No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
How primatology can inform us about the evolution of the human mind
Australian Psychologist
Abstract
Humans are primates. We have evolved from common ancestors and the evolution of the human body is becoming increasingly clear as the archeological record expands. But for most people the gap between humans and animals lies in the mind, not in the body. And minds do not fossilise. To reconstruct the evolution of mind, scholars have thus increasingly looked to our closest relatives for clues. Here I discuss four ways in which the study of primates may inform such reconstruction: fact-finding, phylogenetic reconstruction, analogy, and regression models. Knowledge about primates can help us bridge the gap. Extinction of our closest relatives, on the other hand, would not only deplete that source of information but also increase the apparent differences between animal and human minds. It is likely that we have a long history of displacing closely related species, including the other hominids, leading us to appear ever more unique.
... Independently, Whiten (1996Whiten ( , 2000 and Suddendorf (1998Suddendorf ( , 1999 suggested that a capacity for secondary representation can make sense of a somewhat parallel set of psychological achievements in the great apes, for which evidence has accumulated in recent years. The convergence in our initially separate, yet matching, conjectures on this encouraged us to collaborate on a fuller, comprehensive survey of the available evidence for these correlations, spanning both children's cognitive development, and comparative psychology Whiten, 2001, 2003; see also Suddendorf 2004). ...
The imaginative powers of humans obviously exceed those of other species; however these characteristics and knowledge did not spring from nowhere. Instead they evolved on the shoulders of the distinctive psychology of man's pre-human ancestors. This chapter defines the key characteristics of the ancestral foundations of man and describes the evidence in great ape behaviour for two aspects of imagination. The first level of imagination is inventiveness. Inventiveness is the capacity to generate novel and diverse behavioural responses to any given environmental circumstance. In the experimental studies presented in this chapter wherein chimpanzees are tasked to solve particular problems, it was found that great apes such as gorillas, orang-utans, and chimpanzees display imaginative skills compared to other primates. The second aspect of imagination refers to the capacity to operate mentally in a 'pretend' world. This second level of imagination is higher than inventiveness as it requires holding mind distinctions between the hypothetical and real world. Although the experimental studies generated intriguing results, these results are limited, and while the pretence in apes should be observable, it is dominated by the manifestation of a more general capacity for secondary representation.
An understanding of what death and dying entail is termed a concept of death (CoD), and the human CoD is often viewed as one of the characteristics that distinguishes our species. In this research, I identified an analogous understanding of death and dying in our closest living relatives—genus Pan. Linguistic frameworks designed for studying the CoD in human children look for evidence of understanding of several facets of death. I adapted these frameworks for the non-verbal Pan species, systematically analysing written and video recordings of chimpanzee and bonobo behaviours surrounding death within these new behavioural frameworks. I identified compelling evidence for the comprehension of several aspects of death, and thus for the presence of a human-like CoD in chimpanzees and bonobos. This has implications for our own evolutionary story and raises questions about what makes humans ‘human’.
This article describes the design and implementation of a 1-credit-hour seminar in comparative psychology as a supplement to an introductory biopsychology course. The purpose of the course was to introduce students to the ecological and evolutionary aspects of animal behavior by building on topics that are introduced in many biopsychology courses. This article provides suggestions for course assignments and course reading materials. The current approach of introducing undergraduate students to comparative psychology by attaching a seminar to an existing course offers a framework that could possibly be used with many other undergraduate psychology courses.
There is a growing interest in mental time travel in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and evolutionary psychology. Here we review current issues in each of these disciplines. To help move the debates forward we name and distinguish 15 key hypotheses about mental time travel. We argue that foresight has for too long lived in the shadows of research on memory and call for further research efforts.
Previous research suggests that chimpanzees understand single invisible displacement. However, this Piagetian task may be solvable through the use of simple search strategies rather than through mentally representing the past trajectory of an object. Four control conditions were thus administered to two chimpanzees in order to separate associative search strategies from performance based on mental representation. Strategies involving experimenter cue-use, search at the last or first box visited by the displacement device, and search at boxes adjacent to the displacement device were systematically controlled for. Chimpanzees showed no indications of utilizing these simple strategies, suggesting that their capacity to mentally represent single invisible displacements is comparable to that of 18-24-month-old children.
In a dynamic world, mechanisms allowing prediction of future situations can provide a selective advantage. We suggest that memory systems differ in the degree of flexibility they offer for anticipatory behavior and put forward a corresponding taxonomy of prospection. The adaptive advantage of any memory system can only lie in what it contributes for future survival. The most flexible is episodic memory, which we suggest is part of a more general faculty of mental time travel that allows us not only to go back in time, but also to foresee, plan, and shape virtually any specific future event. We review comparative studies and find that, in spite of increased research in the area, there is as yet no convincing evidence for mental time travel in nonhuman animals. We submit that mental time travel is not an encapsulated cognitive system, but instead comprises several subsidiary mechanisms. A theater metaphor serves as an analogy for the kind of mechanisms required for effective mental time travel. We propose that future research should consider these mechanisms in addition to direct evidence of future-directed action. We maintain that the emergence of mental time travel in evolution was a crucial step towards our current success.
Recent interest in the development and evolution of theory of mind has provided a wealth of information about representational skills in both children and animals. According to J. Perner (1991), children begin to entertain secondary representations in the 2nd year of life. This advance manifests in their passing hidden displacement tasks, engaging in pretense and means-ends reasoning, interpreting external representations, displaying mirror self-recognition and empathic behavior, and showing an early understanding of "mind" and imitation. New data show a cluster of mental accomplishments in great apes that is very similar to that observed in 2-year-old humans. It is suggested that it is most parsimonious to assume that this cognitive profile is of homologous origin and that great apes possess secondary representational capacity. Evidence from animals other than apes is scant. This analysis leads to a number of predictions for future research.
This article contains the argument that the human ability to travel mentally in time constitutes a discontinuity between ourselves and other animals. Mental time travel comprises the mental reconstruction of personal events from the past (episodic memory) and the mental construction of possible events in the future. It is not an isolated module, but depends on the sophistication of other cognitive capacities, including self-awareness, meta-representation, mental attribution, understanding the perception-knowledge relationship, and the ability to dissociate imagined mental states from one's present mental state. These capacities are also important aspects of so-called theory of mind, and they appear to mature in children at around age 4. Furthermore, mental time travel is generative, involving the combination and recombination of familiar elements, and in this respect may have been a precursor to language. Current evidence, although indirect or based on anecdote rather than on systematic study, suggests that nonhuman animals, including the great apes, are confined to a "present" that is limited by their current drive states. In contrast, mental time travel by humans is relatively unconstrained and allows a more rapid and flexible adaptation to complex, changing environments than is afforded by instincts or conventional learning. Past and future events loom large in much of human thinking, giving rise to cultural, religious, and scientific concepts about origins, destiny, and time itself.
Early hominids began leaving Africa for Asia almost one million years earlier than previously thought. What drove these migrations?
This research utilized longitudinal and cross sectional methods to investigate the relation between the development of a representational theory of mind and children's growing ability to search their own minds for appropriate problem solutions. In the first experiment 59 pre-school children were given three false-belief tasks and a divergent thinking task. Those children who passed false-belief tasks produced significantly more items, as well as more original items, in response to divergent thinking questions than those children who failed. This significant association persisted even when chronological age, verbal and nonverbal general ability were partialed out. In a second study 20 children who failed the false-belief tasks in the first experiment were re-tested three months later. Again, those who now passed the false-belief tasks were significantly better at the divergent thinking task than those who continued to fail. The associations between measures of divergent thinking and understanding false-beliefs remained significant when controlling for the covariates. Earlier divergent thinking scores did not predict false-belief understanding three months later. Instead, children who passed false-belief tasks on the second measure improved significantly in relation to their own earlier performance and improved significantly more than children who continued to fail. False-belief task performance was significantly correlated to the amount of intra-individual improvement in divergent thinking even when age, verbal and nonverbal skills were partialed out. These findings suggest that developments in common underlying skills are responsible for the improvement in understanding other minds and searching one's own. Changes in representational and executive skills are discussed as potential causes for the improvement.
This chapter reviews the evidence for theory of mind in great apes and evaluates Povinelli's so-called 'reinterpretation hypothesis'. Introduction As a soccer player, one of us was often confronted with the challenging dilemma of taking penalty kicks. Up to about age 13 I (T.S.) could quite reliably convert the shot by simply peeking briefly to one corner of the goal, running up and then casually placing the ball in the other corner. I relied not on the accuracy or velocity of my shot, but almost entirely on fooling the keeper that I intended to shoot in the opposite direction. But then some clever keepers picked up on this simplest of tricks and tried to thwart my attempt by jumping in the opposite corner to the one I looked to. Some even tried to turn the tables by offering one side (moving closer to the other post). The battle became increasingly more challenging as I was sizing up the keeper's ability to read my intentions and do the opposite of what I thought he thought. For example, I pretend to place it right, but I think that he thinks I am only pretending to place it right - so I may chose to place it right after all. This is 'theory of mind' in action. Most theory-of-mind research uses verbal paradigms to assess children's reasoning about the mind. As the above example illustrates, however, theory of mind manifests in our non-verbal actions. Naturally, investigations into potential theory of mind in non-human animals must rely on such non-verbal performances. Whether our closest animal relatives share such manifestations of theory of mind has been a topic of much research and discussion in recent years. But identification of an unequivocal behavioural indicator for mind-reading has proved frustratingly difficult...
Introduction: Every culture and epoch has had its ideas about the nature of mind and existence. We can reflect upon ourselves, upon others, and upon the world. Do animals do that too? Do they sit around and think that they are because they can think? Are they to be considered mindless if they do not reflect? How did our ability to think beyond the immediately present evolve? The self-awareness implied by 'cogito ergo sum', or 'I think, therefore I am', demands a reflective level of thinking that develops by about age four in children. Only then, recent research suggests, do children begin to reflect on their own mental states. It would be quite difficult, however, to convince people that younger children are mindless - mind can surely exist without being able to reflect upon its own existence. One can know, regardless of whether one knows that one knows. This means that the Cartesian assumption that the mind is necessarily transparent to the self is flawed (cf. Wimmer and Hartl 1991; Gopnik 1993). Instead, the reflective mind, or what I want to call the metamind, seems to depend on mental computations that gradually develop over the first four years of life and that have evolved over the last five million years of human evolution.
As an increasing number of field studies of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have achieved long-term status across Africa, differences in the behavioural repertoires described have become apparent that suggest there is significant cultural variation. Here we present a systematic synthesis of this information from the seven most long-term studies, which together have accumulated 151 years of chimpanzee observation. This comprehensive analysis reveals patterns of variation that are far more extensive than have previously been documented for any animal species except humans. We find that 39 different behaviour patterns, including tool usage, grooming and courtship behaviours, are customary or habitual in some communities but are absent in others where ecological explanations have been discounted. Among mammalian and avian species, cultural variation has previously been identified only for single behaviour patterns, such as the local dialects of song-birds. The extensive, multiple variations now documented for chimpanzees are thus without parallel. Moreover, the combined repertoire of these behaviour patterns in each chimpanzee community is itself highly distinctive, a phenomenon characteristic of human cultures but previously unrecognised in non-human species.
Bipedalism has traditionally been regarded as the fundamental adaptation that sets hominids apart from other primates. Fossil evidence demonstrates that by 4.1 million years ago, and perhaps earlier, hominids exhibited adaptations to bipedal walking. At present, however, the fossil record offers little information about the origin of bipedalism, and despite nearly a century of research on existing fossils and comparative anatomy, there is still no consensus concerning the mode of locomotion that preceded bipedalism. Here we present evidence that fossils attributed to Australopithecus anamensis (KNM-ER 20419) and A. afarensis (AL 288-1) retain specialized wrist morphology associated with knuckle-walking. This distal radial morphology differs from that of later hominids and non-knuckle-walking anthropoid primates, suggesting that knuckle-walking is a derived feature of the African ape and human clade. This removes key morphological evidence for a Pan-Gorilla clade, and suggests that bipedal hominids evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor that was already partly terrestrial.
Geographic variation in some aspects of chimpanzee behavior has been interpreted as evidence for culture. Here we document
similar geographic variation in orangutan behaviors. Moreover, as expected under a cultural interpretation, we find a correlation
between geographic distance and cultural difference, a correlation between the abundance of opportunities for social learning
and the size of the local cultural repertoire, and no effect of habitat on the content of culture. Hence, great-ape cultures
exist, and may have done so for at least 14 million years.
What do functionally important DNA sites, those scrutinized and shaped by natural selection, tell us about the place of humans in evolution? Here we compare approximately 90 kb of coding DNA nucleotide sequence from 97 human genes to their sequenced chimpanzee counterparts and to available sequenced gorilla, orangutan, and Old World monkey counterparts, and, on a more limited basis, to mouse. The nonsynonymous changes (functionally important), like synonymous changes (functionally much less important), show chimpanzees and humans to be most closely related, sharing 99.4% identity at nonsynonymous sites and 98.4% at synonymous sites. On a time scale, the coding DNA divergencies separate the human-chimpanzee clade from the gorilla clade at between 6 and 7 million years ago and place the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees at between 5 and 6 million years ago. The evolutionary rate of coding DNA in the catarrhine clade (Old World monkey and ape, including human) is much slower than in the lineage to mouse. Among the genes examined, 30 show evidence of positive selection during descent of catarrhines. Nonsynonymous substitutions by themselves, in this subset of positively selected genes, group humans and chimpanzees closest to each other and have chimpanzees diverge about as much from the common human-chimpanzee ancestor as humans do. This functional DNA evidence supports two previously offered taxonomic proposals: family Hominidae should include all extant apes; and genus Homo should include three extant species and two subgenera, Homo (Homo) sapiens (humankind), Homo (Pan) troglodytes (common chimpanzee), and Homo (Pan) paniscus (bonobo chimpanzee).
The present study examined the role of the 5-HT1B receptor in learning and memory. The ability of the 5-HT1B receptor agonist anpirtoline and the selective 5-HT1B receptor antagonist NAS-181 to affect spatial learning in the water maze (WM) and aversive learning in the passive avoidance (PA) task were examined in the rat. Anpirtoline (0.1-1.0 mg/kg, s.c.) caused a dose-dependent impairment of learning and memory in both the WM and PA tasks. NAS-181 (1.0-10 mg/kg, s.c.) failed to alter performance of the WM task, but produced a dose-dependent (0.1-20 mg/kg) facilitation of PA retention. Furthermore, treatment with NAS-181 (10 mg/kg) fully blocked the impairment of the WM and PA performance caused by anpirtoline (1.0 mg/kg). In contrast, NAS-181 (3.0-10 mg/kg) did not attenuate the spatial learning deficit and the impairment of PA retention caused by scopolamine (0.1 mg/kg in WM task, 0.3 mg/kg in PA task, s.c.), a nonselective muscarinic antagonist. Moreover, a subthreshold dose of scopolamine (0.1 mg/kg) blocked the facilitation of PA retention induced by NAS-181 (1.0-10 mg/kg). In addition, the behavioral disturbances (eg thigmotaxic swimming and platform deflections) induced by anpirtoline and scopolamine were analyzed in the WM task and correlated with WM performance. These results indicate that: (1) 5-HT1B receptor stimulation and blockade result in opposite effects in two types of cognitive tasks in the rat, and that (2) the 5-HT1B antagonist NAS-181 can facilitate some aspects of cognitive function, most likely via an increase of cholinergic transmission. These results suggest that 5-HT1B receptor antagonists may have a potential in the treatment of cognitive deficits resulting from loss of cholinergic transmission.
Are humans alone in their ability to reminisce about the past and imagine the future? Recent evidence suggests that food-storing birds (scrub jays) have access to information about what they have stored where and when. This has raised the possibility of mental time travel (MTT) in animals and sparked similar research with other species. Here we caution that such data do not provide convincing evidence for MTT. Examination of characteristics of human MTT (e.g. non-verbal declaration, generativity, developmental prerequisites) points to other avenues as to how a case for animal MTT could be made. In light of the current lack of evidence, however, we maintain that MTT is a uniquely human characteristic.
In the past 20 years, there has been a resurgence of archaeological interest in prehistoric and ancient warfare. Whether warfare is seen as a cause or an effect of features of and changes in the archaeological, ethnohistorical, or ancient historical record, it is back “in play.” This change was the result archaeologists working in Europe and the New World who were confronted by the warfare obvious in records in their areas of research. They then argued in the most widely read and stringently refereed publication venues, citing unequivocal evidence and using clear logic, that prehistoric and ethnohistoric warfare did occur and needs attention. One area that is still neglected by most archaeologists are the rare periods of relative peace—periods during which evidences of both war and homicide are rare. If recent archaeologists have shown limited interest in peace, they have at least now recognized that prehistoric war is not an oxymoron. While we vehemently disagree about the causes of war and when it began, archaeologists now recognize that ancient and prehistoric warfare did exist and that it is a topic that we can and should investigate, and most are gratified by the attention given to this subject by a new generation of scholars.
The book encompasses four main global issues: climate change, the role of the World Trade Organization, human rights and humanitarian intervention, and foreign aid. Singer addresses each vital issue from an ethical perspective and offers alternatives to the state-centric approach that characterizes international theory and relations today. On climate change, for example, he sees the ethical issue as one that concerns a common global resource - the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb waste gases. How much of this resource should developed notions appropriate, and how much should be left for developing nations? Regarding the WTO, Singer asks whether the organization allows free trade to override all other values, and he assesses the evidence for and against the view that globalization helps the poor. In his consideration of human rights, the author asks to what extent we can develop global laws protecting human rights and what the criteria for intervention should be when these rights are violated. Finally, Singer addresses the obligations of the world's rich nations to assist the poor nations.
In the current resurgence of interest in the biological basis of animal behavior and social organization, the ideas and questions pursued by Charles Darwin remain fresh and insightful. This is especially true of The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin's second most important work. This edition is a facsimile reprint of the first printing of the first edition (1871), not previously available in paperback. The work is divided into two parts. Part One marshals behavioral and morphological evidence to argue that humans evolved from other animals. Darwin shoes that human mental and emotional capacities, far from making human beings unique, are evidence of an animal origin and evolutionary development. Part Two is an extended discussion of the differences between the sexes of many species and how they arose as a result of selection. Here Darwin lays the foundation for much contemporary research by arguing that many characteristics of animals have evolved not in response to the selective pressures exerted by their physical and biological environment, but rather to confer an advantage in sexual competition. These two themes are drawn together in two final chapters on the role of sexual selection in humans. In their Introduction, Professors Bonner and May discuss the place of The Descent in its own time and relation to current work in biology and other disciplines.
Bound to become a classic and to stimulate debate and research, The Evolution of Communication looks at species in their natural environments as a way to begin to understand what the real units of analysis of communicating systems are, using arguments about design and function to illuminate both the origin and subsequent evolution of each system. It lights the way for a research program that seriously addresses the problem of how communication systems, including language, have been designed over the course of evolution.
Bradford Books imprint
Thanks to an astonishing series of fossil discoveries, researchers are at last glimpsing our earliest ape ancestors, back beyond 4 million years ago. The finds are shifting attention from the savanna to the woods-and changing ideas about what it means to be a hominid.
The relationship between pretense and the child's theory of mind (ToM) has recently become a major research interest in developmental psychology. Over the preschool years, pantomime, or gestural representation, progresses from object substitution by body parts (BPO) to imaginary object (IO) gestures without environmental support. In the present study, the authors investigated whether pantomime is a form of pretense that is linked to ToM development. Forty-four children between age 3 and 4 were tested. An association between IO pantomime and ToM measured by false-belief and appearance-reality tasks was observed. Those children who passed the ToM tasks produced significantly more IO pantomimes than those who did not pass the tasks. The association continued to be significant even when age was partialed out. Modeling IO pantomimes to the children did not improve their performance. The results therefore suggest that the lack of IO pantomime in younger children is not the result of preference. Different reasons for the observed association between ToM and IO pantomime are discussed.
By investigating historic changes in complexity Bichakjian (1999) tries to convince linguists that languages evolve. Here, I wish to add a reason why speculation about the very origin of language may be a fruitful endeavour. The significance of the question, and increasing archaeological evidence, has resulted in an avalanche of recent proposals. These accounts can be divided into two broad categories; those that advocate either early or late emergence. The "late-bloomer" theories face the likelihood of being disproved by mounting evidence, yet it is precisely for this reason that theories of the evolution of language might gain respectability within the realms of scientific inquiry.
The development of a `theory of mind' may not only be important for understanding the minds of others but also for using one's own mind. To investigate this supposition, forty children between the ages of three and four were given false-belief and creativity tasks. The numbers of appropriate and of original responses in the creativity test were found to correlate positively with performance on false-belief tasks. This association was robust, as it continued to be strong and significant even when age and verbal intelligence were partialled out. The results support the hypothesis that the metarepresentational skills involved in theory of mind also affect the way children can access and scan their own mental repertoire beyond the areas of currently activated content (i.e. divergent thinking). With the advent of theory of mind a basic cognitive shift takes place in human development, and possibly took place in cognitive evolution.
IQ gains over time were calculated for each WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) subtest and the subtests ranked by size of gain. Verbal similarities led at 20 points per generation--larger than gains on Raven's Progressive Matrices. Similarities measures on-the-spot problem-solving (something akin to fluid g); verbal subtests that do not measure this show low rates of gain. WISC subtests were also ranked by their correlations with Raven's, the latter being used as a marker for fluid g. The r between the two hierarchies was calculated to approximate a correlation between IQ gains and fluid g. The result of 0.50 contrasts with the negative correlation between IQ gains and the g generated by factor analysing the WISC battery itself, which is generally viewed as predominately a crystallized g. In sum, it appears that human groups can make massive fluid g gains in a period too short to accommodate radical change in the speed and efficiency of neural processes. Moreover, once gains in intelligent behaviour over historical time are seen to be independent of brain physiology, does g really provide a criterion for assessing their significance? Finally, not only a measure of fluid g (which is highly heritable) but also inbreeding depression are shown to be correlated with IQ gains--gains overwhelmingly environmental in origin. Therefore, correlations between such genetically influenced factors and the size of the black/white IQ gap do not show that the gap has a genetic component.
Hominid evolution: Looking to modern apes for clues
- Savage-Rumbaugh
- Es
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S. (1994). Hominid evolution: Looking to
modern apes for clues. In D. Quiatt, & J. Itani (Eds.), Hominid
culture in primate perspective (pp. 7 -49). Niwot: University of
Colorado Press.
Out of the pan, into the fire: How our ancestors' evolution depended on what they ate Tree of origin: What primate behavior can tell us about human social evolution Primates and human evolution
- R W Wrangham
Wrangham, R. W. (2001). Out of the pan, into the fire: How our ancestors' evolution depended on what they ate. In F. B. de Waal (Ed.), Tree of origin: What primate behavior can tell us about human social evolution (pp. 119 – 143). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Primates and human evolution