The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (Jean Nicod Lectures)

In a time of active ferment to get the plausible outline of the cognitive steps that human evolution took since diverging from the great ape line, this is state of the art. Sterelny uses his formidable analytic prowess to wade through the literature of many researchers and many rivulets of argumentation (cooperation, origin of morality, commitments, public symbols, environmental modification, etc.) that all bring the human evolutionary landscape with its many challenges but also with its many positive reinforcements into better focus. Two ideas are particularly well developed - the ramifications of "social foraging" and the stability of cooperation under differing group sizes, different time horizons, differing informational needs, and differing reputational needs.Besides the clear collecting and winnowing of good arguments, this book feels more relaxed and even personal at places giving the work a sense of confident clarity. In some ways this present book is an extension of his previous Thought in a Hostile World but in many ways it differs in that the ideas have progressed greatly and in that the subject matter is much more focused on hominins and less on the cognition of other animals. At less than 200 pages and while leaving out such important lines of human behavioral evolution as language the book manages to give the many behavioral rivulets a sense of the sweep of cultural evolution with the many reinforcing flows. With the field in great flux I came away with the sense that this work is a well done synthesis but self-consciously an interim one.

Sterelny writes a good (though slightly repetitive) book, arguing that the key to humaniqueness is social propensities toward cooperation and social learning. Yet there are, as he himself recignizes, quite a few holes in his argument. The major one is language, about which he has nothing to say, though it plays an obvious role both in cognition and in communication....