I Background
1 In Search of Human Uniqueness
The solution to the puzzle—the new evolutionary process—is of course human culture. But the traditional notion of culture as something apart from biology and evolution will not do. Human culture is the form of social organization that arose in the human lineage in response to specific adaptive challenges. Its most distinctive characteristic is its high degree (and new forms) of cooperation. (Location 132)
“Biológicamente cultural” Adios lacanitos
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But this explanation of human uniqueness in terms of cultural processes creates another puzzle, and this one is not yet solved. In this case the focus is not on the level of the species and its achievements, but rather on the level of the individual and its psychology: how do human individuals come to the species-unique cognitive and social abilities necessary for participating in cultural coordination and transmission? To answer this question the obvious first step is to establish exactly how human psychology differs from that of other primates—precisely how humans as individuals are unique. (Location 143)
Given a description of the key differences between humans and their nearest great ape relatives, the next task is to explain those differences. In an evolutionary framework, the axiomatic explanation is, of course, natural selection: the human individuals alive today have been naturally selected to meet certain species-unique ecological or socioecological challenges. (Location 160)
Classically, inherited variation in evolution emanates from genetic mutation or recombination, which produce, via ontogenetic processes, novel traits. But recent advances in evolutionary developmental biology (so-called Evo-Devo) suggest that the constructive role of these ontogenetic processes has not been fully recognized. Not only do new traits always come into existence via ontogenetic processes—which direct and constrain genetic expression—but by far the most frequent source of new traits is changes in the timing and manner in which already existing genes are expressed and transact with the environment. Thus, even relatively modest changes in the way that regulatory genes orchestrate ontogenetic timing and plasticity can have enormous and cascading phenotypic effects—not encoded directly in the genes—as developing systems interact with one another and with the environment in unexpected ways. The implication is that if we wish to explain how uniquely human psychology is created, we must focus our attention on ontogeny, and especially on how great ape ontogeny in general has been transformed into human ontogeny in particular. (Location 169)
Our working hypothesis to explain the ontogeny of uniquely human psychology is Vygotskian: uniquely human forms of cognition and sociality emerge in human ontogeny through, and only through, species-unique forms of sociocultural activity. But the theory we develop updates and modifies Vygotsky—it is Neo-Vygotskian—in placing human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory. (Location 190)
Tomasello actualiza el framework sociocultural con teoría de la evolución.
evolución teoría sociocultural ontogenia homo_sapiens
Modern evolutionary theory emphasizes that organisms inherit their environments as much as they inherit their genes: a fish inherits not only fins but also water. Human children inherit a sociocultural context replete with cultural artifacts, symbols, and institutions, and their unique maturational capacities would be inert without a sociocultural context within which to develop (Location 197)
In contrast to Vygotsky’s almost exclusive focus on the transmitive dimension of culture—how the culture’s practices with symbols and other artifacts are passed along across generations and thereby restructure human psychological functioning—we focus more on the coordinative dimension of culture: how humans, including children, collaborate and communicate in the moment (how they co-operate) as they engage with others in sociocultural activities. (Location 208)
In the context of this evolutionary account, our ontogenetic account invokes three sets of processes that together construct particular developmental pathways. The first are processes of maturation as more or less direct reflections of humans’ evolutionary history. (Location 214)
this maturational process unfolds in two basic steps: first is the emergence of joint intentionality at around nine months of age, and second is the emergence of collective intentionality at around three years of age. (Location 218)
The second set of processes is children’s individual experiences, especially their sociocultural experiences. (Location 220)
Once again, age three is a crucial transition point. For most of human evolutionary history, this is the age of weaning, when children start taking their first independent baby steps into the wider world. (Location 224)
The third set of processes are humans’ various forms of executive self-regulation. The proposal, following Vygotsky, is that many aspects of human cognitive and social uniqueness result from the special ways in which children attempt to executively self-regulate their thoughts and actions not just individually, as do many primates, but also socially through their constant monitoring of the perspectives and evaluations of social partners on the self. (Location 231)
Tercero, la regulación interiorizada desde la interacción social
sociocultural agencia autoregulación relación
My attempt in what follows is to use this neo-Vygotskian framework to explain the origin and development of children’s species-unique forms of psychological functioning during the first six years of life. (Location 243)
2 Evolutionary Foundations
These uniquely human adaptations for cooperation evolved in two key steps (Tomasello et al. 2012). The first step comprised adaptations enabling early human individuals to cooperate with one another dyadically in obligate collaborative foraging (with partner choice); these are the skills and motivations of joint intentionality. The second step comprised adaptations enabling modern human individuals to cooperate with one another in the larger collaborative enterprise known as culture; these are the skills and motivations of collective intentionality. These two steps constitute the evolutionary foundations of uniquely human cognitive and social ontogeny. (Location 256)
In this chapter, then, we set the stage for the specific ontogenetic analyses in the main body of the book. We do this, first, by explicating the evolutionary foundations of uniquely human psychology, and, second, by specifying how this uniquely human psychology led to several novel features of human ontogeny as a whole. (Location 265)
Our story begins with humans’ last common ancestor (LCA) with other apes, about 6 million years ago. (Location 270)
chimpanzees and bonobos possess the same “core knowledge” of the physical world that human infants begin to display early in ontogeny (Location 284)
The ape can do this because she has the ability to cognitively represent the problem and mentally simulate using the available tools within that represented problem. In all, based on studies of modern-day great apes, we may say that the LCA had very sophisticated skills of cognition and thinking about the physical world. (Location 288)
based on studies with great apes we may hypothesize that the LCA had an understanding of others as intentional agents (another piece of core knowledge) and that they used this understanding in mental simulations to predict what others would do in various novel competitive situations. (Location 296)
They possess complex skills of cognition and social cognition for understanding, predicting, and manipulating their physical and social worlds. What they do not possess is humanlike skills of shared intentionality, such as the ability to participate in the thinking of others through joint attention, conventional communication, and pedagogy. Chimpanzees and bonobos—and thus the LCA—are and were very clever, but mainly or only as individuals. (Location 302)
The participants are not working together so much as they are using one another as “social tools” to maximize their own gains. (Location 316)
We may thus infer that the LCA had some basic skills of collaboration, but these did not include working together toward a shared goal or voluntarily sharing the spoils at the end. (Location 319)
Chimpanzees and bonobos, and so the LCA, are and were very social, but only in a kind of instrumental way. (Location 324)
LCAs had a variety of skills of cognitive self-monitoring and motivational self-regulation. What they did not do, that even human children do, is to monitor their actions and thinking based on the perspectives and evaluations of others in their social group. (Location 333)
homininos capacidad favorite cognición cita
Humans diverged from other great apes around 6 million years ago. For the next 4 million years they were basically bipedal apes with ape-sized brains. Then, around 2 million years ago, there emerged the genus Homo, with larger brains and new skills in making stone tools. (Location 336)
An essential part of the process of obligate collaborative foraging was partner choice. Individuals who were cognitively or otherwise incompetent at collaboration—for example, those incapable of forming a joint goal with others—were not chosen repeatedly as partners, and this meant no food. Likewise, individuals who were socially or morally uncooperative in their collaborative interactions with others—for example, those who tried to hog all the spoils—were also avoided as regular partners and so were doomed. The upshot was that there was strong and active social selection (West-Eberhard 1979) for cooperatively competent and motivated individuals. (Location 342)
The creation of a joint agent—while each partner maintains her own individual role and perspective at the same time—created a completely new human psychology, spawning new forms of both cognition and sociality. (Location 351)
A joint intentional activity constituted a shared conceptual world, encompassing the partners’ distinct perspectives, and it created the pragmatic infrastructure upon which early humans’ new skills of cooperative communication could be built (Location 361)