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Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

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If you have a question about this talk, please contact Louise White .

Evolutionary psychology casts the human mind as a collection of cognitive instincts – organs of thought shaped by genetic evolution and constrained by the needs of our Stone Age ancestors. This picture was plausible 25 years ago but, I argue, it no longer fits the facts. Research in psychology and neuroscience – involving nonhuman animals, infants and adult humans – now suggests that genetic evolution has merely tweaked the human mind, making us more friendly than our pre-human ancestors, more attentive to other agents, and giving us souped-up, general-purpose mechanisms of learning, memory and control. Using these resources, our special-purpose organs of thought are built in the course of development through social interaction. They are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution, cognitive gadgets rather than cognitive instincts.

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