children sitting at their desks, all dressed in the same uniform, and all (or, at least, many) sitting calmly and listening to their teacher's instruction. But why do they listen? Why bother absorb facts about events in antiquity, or labor to compute the angle of an abstract shape? Other animals only learn what is of immediate use to them. Capuchin monkeys don't instruct juveniles in how their ancestors cracked nuts hundreds of years ago, and no songbird educates the young about what is sung in the wood across the road.
Just as curious to a biologist is the fact that the pupils all dress the same. Some of these children will come from less fortunate backgrounds. Their parents cannot easily afford to spend money on special clothes for school. When they finish their education many of these young people will exchange school attire for another uniform (probably equally uncomfortable), perhaps comprising a suit, or the white and blue attire of doctors and nurses in the hospital down the road. Even the students at my university, replete with liberal, radical, and freethinking values often dress the same, in jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts, and sneakers. Where did these proclivities come from? Other animals don't have fashions or norms.
Darwin provided a compelling explanation for the protracted history of the biological world, but only hinted about origins of the cultural realm. When discussing evolution of the "intellectual faculties," he confessed: "Undoubtedly it would have been very interesting to have traced the development of each separate faculty from the state in which it exists in the lower animals to that in which it exists in man; but neither my ability nor knowledge permit the attempt." With the benefit of hindsight, we should not be surprised if Darwin struggled to understand the origins of humanity's intellectual achievements; it is a monumental challenge. A satisfactory explanation demands insight into the evolutionary origins of some of our most striking attributes — our intelligence, language, cooperation, teaching, and morality — yet most of these features are not just distinctive, they are unique to our species. That makes it harder to glean clues to the distant history of our minds through comparison with other species.
At the heart of this challenge lies the undeniable fact that we humans are an amazingly successful species. Our range is unprecedented; we have colonized virtually every terrestrial habitat on Earth, from steaming rainforests to frozen tundra, in numbers that far exceed what would be typical for another mammal of our size. We exhibit behavioral diversity that is unparalleled in the animal kingdom, but (unlike most other animals) this variation is not explained by underlying genetic diversity, which is in fact atypically low. We have resolved countless ecological, social, and technological challenges, from splitting the atom, to irrigating the deserts, to sequencing genomes. Humanity so dominates the planet that, through a combination of habitat destruction and competition, we are driving countless other species to extinction. With rare exceptions, the species comparably prosperous to humans are solely our domesticates, such as cattle or dogs; our commensals, such as mice, rats, and house flies; and our parasites, such as lice, ticks, and worms, which thrive at our expense. When one considers that the life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns of humans have also diverged sharply from those of other apes, there are grounds for claiming that human evolution exhibits unusual and striking features that go beyond our self-obsession and demand explanation.
As the pages of this book demonstrate, our species' extraordinary accomplishments can be attributed to our uniquely potent capability for culture. By "culture" I mean the extensive accumulation of shared, learned knowledge, and iterative improvements in technology over time. Humanity's success is sometimes accredited to our cleverness, but culture is actually what makes us smart. Intelligence is not irrelevant of course, but what singles out our species is an ability to pool our insights and knowledge, and build on each other's solutions. New technology has little to do with a lone inventor figuring out a problem on their own; virtually all innovation is a reworking or refinement of existing technology. The simplest artifacts provide the test cases with which to evaluate this claim, because clearly no single person could invent, say, a space station.
Consider the example of the paper clip. You might be forgiven for assuming that what is, in essence, just a bent piece of wire was devised in its current form by a single imaginative individual. Yet that could not be further from the truth. Paper was originally developed in first-century China, but only by the Middle Ages was sufficient paper produced and used in Europe to create the demand for a means to bind sheets of paper together temporarily. The initial solution was to use pins as fasteners, but these rusted and left unsightly holes, such that the pinned corners of documents sometimes became ragged. By the middle of the nineteenth century, bulky spring devices (resembling those on clipboards today) and small metal clasps were in use, and in the decades that followed a great variety of fasteners came into existence, with fierce competition governing their use. The first patent for a bent wire paper clip was awarded in 1867. However, the mass production of cheap paper fasteners had to wait for the invention of a wire with the appropriate malleability, and a machine capable of bending it, both of which were developed in the late nineteenth century. Even then, the earliest paper clips were suboptimal in form — for instance, these included a rectangular-shaped wire with one overlapping side, rather than the circular "loop within a loop" design dominant today. A variety of shapes were experimented with for several decades of the twentieth century before manufacturers finally converged on the now standard paper clip design, known as the "Gem." What appears at first sight to be the simplest of artifacts was in fact fashioned through centuries of reworking and refinement. Even today, in spite of the Gem's success, novel paper clip designs continue to emerge, with a wide range of cheaper plastic forms manufactured over the last few decades.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Darwin's Unfinished Symphony by Kevin N. Laland. Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Princeton University Press; Illustrated edition (21 Mar. 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0691151180
- ISBN-13 : 978-0691151182
- Dimensions : 16.51 x 3.81 x 24.13 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 1,375,723 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 677 in Human Evolution
- 1,201 in Evolutionary Psychology
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About the author
Kevin Laland is Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews, where he is a member of the Centre for Biological Diversity, the Centre for Social learning and Cognitive Evolution, the Institute for Behavioural and Neural Sciences, and the Scottish Primate Research Group. After completing his PhD at University College London, Laland held a Human Frontier Science Programme fellowship at UC Berkeley, followed by BBSRC and Royal Society University Research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, before moving to St Andrews in 2002. He has published over 200 scientific articles and 11 books on a wide range of topics related to animal behaviour and evolution, particularly social learning, cultural evolution and niche construction. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Society of Biology, and the recipient of both an ERC Advanced Grant and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
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DJ_MAGReviewed in Brazil on 1 August 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Inspirador
Adoro teorias evolucionárias e quando elas se "encontram" com o universo da arte e da beleza é incrível! Adorei o livro.
- Dr. GlockenspielReviewed in Canada on 4 December 2017
4.0 out of 5 stars La symphonie inachevée de Darwin est de situer les capacités ...
La symphonie inachevée de Darwin est de situer les capacités intellectuelles ou cognitives humaines par rapport à celles des autres espèces. Il y consacre deux ouvrages après l'Origine des espèces . La filiation de l'homme et la sélection liée au sexe (The Descent of Man and the selection in relation to sex, 1871), L'Expression des émotions chez l'homme et les animaux (1872), qui, semant différentes pistes stimulantes, laissent en plan autant de questions faute d'évidences empiriques et de concepts pour nous devenus centraux (dont l'héritabilité génotypique).
La quête de prolongements et de réponses suscite des travaux nombreux et stimulants depuis les trois dernières décennies. Kevin Laland présente dans cet ouvrage sa contribution tenant en la synthèse des recherches menées par son équipe sur 25 ans, avec différents compléments esquissant des axes de recherches en cours.
Laland reconstitue à grands traits la tendance qui fut d'abord considérée inséparable ou naturellement liée à Darwin, qui attribue de manière charitable aux autres espèces les mêmes classes ou catégories de capacités cognitives qui font notre orgueil (capacité morale, logique, sociale, coopérative, esthétique), capacités dont la seule différence avec les nôtres en serait de degré, capacités que les recherches scientifiques auraient encore échoué à saisir en raison de leur nombre encore modeste ou de leur manque à gagner au plan des conditions expérimentales.
Cette tendance, dont certains films se rapprochent qui mettent en vedette des animaux résolvant des dilemmes de justice, s'ancre à travaux qui carburent à base d'anecdotes non réplicables et d'émotions proches du mysticisme (cf. Franz de Waal). En rupture avec ce point de vue, la reconnaissance d'une unicité de l'intelligence humaine résidant principalement dans sa dimension sociale, écrit Laland, fait l'objet d'un consensus actuellement. "The gap is social" (dixit Michael Tomasello figure de premier plan de ce paradigme et penseur très largement repris par Laland, citation extraite de sa contribution à P.Kappeler & J. B. Silk, 2009, Mind the Gap: Tracing the Origins of Human Universals).
Les travaux originaux exposés dans les chapitres 2 à 5 détaillent les capacités d'apprentissage sociale, par imitation, d'espèces éloignées phylogénétiquement de l'homme telles des variétés de poisson (threespine et ninespine sticklebacks) et d'oiseaux. Ces travaux servent d'illustration au postulat central de Laland selon lequel l'apprentissage social n'est jamais inconditionnel ou automatique, mais suit différentes conditions qui le rendent efficace et adaptatif : conditions ayant trait au quand imiter (imite si 1. le coût de l'apprentissage asocial - par essai et erreur - est trop élevé en termes de prédation, imite 2. en cas d'insatisfaction envers le résultat obtenu; ou 3. en cas d'incertitude pour cause 3.1 d'environnement changeant ou 3.2 d'informations périmées); et ayant trait au qui imiter (1. la majorité, cinq individus performant une fois le même comportement, davantage qu'un individu performant cinq fois le même comportement, 2. l'individu le plus prestigieux, autour duquel gravitent 3 femelles davantage que celui autour duquel 1 femelle gravite, 3. l'individu ayant le plus de succès dans son approvisionnement - déduction via l'information publique ou comportement, de la qualité et quantité des ressources). Cette base expérimentale est, largement, à la source des apports originaux de Laland à la symphonie inachevée. L'autre portion tient en la description détaillée de la nature précise du "gap" ou écart.
Cet écart, selon Laland, tient en la rétention des comportements à imiter au fil des générations, en la précision avec laquelle ces comportements sont transmis, en l'émergence de l'éducation (teaching) pour augmenter cette précision - cumulativité, et en l'émergence du langage pour étendre la portée de l'éducation au-delà des relations entre parents ("kin") et au-delà d'un domaine d'activités spécifiques, affaiblissant le coût de l'éducation, et redoublant la précision de la transmission.
Précision de la transmission - éducation - langage forment les trois piliers sur lesquels l'unicité de l'apprentissage social-imitatif humain repose au sens de Laland et son équipe. Il consacre une portion de l'ouvrage à démontrer que cette hypothèse satisfait les 7 conditions à l'évolution du langage posées par Szamado et Szathmary dans un article clef (2006) : unicité, honnêteté, caractère coopératif et adaptatif, motivation à l'apprentissage, et ancrage symbolique. Une portion plus considérable de l'ouvrage tient en la reprise d'un postulat initialement formulé par Allan Wilson selon lequel, à partir d'un certain seuil, les innovations et comportements imités sont à l'origine de pressions sélectives favorisant la rétention de mutations génétiques clefs pour l'accroissement de la taille du cerveau (anatomie, connections entre aires), la consolidation du contrôle d'un organisme sur son environnement et sa modification morphologique (stabilisation des mutations responsables des modifications d'organes compatibles avec les innovations comportementales apprises et transmises).
Laland insère cette hypothèse dans le cadre plus global de la construction de niche, auquel il a puissamment contribué à donner une formulation achevée (voir. Odling-Smee, Laland et Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution). Ce cadre donne à la théorie défendue ici sa véritable ampleur : non seulement l'imitation transmise avec précision du fait de l'éducation et du langage forme-t-elle l'unicité de l'apprentissage social humain, mais par sa production de nouvelles pressions sélectives affectant la taille du cerveau, l'anatomie et la physiologie de l'espèce, cet apprentissage forme un processus autocatalytique au sein duquel nous distinguons deux phases. Après le règne des pressions environnementales auxquelles des réponses biologiques-adaptatives étaient apportées, Laland distingue une période caractérisée par des pressions sélectives occasionnées par des comportements-innovations auxquels des réponses biologiques-adaptatives étaient apportées (telle la tolérance au lactose, ou la rétention de gènes favorisant l'immunité aux virus proliférant en contexte de sédentarité et de proximité avec les espèces domestiquées, notamment) laquelle période fut suivie d'une autre, dans laquelle les pressions sélectives créées par des innovations suscitent, non plus seulement des adaptations biologiques, mais surtout et dans un tout premier temps, des réponses culturelles (techniques notamment).
Les contraintes à l'innovation culturelle posées par le nomadisme et l'exigence de mobilité sont détaillées afin de mieux mettre en lumière l'ampleur du processus autocatalytique amorcée ultérieurement à partir de la conjonction de la domestication des plantes et animaux avec la sédentarisation et l'agriculture. D'une part, une mobilité réduisant le patrimoine matériel au minimum, faisant appel à tous également dans les tâches de collecte et de chasse, ne laissant place à aucune augmentation de prestige à base de ressources accumulées, et contraignant à des naissances espacées (moyenne de 4 ans d'écart entre les naissances); d'autre part, bien qu'à travers plusieurs difficultés et écueils, accumulation de ressources, division du travail, encouragement à l'innovation technique (irrigation, charrue, laboure...), augmentation démographique, naissance d'administration (décompte des récoltes), de villes, d'armée et d'états.
Les forces de l'ouvrage :
• un enrichissement des recherches sur l'unicité des capacités d'apprentissage sociale humaine dans un dialogue stimulant avec certaines figures clefs du domaine, sur fond d'études expérimentales nouvelles et solides (au sein d'espèces peu étudiées);
• une cohabitation réussie du postulat de l'unicité sociale-cognitive humaine avec une extension subtile - sélective et attentive aux détails - de la capacité imitative à des espèces peu réputées pour leur intelligence;
• un étagement successif des arguments clair et stimulant, en général;
• une réfutation des hypothèses simplistes de la psychologie évolutionniste grand public (pour laquelle les membres de notre espèce auraient construit un environnement en décalage et inadéquation avec leurs capacité cognitives ancrées dans un environnement de Pléistocène - petits groupes liés par l'apparentement, le gossip et autres);
• un plaidoyer convaincant sur la nécessité d'intégrer histoire culturelle et biologique, innovations culturelles et adaptations biologiques.
Les faiblesses de l'ouvrage:
• aucun rapprochement avec la littérature philosophique portant sur la théorie cognitive et évolutionnaire (contrairement à Michael Tomasello);
• absence de prise en compte de certains travaux clefs postérieurs à 2013 (notamment Thom Scott-Philipps, Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special et toutes les recherches de Tomasello ultérieurs à Why We Cooperate);
• une certaine hétérogénéité entre les portions de l'ouvrage résumées dans ce commentaire et les autres portant sur l'agriculture, les fondements de la coopération et l'évolution culturelle de la danse;
• beaucoup de redites, en particulier lorsqu'il convient de démontrer la pertinence d'une mise en perspective bio-culturelle d'une pratique comme la danse. L'importance et la complexité de la coordination inter-modale (coordination des perceptions - de ce qui est observé - et des actions qu'il convient d'imiter) sont réitérées à plusieurs reprises et l'apport de la mise en perspective proposée ne semble pas aller beaucoup au-delà.
Point en suspens
Si, comme Laland le soutient, les innovations culturelles posent des problèmes adaptatifs auxquels des réponses culturelles sont dorénavant apportées (suivant une temporalité beaucoup plus courte que celle des adaptations biologiques qui se poursuivent à la traîne), les partisans actuels des sciences sociales y verront suffisamment matière à persister dans leur voie de négligence et de désintérêt envers les développements des recherches esquissées et synthétisées ici. Il reste une différence dans l'ordre du type de questions que se posent les praticiens des sciences sociales - critiques et constructivistes pour la plupart - et les chercheurs d'ascendance néodarwinienne (Niche construction comprise) : les premiers cherchent à problématiser des rapports de force, de domination et des inégalités, et passent les idées et événements sous le bain acide de cette problématisation incessante, tandis que les rapports de pouvoir ne sont abordés qu'indirectement (lorsqu'ils le sont) par les seconds; abordés, qui plus est, sans un accompagnement revendicateur ou d'indignation, mais avec une tonalité descriptive parfois proche d'une certaine quiétude. L'écart (gap) dans l'intelligence sociale entre espèces peut être admis avec beaucoup moins de réticence que d'autres thèmes développés par l'ancienne sociobiologie notamment, et il est possible d'en tirer des éclairages nouveaux sur certains thèmes de la socio-anthropologie, notamment d'ascendance fonctionnaliste, mais il n'en demeure pas moins que cet autre écart dans la prise en compte des rapports de pouvoir reste béant entre ces domaines d'étude, que l'on doive déplorer ou se réjouir de cet état de fait.
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Nukyen ArcherReviewed in Mexico on 29 September 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente lectura
Es un muy buen libro, Kevin Laland ve la evolución no solo desde la perspectiva biológica sino desde la cultura. Se aborda la evolución del comportamiento de una manera sencilla, aunque si se requiere un poco de antecedentes para comprender todos los términos.
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Marco FerrariReviewed in Italy on 16 May 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Complesso e non facile
Usando tecniche moderne e sapienza classica, da Darwin in poi, Laland spiega che secondo lui la cultura umana deriva da intricate e difficili interazioni tra biologia e, successivamente cultura. E pensa che l'insegnamento, l'imitazione e la fedeltà culturale siamo indispensabili per spiegare il comportamento umano. Ricchissimo di rimandi e note, convince quasi fino in fondo. Da leggere e discutere
- Matias BergReviewed in Germany on 20 July 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars The unique mechanisms behind genetic and cultural co-evolution. Presenting the Big Picture
This book certainly is one of the main contributions to the theory of cultural evolution. It is a kind of opus magnum of one of the leading figures in this field of research.
The theory of cultural evolution comes in two flavours: the first, the theory of memes or memetics is well known after Richard Dawkins coined the word 'meme' in the seventies, but memetics is all but scientifically dead. Kevin Laland dismisses it in one sentence in footnote nr.3 „However, the modern science of cultural evolution derives very little from memetics“. Unfortunately, that is correct.
The other theory, called Dual Inheritance Theory (DIT) - also known as gene–culture coevolution - is all but unknown to the wider public, but it is alive and kicking in academia, probably because it was linked to massive mathematical modelling right from the beginning. The best known (and most accessible) book of this theory is „Not by genes alone“ by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, an absolute must-read for everyone interested in the subject. (Other names busy in this field of research are L. Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus Feldman, Herbert Gintis, Joseph Henrich)
The author starts by accentuating the gap that separates the so-called proto-culture found in apes or dolphins or clever crows, on the one hand, and human culture on the other hand. Only human culture is cumulative, it works like a ratchet that knows only one direction: towards more knowledge, more complexity. Those clever chimps are still sitting in the forest, cracking nuts as they did maybe millions of years ago, whereas the advances of human culture, especially technology, are breathtaking.
Central to Laland's argumentation is the „cultural drive hypothesis“: Due to a cultural feedback mechanism, the mammalian brain has driven its own evolution: Positive selection for better perceptual systems, more cross-modal mapping (in the brain), Theory of mind, Mental time travel, tool use, Enhanced diet quality (among others) led to bigger brains, which led to more efficient copying and – very important! - higher fidelity in the copying process, which is a necessary condition for cumulative culture.
This is the main reason why (proto-)cultures in animal population never „take off“: too low fidelity in social learning resp. copying. And the main reason why human social learning is so effective is of course language. Laland devotes a whole chapter to the question: Why did language evole the way it did? His answer: for effective teaching, for an active transmission (with a high degree of fidelity) of knowledge from teacher to pupil. That too is unique to Homo sapiens. The enormous success of our species rests on this faculty of hi-fi copying, enabling lineages of cumulative knowledge.
Human culture is, according to Prof. Laland, not only a magnificent end product of an evolutionary process, like the tail of the peacock or the elaborate nest of bowder birds. Culture is an important part of the very process, it is our specific environment. Human adapted during their evolution not only to their natural environment, but even more and increasingly so to their own culture, their own product! „Human minds are not just build for culture; they are build by culture.“ (p.30)
Humans, like no other animal before, created its own niche: „Our ancestors didn't just evolve to be suited to their world; they shaped their world. The landscape of human evolution did not pre-exist us; we built it ourselves.“ (page 229).
Those are the main lines of Laland's reasoning. Are they are convincing? I think so. I think it is outdated to treat culture as a kind of by-product of genetic/biological evolution. If culture, as E.O.Wilson famously put it, is „on the leash of genes“, it is (a) a long and flexible leash, and (b) the dog is very big and wayward, and it is often not clear which side is tugging stronger...
Therefore gene-culture coevolution should become the standard paradigm in human evolution. Sociobiology or Evolutionary psychology are important contributions , but they are too one-sided and unable to explain the whole picture, to account for culture's enormous influence on human evolution.
But I think that there is a weak spot in DIT / gene-culture coevolution: Laland somewhat fails to account for the fact that the niches that humans create, our cultural environment with all its artifacts, ideas, traditions... - that it has „a life of its own“. The sphere of culture and its entities is the RESULT of human activity, but not of human DESIGN. Humans didn't design the agricultural or industrial world, they stumbled into it. Cultual evolution shows often enough unintended consequences of intentional behaviour, whether it's on a small or a big scale. There is a lot of talk in this book about feedback mechanisms and runaway processes, but it is all about cognitive faculties and the „hardware“ behind them, not about the entities of culture themselves.
There is one sentence in this book where Kevin Laland alludes to this „life of its own“ of human inventions : „When our ancestors first devised agriculture, they opened up a Pandora's box, and let lose the evil of the Anthropocene.“
It's the last sentence of chapter 10, just an isolated remark, nothing more.
It was one of the strong sides of the so-called „meme's eye view“ to stress this independent dynamic in the noosphere. I would like to read a book that combines the insight of both perspectives: the selectionst focus on „memes“ and the kinetic focus on social learning and teaching, as in the DIT.
Laland has written an important book, presenting an up-to-date summary of the research in DIT. Unfortunately, it is not a pure pleasure to read it, because the style is somewhat dry and academic (more than 1400 endnotes, very few of them give additional information!). Readers already acquainted with the theory of cultural evolution have to read it. For beginners, I can recommend „Not by genes alone“ (the classic text!), or „The Secret of our Success“ by Joseph Henrich, which too is up-to-date theory of the DIT variety, but which is more fun to read.