Colloquium paper: the cognitive niche: coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language.
Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace's apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the "cognitive niche." This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people's beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation). The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction, which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively. These abilities can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces and are in principle testable by analyses of statistical signs of selection in the human genome.
Pinker
Steven
S
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. pinker@wjh.harvard.edu
D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D003071:Cognition; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005260:Female; D015894:Genome, Human; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011340:Problem Solving; D013045:Species Specificity
Science. 1991 Aug 2;253(5019):530-5
1857983
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1998 Oct 13;95(21):12695-700
9770548
Psychol Rev. 2002 Apr;109(2):306-29
11990320
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 1999 Jun 30;882:119-27; discussion 128-34
10415890
Behav Brain Sci. 2003 Dec;26(6):651-65; discussion 666-707
15377127
Nature. 2002 Aug 22;418(6900):869-72
12192408
Nature. 1998 Jun 11;393(6685):573-7
9634232
Hum Mol Genet. 2004 Mar 1;13(5):489-94
14722158
Am J Psychol. 1950 Apr;63(2):176-85
15410879
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Jul 23;99(15):10221-6
12122210
Science. 2004 Sep 17;305(5691):1779-82
15375269
Annu Rev Genomics Hum Genet. 2000;1:539-59
11701640
Nature. 2000 Mar 30;404(6777):495-8
10761917
Psychol Rev. 2010 Jul;117(3):785-807
20658853
Behav Brain Sci. 1998 Aug;21(4):547-69; discussion 569-609
10097021
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jan 22;105(3):833-8
18199841
Psychol Rev. 1992 Oct;99(4):605-32
1454901
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2000 Feb 1;17(1):1-11
20945168
Trends Genet. 2000 Jul;16(7):296-302
10858659
Nature. 2001 Oct 4;413(6855):519-23
11586359
Science. 2003 Dec 12;302(5652):1960-3
14671302