The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique

by Kim Sterelny

Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from those of our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology, life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away from those of the other great apes. In The Evolved Apprentice , Kim Sterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and to cooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedback loops that drove us further from other great apes. Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of information-sharing practices across generations and how these practices transformed human minds and social lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with their environment, cooperative foraging. The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments.

Genres: Science, Evolution, Nonfiction, Psychology, Philosophy, Biology, History

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 24, 2012

About the author

After studying philosophy at Sydney University, Kim Sterelny taught philosophy in Australia at Sydney, ANU (where he was Research Fellow, and then Senior Research Fellow, in Philosophy at RSSS from 1983 until 1987), and La Trobe Universities, before taking up a position at Victoria University in Wellington, where he held a Personal Chair in Philosophy. For a few years he spent half of each year at Victoria University and the other half of each year with the Philosophy Program at RSSS, but from 2008 he has been full-time at ANU.

Sterelny has been a Visiting Professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and at Cal Tech and the University of Maryland, College Park, in the USA. His main research interests are Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Psychology and Philosophy of Mind. He is the author of The Representational Theory of Mind and the co-author of Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt) and Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (with Paul Griffiths). He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In addition to philosophy, Kim spends his time eating curries, drinking red wine, bushwalking and bird watching.

http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/profile/ki...

Reviews

[Nat]

I feel like Sterelny's reflections on "high-price defection from the norms of the larger society" (p.119) as a way of enforcing strong group commitments should figure in any explanation of why the excruciating job market experience in philosophy actually contributes to stronger commitments to philosophy as a profession.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting content, but Sterelny presumes a level of knowledge above the average layman. This book is for perhaps Honors students or very keen undergraduates with a firm grasp of evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy of biology. The multi-level selection model was refreshing to read, and is intuitively plausible so long as one keeps in mind what level of description a particular phenomena is meant to exist at (don't look for culture in the genes).

Be prepared to have to google multiple references to get sufficient background on key concepts that you may not be familiar with, such as phenotypic plasticity.

[Piet van den Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second book of Sterelny's that I read in a relatively short time - this one is perhaps his most cited and makes a broader argument than his more recent book of his I read ('The Pleistocene Social Contract'). I wanted to read it because it because I had the sense that it more broadly reflects his views on human (behavioural) evolution. What I really enjoy about reading him is that he has a truly interdisciplinary stance, bringing together arguments from widely different fields from the more economic/game theory world via cognitive science to archeaeology. What I find more challenging is that his argumentation is often relatively dense and opaque - not the easiest to distil the general message from, either within each chapter or across them. Perhaps that's the idea: he wants to present all evidence and honor the fact that this is a field that necessarily relies on very scant evidence and therefore a lot of conjecture. What I really like is his emphasis on feedbacks in the evolutionary process, an approach that I consider close to complex-systems thinking (which I appreciate and suspect we need more of in this realm). He eschews the common (more simplistic) stance that there is a specific characteristic that makes all the difference between humans and the other great apes, and instead really tries to focus in more detail on what happened in human populations for them to change so quickly. I think he probably gets a lot of it right, and it is anyway refreshing and instructive to read him, as his he really shows how making an interdisciplinary argument can work. He takes parts from the different traditions, but at the same time does not buy in to many of the dogmas that exist in these traditions, which I consider to be a really strong way of doing things that we can all learn from.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Depends on some assumptions I just can't buy, but which are very common in anthropology. Aside form that, even the academic tone didn't turn me off this volume. And the argument is broad enough to survive the crumbling of those assumptions. I found the title a little off-putting though. It is less about evolution than positing possible cultural adaptions of early hominids and rarely is it able to solidly conjecture much beyond Homo erectus, tied as it is to the archeological record (for the most part). It's more anthropology, or perhaps evolutionary psychology, rather than the biology I expected from the title.

[Heather Browning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sterelny provides a new way of thinking about what has driven the evolution of unique human cognition and culture in terms of a feedback loop between increasing co-operation and specialised social learning. The model is extremely plausible and he provides strong arguments and evidence to back it up. I felt the book as a whole didn't always stay on target - it felt like he strayed away from specifically his apprentice learning model to discuss other aspects of human social life and cognition peripheral to his case. Recommended for anyone studying human sciences or evolutionary biology.

[Clarence Williams]

An outstanding addition to anyone interested in understanding the evolution of complex human sociality (in general) and our amazing achievements. Essentially (and crudely stated), our evolved (and advanced) learning capacity coupled with downloaded cognition in the form of artifacts is responsible.

[Tim]

4PTR (New Thinking)