The evolution of cultural gadgets

Dor, Daniel; Ginsburg, Simona; Jablonka, Eva

doi:10.1111/mila.12250

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The cultural-evolutionary framework suggests that human normative competence depends on domain-general psychological processes plus a cognitive gadget—a domain-specific way of processing norms shaped by cultural selection ( Heyes, 2018a , 2019b ). A common and potentially powerful objection to cognitive gadgets says that they would have become cognitive instincts (e.g., Del Giudice, 2019 ; Dor et al, 2019 ; Turner & Walmsley, 2021 ). Even if distinctively human cognitive mechanisms were at first socially inherited and shaped by cultural selection, a process variously known as “Baldwinisation” ( Baldwin, 1896 ), “canalization” ( Gottlieb, 1991 ), and “genetic assimilation” ( Waddington, 1953 ) would have favored genetic variants that reduced the environmental input necessary for their development.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Norm Psychology

Heyes

2023

Perspect Psychol Sci

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Norms permeate human life. Most of people’s activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden—rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of “norm psychology” and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior—compliance, enforcement, and commentary—and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or “cognitive gadget,” perspective suggests that people alive today—parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers—have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People’s actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking Norm Psychology

Heyes

2023

Perspect Psychol Sci

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“…Cognitive Gadgets will not take him where he wants to go, she is built for different roads. Dor, Ginsburg and Jablonka () arrive as a lively, knowledgeable group. Like Morin (), they find some features attractive—the basic design of cultural evolutionary psychology is pleasing, and the trim stylish—but, for them, Cognitive Gadgets just is not big enough.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing cognitive gadgets

Heyes

2019

Mind & Language

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Cognitive Gadgets is a book about the cultural evolution of distinctively human cognitive mechanisms. Responding to commentators with different and broader interests, I argue that intelligent design has been more important in the formation of grist (technologies, practices and ideas) than of mills (cognitive mechanisms), and that embracing genetic accommodation would leave research on the origins of human cognition empirically unconstrained. I also underline the need to assess empirical methods; query the value of theories that merely accommodate existing data; and ask whether acquiring literacy is more laborious than learning to imitate, to talk and to read minds.

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“…It is worth noting that, although Heyes says she expects that her cognitive gadgets would be more evolvable than genetically inherited cognitive systems, and that such evolvability would be a good thing, she is not offering this as a bald reason to think that cognitive gadgets exist. The foundation of her defence of the CGH is empirical, not theoretical and does not rest on evolvability.6 Heyes adds further reasons to reject the idea that cognitive gadgets could be partially genetically assimilated in a later response(Heyes, 2019b) to a criticisms byDor et al (2019). Whilst interesting, I don't elaborate on these reasons here, as Heyes' views regarding the evolutionary lability of cognitive gadgets (which is our focus) appear unchanged.…”

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confidence: 97%