New thinking

Phil Trans has a special issue (‘New thinking: the evolution of human cognition’ compiled and edited by Cecilia Heyes and Uta Frith) on new ways of thinking about thinking, which is a recent response to evolutionary psychology and insistence upon there being modules. One of the essays, by Nicholas Shea, is open access and has links to some papers that allow you access indirectly.

The issue is partially instigated by Kim Sterelny’s latest book, The evolved apprentice (London, UK: MIT Press). Sterelny argues that we evolved the ability to do culture by instruction, which changed our learning environment and led to the Olduwan technological revolution.

This seems to be the vanguard of a new way to approach cognitive evolution, a kind of post-evopsych general approach. There are disputes of detail within the movement, if it can be called that, but all agree that massive modularity of mind is not a helpful way to deal with human cognition.

It also therefore deals with the issue of cultural evolution (post-Dawkinsian, as it were, but also challenging the Boyd and Richerson dual inheritance theory.