Cumulative Cultural Evolution and the Origins of Language

Stages and causes of the evolution of language and consciousness: A theoretical reconstruction

This article presents a refinement of theoretical explanations of the main stages of linguistic and cognitive evolution in anthropogenesis. The concepts of language, consciousness, self-consciousness, the self, the unconscious, the subconscious, and the relation between free will and determinism remain at the center of active and complex debates in philosophy and neuroscience. A basic theoretical apparatus comprising the central concepts of "concern" and "providing structure" (an extension of the biological concept of "adaptation") develops the paradigm of the extended evolutionary synthesis. Challenge-threats and challenge-opportunities are invariably associated with concerns pertaining to sustenance, safety, sexuality, parenthood, status, and emotional support. The consolidation of successful behavioral tries (tries), in response to these challenges occurs through the formation of a variety of providing structures including practices, abilities, and attitudes. These structures are formed through mechanisms of interactive rituals and internalization. These novel practices facilitate the transformation of both techno-natural environmental niches and group niches. The emergence of new structures gives rise to new challenges and concerns, which in turn necessitate undertaking of new tries. In the context of African multiregionalism, hominin groups and populations that experienced favorable periods of demographic growth, active migration, genetic, technological, and skill exchange also underwent significant demographic disasters. During the most unfavorable bottleneck periods only the most advanced groups, populations and species survived. The achieved potential for these abilities was consolidated as complexes of innate assignments in gene pools through the Baldwin effect and the multilevel selection. This logic provides an explanation for the main stages of language and speech complication (from holophrases and articulation to complex syntax), as well as the emergence of new abilities of consciousness (from the expansion of attention field to self-consciousness and the "I"-structure).

Hominin cognition: The null hypothesis

The target article explores material culture datasets from three African forager groups. After demonstrating that these modern, contemporary human populations would leave scant evidence of symbolic behaviour or material complexity, it cautioned against using material culture as a barometer for human cognition in the deep past. Twenty-one commentaries broadly support or expand these conclusions. A minority offer targeted demurrals, highlighting (1) the soundness of reasoning from absence; and questioning (2) the "cognitively modern" null; (3) the role of hunter-gatherer ethnography; and (4) the pertinence of the inferential issues identified in the target article. In synthesising these discussions, this reply addresses all four points of demurral in turn, and concludes that there is much to be gained from shifting our null assumptions and reconsidering the probabilistic inferential links between past material culture and cognition.

Evolutionary origins of music. Classical and recent hypotheses

The aim of this paper is to review recent hypotheses on the evolutionary origins of music in Homo sapiens, taking into account the most influential traditional hypotheses. To date, theories derived from evolution have focused primarily on the importance that music carries in solving detailed adaptive problems. The three most influential theoretical concepts have described the evolution of human music in terms of 1) sexual selection, 2) the formation of social bonds, or treated it 3) as a byproduct. According to recent proposals, traditional hypotheses are flawed or insufficient in fully explaining the complexity of music in Homo sapiens. This paper will critically discuss three traditional hypotheses of music evolution (music as an effect of sexual selection, a mechanism of social bonding, and a byproduct), as well as and two recent concepts of music evolution - music as a credible signal and Music and Social Bonding (MSB) hypothesis.

Causal learning in CTC: Adaptive and collaborative

Osiurak and Reynaud highlight the critical role of technical-reasoning skills in the emergence of human cumulative technological culture (CTC), in contrast to previous accounts foregrounding social-reasoning skills as key to CTC. We question their analysis of the available evidence, yet for other reasons applaud the emphasis on causal understanding as central to the adaptive and collaborative dynamics of CTC.

A variational approach to niche construction

In evolutionary biology, niche construction is sometimes described as a genuine evolutionary process whereby organisms, through their activities and regulatory mechanisms, modify their environment such as to steer their own evolutionary trajectory, and that of other species. There is ongoing debate, however, on the extent to which niche construction ought to be considered a bona fide evolutionary force, on a par with natural selection. Recent formulations of the variational free-energy principle as applied to the life sciences describe the properties of living systems, and their selection in evolution, in terms of variational inference. We argue that niche construction can be described using a variational approach. We propose new arguments to support the niche construction perspective, and to extend the variational approach to niche construction to current perspectives in various scientific fields.

Convergent minds: ostension, inference and Grice's third clause

A prevailing view is that while human communication has an 'ostensive-inferential' or 'Gricean' intentional structure, animal communication does not. This would make the psychological states that support human and animal forms of communication fundamentally different. Against this view, I argue that there are grounds to expect ostensive communication in non-human clades. This is because it is sufficient for ostensive communication that one intentionally addresses one's utterance to one's intended interlocutor-something that is both a functional pre-requisite of successful communication and cognitively undemanding. Furthermore, while ostension is an important feature of intentional communication, the inferences required in Gricean communication may be minimal: ostension and inference may come apart. The grounds for holding that animal communication could not be Gricean are therefore weak. I finish by defending the idea that a 'minimally Gricean' model of communication is a valuable tool for characterizing the communicative interactions of many animal species.