Authors & Works cited in this section (citations below):

Abramova, Ekaterina & Slors. “Social cognition in simple action coordination: A case for direct
Acerbi, Alberto & Mesoudi. 2015. “If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about?
Andriani, P. & Cohen. From Exaptation to Radical Niche Construction in Biological and
Anton, Susan et al. 2014. “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective.
Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved.
Baccini, Peter & Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation
Bach, Patric et al. “The affordance-matching hypothesis: how objects guide action
Baert, Patrick & Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond
Bardone, Emanuele & Shmorgun. 2013. “Ecologies of creativity: smartphones as a case
Bekoff, Marc. Cooperation and the Evolution of Social Living: Moving Beyond the Constraints
Bonneuil, Christophe & Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History
Borghi, Anna et al. 2013. “The embodied mind extended: using words as social tools
Braje, Todd. 2015. “Earth Systems, Human Agency, and the Anthropocene: Planet Earth in the
Bratman, Michael. Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together.
Burkart, J.M. et al. 2014. “The evolutionary origin of human hyper-cooperation.”
Butterfield, Nicholas. 2015. “The Neoproterozoic.
Butterfill, Stephen & N. Sebanz. “Editorial: Joint Action: What is Shared?”
Butterfill, Stephen. “Joint Action and Development.”
Christiansen, Morten. “Language has evolved to depend on multiple-cue integration
Codding, Brian & Bird. “Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science.”
Coppinger, Raymond & L. Coppinger. What Is a Dog?
Cowley, Stephen & M. Harvey. 2015. “The illusion of common ground.”
De Jaegher, H. et al. The co-creation of meaningful action: bridging enaction and interactional
Derex, Maxime & R. Boyd. 2015. “The foundations of the human cultural niche.”
Di Paolo, Ezequiel & De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis
Dingemanse, Mark et al. 2015. “Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems
Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction
Elias, John & Tylen. 2014. “Instituting interaction: normative transformations in human
Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.
Enfield, N.J. 2013. “Language, culture, and mind: trends and standards in the latest pendulum
Fantasia, Valentina et al. “We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation.”
Favela, Luis & A. Chemero. “The Animal-Environment System.”
Flynn, Emma et al. “Developmental niche construction.”
Fragaszy, D.M. et al. “The fourth dimension of tool use:
Froehlich, M. et al. Unpeeling the layers of language: Bonobos and chimpanzees engage
Fuentes, Agustin. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a
Fuentes, Agustin. “Blurring the biological and social in human becomings”
Fuentes, Agustin. Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary
Fusaroli, Riccardo et al. “Dialog as interpersonal synergy.”
Fusaroli, Riccardo et al. 2014. “The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful
Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains”
Gallotti, Mattia & C. Frith. 2013. “Social cognition in the we-mode.”
Grene, Marjorie & D. Depew. The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History.
Hare, Brian et al. The self-domestication hypothesis: evolution of bonobo psychology is due
Hari, R. et al. Attending to and neglecting people: bridging neuroscience, psychology
Hari, Ritta et al. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.”
Haslam, Michael. 2014. “On the Tool Use Behavior of the Bonobo-Chimpanzee Last Common
Hawkes, Kristen. 2014. “Primate Sociality to Human Cooperation
Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living
Heikkurinen, Pasi et al. 2016. “Organising in the Anthropocene: an ontological outline for
Henn, Brenna, L. Cavalli-Sforza & M. Feldman. 2012. “The great human expansion.”
Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution,
Herrmann, E. et al. Humans Have Evolved Specialized... The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis
Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. 2015. “Energy, growth, and evolution: Towards a naturalistic
Heylighen, Francis. Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism II: Varieties and evolution
Heylighen, Francis. Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and
Hicks, Dan & M. Beaudry. “Introduction: Material culture studies; a reactionary view.”
Hulme-Beaman, Ardern et al. An Ecological and Evolutionary Framework for Commensalism in
Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.
Ingold, Tim. “Prospect.” Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological
Iriki, Atsushi & Taoka. 2012. “Triadic (ecological, neural, cognitive) niche construction:
Jones, Peter. 2016. “‘Coordination’ (Herbert H Clark), ‘integration’ (Roy Harris)
Kiverstein, Julian & Miller. 2015. “The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive
Lamba, Shakti & Mace. “Demography and ecology drive variation in cooperation across human
Laubichler, M. & Renn. Extended Evolution: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating
Lennox, James. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life
Levinson, Stephen & Holler. The origin of human multi-modal communication
Li, Bocong. 2015. “Human nature, the means-ends relationship, and alienation: Themes for
Long, A.A. 2015. Greek Models of Mind and Self
MacKinnon, K. & Fuentes. Primates, Niche Construction, and Social Complexity: The Roles
McGann, Marek. 2014. “Enacting a social ecology: radically embodied intersubjectivity.
Mesoudi, Alex. 2016. “Cultural evolution: integrating psychology, evolution and culture.
Miller, Cory et al. Marmosets: A Neuroscientific Model of Human Social Behavior
Monster, Dan et al. Physiological evidence of interpersonal dynamics in a cooperative
Morey, Darcy & R. Jeger. 2015. “Paleolithic dogs: Why sustained domestication then?”
Orban, Guy & F. Caruana. “The neural basis of human tool use.”
Palsson, Gisli. “Ensembles of biosocial relations.”
Pierides, Dean & Woodman. 2012. “Object-oriented sociology and organizing in the face of
Pievani, Telmo. Born to Cooperate? Altruism as Exaptation and the Evolution of Human
Powers, Simon et al. “How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition
Praet, Istvan. Humanity and life as the perpetual maintenance... a reappraisal of animism
Rachlin, Howard. The Escape of the Mind.
Ramirez-Goicoechea, Eugenia. “Life-in-the-making: epigenesis, biocultural environments
Reynaud, Emanuelle et al. “On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use:
Riede, Felix. 2011. “Adaptation and niche construction in human prehistory: a case study
Riley, Michael et al. 2011. “Interpersonal synergies.”
Rousseau, David. “Systems Philosophy and the Unity of Knowledge.”
Rousseau, Jerome. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies.
Ryan, P.A. et al. “Social niche construction and evolutionary transitions in individuality.”
Sandstrom, Kent et al. Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach
Satne, Glenda. 2014. “Interaction and self-correction.”
Schurger, Aaron. 2014. “Consciousness perceived.”
Scott-Phillips, Thomas et al. 2013. “The Niche Construction Perspective: A Critical Appraisal
Sewall, Kendra. 2015. “Social Complexity as a Driver of Communication and Cognition.
Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.”
Seyfarth, Robert & Cheney. “The evolution of language from social cognition
Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism
Sigaud, Olivier et al. 2013. “The anticipatory construction of reality as a central concern for
Sinha, Chris. “Language and other artifacts: socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction
Sinha, Chris. “Ontogenesis, semiosis and the epigenetic dynamics of biocultural niche
Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds
Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature
Soederbaum, Peter. 2015. “Varieties of ecological economics: Do we need a more open and
Sterelny, Kim. “Minds: extended or scaffolded?”
Stevenson, Leslie et al. Twelve Theories of Human Nature
Stotz, Karola. “Extended evolutionary psychology: the importance of transgenerational
Strier, Karen et al. “Behavioral Flexibility and the Evolution of Primate Social
Stutz, Aaron. “Embodied niche construction in the hominin lineage: semiotic structure
Szanto, Thomas. 2014. “How to share a mind: Reconsidering the group mind thesis
Szary, Janelle et al. 2015. “Patterns of interaction-dominant dynamics in individual versus
Tattersall, Ian. 2011. “Cooperation, Altruism, and Human Evolution: Introduction Part I
Thierry, Bernard. “Identifying constraints in the evolution of primate societies
Tomasello, Michael. 2016. “The ontogeny of cultural learning.”
Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution.
Van Elk, M. et al. Action semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of
Visco-Comandini, F. et al. 2015. “Do non-human primates cooperate? Evidences of motor
Whiten, Andrew et al. 2016. “Cultural diffusion in humans and other animals.”
Wilson, Robert A. & B. Lenart. 2015. “Extended Mind and Identity.”
Wolf, Wouter et al 2016. “Joint attention, shared goals, and social bonding.”
Worm, Boris & R. Paine. 2016. “Humans as a Hyperkeystone Species
Wrobel, Szymon. Grammar and Glamour of Cooperation: Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind
Young, Kenneth. “Biogeography of the Anthropocene: Domestication.

Citations collected in 2016 (works listed above):

“Understanding and reproducing the organization of animal and human behavior has been one of the central problems in the life and engineering sciences throughout the centuries. It is still largely unresolved.

“The life sciences approach consists in designing experiments that may reveal underlying principles of this organization in living systems. A key requirement for such experiments is that the interpretation of their results is unequivocal. The complexity of natural behavior is an obstacle to this requirement because the more complex the context and the behavior, the greater the number of potential interpretations of any set of results....

“By contrast, the engineering approach to the organization of behavior is synthetic. It starts from principles whatever their origin, implements them on robotics platforms or simulators, and then evaluates the properties of the resulting systems. The purpose of engineering oriented research is to produce functional systems. Consequently, the more elaborate the generated behavior, the better it is.

“The principles that the life sciences researchers carefully extract from experimental data and that the engineers use for designing their systems are the meeting point between the two approaches.” Sigaud, Olivier, M. Butz, G. Pezzulo & O. Herbort. 2013. “The anticipatory construction of reality as a central concern for psychology and robotics.” New Ideas in Psychology. 31: 217-220. P. 217.


“But researchers from both disciplines have now entered more complex domains of investigation where a lot remains to be done.

“One such difficult domain is our feeling that there is a steady world and an underlying space around us. In developmental psychology, the issue of ‘the child’s construction of reality’ was raised more than 70 years ago by Piaget...” Sigaud, Olivier, M. Butz, G. Pezzulo & O. Herbort. 2013. “The anticipatory construction of reality as a central concern for psychology and robotics.” New Ideas in Psychology. 31: 217-220. P. 218.


“The question can be stated as follows: How is it that, given our diverse sensors that are moving at any moment, we get to the idea that there is a more or less permanent world around us that contains objects and living beings and that is endowed with spatial and temporal properties?... Part of the answer to this question seems to rely on our dynamic interactions with this world: It seems that we need to act on it to form a notion of its existence.” Sigaud, Olivier, M. Butz, G. Pezzulo & O. Herbort. 2013. “The anticipatory construction of reality as a central concern for psychology and robotics.” New Ideas in Psychology. 31: 217-220. P. 218.


“Since the first AbiALS workshop, which took place in 2002 in Edinburgh, Scotland, participants have worked from the shared assumption that predictions and anticipations play a key role in organizing behavior.” Sigaud, Olivier, M. Butz, G. Pezzulo & O. Herbort. 2013. “The anticipatory construction of reality as a central concern for psychology and robotics.” New Ideas in Psychology. 31: 217-220. P. 218.


“The view of proactive brain continuously generating and evaluating predictions has been put forward in a number of interdisciplinary initiatives....” Sigaud, Olivier, M. Butz, G. Pezzulo & O. Herbort. 2013. “The anticipatory construction of reality as a central concern for psychology and robotics.” New Ideas in Psychology. 31: 217-220. P. 218.


“An influential attempt to capture the role of interaction for social cognition is represented by ‘interactionism’, a family of views unified by opposition to various forms of individualism, such as cognitivism.” Gallotti, Mattia & C. Frith. 2013. “Social cognition in the we-mode.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Vol. 17. No. 4. 160-5. P. 161.


“These encounters are not reducible to attributes of the individual mind, because it is the interactive unit that behaves in a certain way, and the cause of this behaviour is captured by the collective dynamics themselves.” Gallotti, Mattia & C. Frith. 2013. “Social cognition in the we-mode.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Vol. 17. No. 4. 160-5. P. 161.


“Although it is crucial to stress the enabling role of the environment for interpersonal understanding, in general, we believe that claims about its allegedly constitutive role miss the point of the interactive turn in social cognitive research. To see why, note that enactivism implies two claims about (social) cognition. One is that cognitive activity consists predominantly in making sense of things in the world, where sense-making is the relational process between an organism and its environment that transforms the world into a place of meaning and value. When the environment is social, sense-making occurs in a participatory manner.” Gallotti, Mattia & C. Frith. 2013. “Social cognition in the we-mode.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Vol. 17. No. 4. 160-5. P. 161.


“More generally, when people join forces and act as a group, there is a sense in which the fact that they do something together implies that no member of the group does it ‘on her own’. This sense of ‘we-ness’ is a striking feature of the psychology of collective intentional behaviour, hence the view that joint action involves shared or collective or ‘we-intentions’.” Gallotti, Mattia & C. Frith. 2013. “Social cognition in the we-mode.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Vol. 17. No. 4. 160-5. P. 162.


“‘Culture’ is commonly defined as the body of information that is transmitted from individual to individual via social learning, and colloquially includes such phenomena as attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, skills, customs, and institutions. Inspired by pre-existing population genetic tools, the mathematical models of cultural dynamics developed by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman and Boyd and Richerson first established that cultural change can be modelled as an evolutionary process yet one that is not slavishly identical in its details to genetic evolution. Today, while maintaining a solid modelling core, a wide range of methodologies are used in the field of cultural evolution, including phylogenetic analysis, laboratory experiments, ethnographic field studies, quantitative analysis of pre-historical, historical, and contemporary datasets, and comparative studies of culture across species. Although varied in methodology and topic, these studies are united by the notion that culture evolves according to broadly Darwinian principles.” Acerbi, Alberto & A. Mesoudi. 2015. “If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.” Biol Philos. 30:481-503. P. 482.


“In parallel with this approach, a group of cognitive anthropologists have advanced a similar project aiming towards naturalistic explanations of culture, mainly focusing on the role that cognitive factors play in the transmission and transformation of cultural representations.” Acerbi, Alberto & A. Mesoudi. 2015. “If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.” Biol Philos. 30:481-503. P. 482.


“Sperber, Claidiere, Atran, Boyer and colleagues, instead, argue that in the vast majority of cases cultural traits are neither properly copied or selected, but reconstructed each time an instance of transmission happens. The permanence of some cultural traits occurs not due to high fidelity cultural transmission but instead due to the existence of stable ‘cultural attractors’.... Cultural transmission here has relatively low fidelity, and non-random distortions and reconstructions play an important role in maintaining cultural diversity and stability.” Acerbi, Alberto & A. Mesoudi. 2015. “If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.” Biol Philos. 30:481-503. P. 483.


“Minimally counter-intuitive entities function as ‘cultural attractors’. These predictions have been supported by laboratory experiments showing that minimally counterintuitive representations are better remembered and passed on, and analyses of actual folk tales showing that successful tales contain an optimal number of counterintuitive elements.” Acerbi, Alberto & A. Mesoudi. 2015. “If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.” Biol Philos. 30:481-503. P. 486.


“According to Sperber, describing cultural evolution as a process of selection between different alternatives is quite misleading: cultural traits do not replicate in the process of transmission, instead they are transformed and reconstructed each time. A proper process of selection, such as natural selection as it operates on genetic replicators, needs to be sustained by low rates of mutation that are simply impossible to achieve in the case of human cultural transmission....

“However, they reject the assumption that this happens because the transmission of traits at the individual level is highly faithful. Instead, the transformations that occur at each transmission event are, in the majority of cases, non-random. Amongst all possible reconstructions of Cinderella, some of them, perhaps the ones featuring a pumpkin coach or ugly stepsisters, are more likely than others to happen. The idea of a ‘cultural attractor’ rests on the assumption that transformations are not equally probable, and instead are biased in some direction.” Acerbi, Alberto & A. Mesoudi. 2015. “If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.” Biol Philos. 30:481-503. Pp. 486-7.


“While probabilistic attraction basically entails adding noise to the original model, it shows that, in this more realistic situation, the relative strength of attraction and selection are important for the outcomes, and both can contribute to cultural evolutionary dynamics.” Acerbi, Alberto & A. Mesoudi. 2015. “If we are all cultural Darwinians what’s the fuss about? Clarifying recent disagreements in the field of cultural evolution.” Biol Philos. 30:481-503. P. 490.


“We found that humans’ reasoning abilities play an important role in the production of innovations, but that groups of individuals are able to produce artefacts that are more complex than any isolated individual can produce during the same amount of time. We show that this group-level ability to produce complex innovations is maximized when social information is easy to acquire and when individuals are organized into large and partially connected populations.” Derex, Maxime & R. Boyd. 2015. “The foundations of the human cultural niche.” Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms9398. P. 1.


“Technological innovations have allowed humans to settle in habitats for which they are poorly suited biologically.... The fossil record reveals increasing encephalization in the human lineage during the past 2 Myr ago and comparative studies demonstrate that brain volume and intelligence covary suggesting that modern humans developed complex technology because biological evolution made them smarter than non-humans species. However, (1) the archaeological record indicates that major increases in technological complexity occurred significantly after the appearance of anatomically modern humans, and (2) human populations typically overcome environmental challenges that isolated individuals cannot cope with, suggesting that increased intelligence does not fully explain this phenomenon.” Derex, Maxime & R. Boyd. 2015. “The foundations of the human cultural niche.” Nature Communications. DOI 10.1038/ncomms9398. P. 2.


“Our experiment provides the first empirical evidence that people working in groups are able to accumulate information and develop artefacts that are too complex for any isolated individual to invent during the same period. This result is consistent with the cultural niche hypothesis that holds that human populations would have been able to settle and prosper in harsh environments as a result of cultural information accumulation rather than evolved cognitive abilities alone.” Derex, Maxime & R. Boyd. 2015. “The foundations of the human cultural niche.” Nature Communications. DOI 10.1038/ncomms9398. P. 2.


“Cumulative cultural evolution based on the ratchet effect requires a unique individual psychology. Individuals need to be equipped not just with general skills of social learning, but with more specialized skills of cultural learning. These are, most basically: [1] skills of imitative learning – and a strong conformist tendency – that enable an especially faithful reproduction of cultural practices by young children; and [2] adult teaching of children and, critically, a special sensitivity of children to glean from this pedagogy generalizable cultural knowledge.” Tomasello, Michael. 2016. “The ontogeny of cultural learning.” Current Opinion in Psychology. 8:1-4. P. 1.


“It is possible that there are cross-cultural differences in human children’s cultural learning, but so far, despite some documented differences in teaching styles across cultures, research suggests that both strong conformity and instructed learning are human universals.” Tomasello, Michael. 2016. “The ontogeny of cultural learning.” Current Opinion in Psychology. 8:1-4. P. 3.


“The current focus on language as situated, real-time interaction (‘languaging in fashionable parlance) marks a significant break from the 20th century linguistic orthodoxy built on ‘languages’ conceived as systems of invariant form-meaning units underlying actual instances of language use.” Jones, Peter. 2016. “‘Coordination’ (Herbert H Clark), ‘integration’ (Roy Harris) and the foundations of communication theory: common ground or competing visions?” Language Sciences. 53:31-43. P. 32.


“Language use, for Clark, is a form of ‘joint action’ which is ‘one that is carried out by an ensemble of people acting in coordination with each other’.

“Harris, similarly, has repeatedly attacked ‘the dehumanisation of language’ which comes from the ‘segregationist’ practice of ‘treating the linguistic system as an independent abstraction’...” Jones, Peter. 2016. “‘Coordination’ (Herbert H Clark), ‘integration’ (Roy Harris) and the foundations of communication theory: common ground or competing visions?” Language Sciences. 53:31-43. P. 33. First Subquote is from Clark, H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge U. P. P. 3. Second is from Harris, Roy. 2012. Integrationist Notes and Papers. Bright Pen. P. 116.


“For Harris, communication can be treated ‘as including all processes in which human activities are contextually integrated by means of signs’, a definition which would cover all Clark’s cases of coordination. Thus, communication minimally depends on an ‘integration of two sequences of activity, the second of which complements the first’, where complementation ‘requires that the second contribute to that sequence of events which the first is interpreted as projecting’. Activities ‘may be said to be integrated when in combination they produce results which could not have been achieved by any of those single activities independently’...” Jones, Peter. 2016. “‘Coordination’ (Herbert H Clark), ‘integration’ (Roy Harris) and the foundations of communication theory: common ground or competing visions?” Language Sciences. 53:31-43. P. 34. Subquotes from Harris, Roy. 1996. Signs, Language and Communication. Routledge. Pps. 11, 71, 70.


“For his part, Harris sees the very idea of ‘symbols of a language’ as a projection of the language myth and advocates a perspective which ‘renounces in advance the possibility of setting up systems of forms and meaning which will ‘account for’ a central core of linguistic behaviour irrespective of the situational and communicational purposes involved’.” Jones, Peter. 2016. “‘Coordination’ (Herbert H Clark), ‘integration’ (Roy Harris) and the foundations of communication theory: common ground or competing visions?” Language Sciences. 53:31-43. Pp. 34-5. Subquote is from Harris, Roy. 1981. The Language Myth. Duckworth. P. 165.


“For Harris, meanings are not ‘semantic units established in advance by a fixed code’ but ‘values which arise in context out of particular communication situations. These valules are assigned by the participants as part of the integration of activities involved’. Thus, communication ‘involves a constant making and re-making of meaning’.” Jones, Peter. 2016. “‘Coordination’ (Herbert H Clark), ‘integration’ (Roy Harris) and the foundations of communication theory: common ground or competing visions?” Language Sciences. 53:31-43. P. 35. Subquote: Harris, Roy. 1998. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Pergamon. P. 68.


“Harris rejects all intention-based models of communication (including Grice’s) as involving telementation, albeit with intentions rather than meanings having to match for communication to take place.” Jones, Peter. 2016. “‘Coordination’ (Herbert H Clark), ‘integration’ (Roy Harris) and the foundations of communication theory: common ground or competing visions?” Language Sciences. 53:31-43. P. 35.


“Harris’ point, I think, is that what is communicationally fundamental is not ‘common ground’ in the sense of intersubjectivity (i.e., telementation), or belief in such, but the complementarity and interdependence (or reciprocity) of their sign-making acts which participants must establish, and which they then may hone and develop, to enable their mutual engagement in action. If ‘local convergence of purposes’ is to be achieved this can only happen through a reciprocally enacted differentiation in the integrationally-relevant roles, experiences, skills, knowledge and beliefs of each participant with respect to the other. Sameness, he appears to say, cannot of itself explain or ground interaction: ‘sames’ cannot integrate (or coordinate). A joint action, then, is precisely a dynamically and situationally achieved complementarity or interlocking of ‘differents’. For that reason, communication generally, including linguistic communication, neither presupposes a shared system of signs nor occurs through sharing signs, meanings or beliefs; it occurs through the reciprocally interlocking integration of complementary creative sign-making practices; sign-making is not the differential use or transfer of sames but the contextualized creation of integrated complementaries. What Clark sees as common ground and the accumulation of common ground is best understood, for Harris, in terms of the complementary integrational proficiencies of the individual participants in interaction. From that point of view, what the participants have in common is simply the ‘joint action’ itself, that is, the emerging result and product of their combined activities. This divergence over common ground penetrates to the very definitions of ‘signal’ and ‘sign’ in Clark and Harris. While Clark posits a shared semiological basis for communication between A and B in joint construal of a single signal produced by A, Harris has two different signs in play as the result of the interlocking sign-making practices of each agent.” Jones, Peter. 2016. “‘Coordination’ (Herbert H Clark), ‘integration’ (Roy Harris) and the foundations of communication theory: common ground or competing visions?” Language Sciences. 53:31-43. P. 37.


“Taking a distributed ecological view, we treat wordings as crucial to human activity. Even if described by and, perhaps, based in synergies, the phenomenology of wordings is crucial to non-local ways of understanding. Like pictures, wordings are intrinsically multi-scalar and virtual. Accordingly, our focus turns to how bodily activity comes to connect up with non-local and virtual patterns. Roughly, we replace an idea of ‘semantic content’ with a view of how agents use verbal objects normatively as they manage bodily coordination and interaction.” Cowley, Stephen & M. Harvey. 2015. “The illusion of common ground.” New Ideas in Psychology. P. 4.


“Workings can be transcribed and recorded, but in the moment that we enact them their phenomenality links them, and us, with population-level patterns and a sense of what matters at the time. Probabilistic aspects of wordings (co-occurrence, typical acoustic realization, etc.) influence activity, in large part because their affordance-potential has been created and stabilized with respect to lived experience.” Cowley, Stephen & M. Harvey. 2015. “The illusion of common ground.” New Ideas in Psychology. P. 5.


“Organisms self-construct their own phenomenality, and for at least some of them, techniques can be articulated, perceived, and used as if they were sensorimotor objects even though they lack material stability on experiential timescales. This makes them attentional techniques, or interpersonally stable actions constituted as patterns of attention. Wordings are prototypical attentional techniques.” Cowley, Stephen & M. Harvey. 2015. “The illusion of common ground.” New Ideas in Psychology. P. 6.


“A ubiquitous computing environment is commonly compared to a walk in the woods, where lots of information is available, yet a person does not feel overwhelmed.... This leads to a concept of calm technology, where users sense and control what directly interests them, while retaining awareness of other opportunities to use information and when to focus on it. Calm technology engages both the centre and the periphery of a person’s attention, but it is the individual, not the environment, who must be in charge of moving things from the centre to the periphery and back.” Bardone, Emanuele & I. Shmorgun. 2013. “Ecologies of creativity: smartphones as a case in point.” Mind Soc. 12:125-35. P. 127.


“The characterisation of the context as a cognitive ecology is meant for pointing out that the context is not inert from the cognitive point of view. In this respect we adopt the notion of wide computationalism introduced by Wilson. We propose that the context of one’s activity is part of a larger computational system, which transcends the boundary of the individual and the device he is using at a particular moment.” Bardone, Emanuele & I. Shmorgun. 2013. “Ecologies of creativity: smartphones as a case in point.” Mind Soc. 12:125-35. P. 130. Reference: Wilson, R. 1994. “Wide computationalism.” Mind. 103:351-372.


“The special difference between language and tools such as golf clubs, pliers, and wrenches is that language must have already existed in some form well before we became anatomically modern. It is clear that our highly specialized vocal tracts evolved with the presence of language itself as a selective pressure.” Enfield, N.J. 2013. “Language, culture, and mind: trends and standards in the latest pendulum swing.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 19:155-169. P. 158.


“Functionalist linguistics has enjoyed growing popularity across the disciplines that focus on language, now going a good way towards displacing the innatist approach of generativist linguistics.” Enfield, N.J. 2013. “Language, culture, and mind: trends and standards in the latest pendulum swing.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 19:155-169. P. 158.


“Extending upon A. Clark’s proposal, we stress how language enables skilful intersubjective engagement, that is the coordination of individual cognitive systems giving rise to composite units that exceed the capabilities of their parts.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, N. Gangopadhyay & K. Tylen. 2014. “The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement.” Cogntive Systems Research. 29-30: 31-39. P. 32.


“Linguistic activity is a means by which individuals come to jointly apprehend and manipulate information to create informational and behavioural interpersonal synergies, which potentially outstretch the cognitive abilities of any of the individuals were they on their own. Thus, language as a skilful intersubjective activity de facto constitutes dialogically extended minds.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, N. Gangopadhyay & K. Tylen. 2014. “The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement.” Cogntive Systems Research. 29-30: 31-39. P. 32.


“We thus propose that language is a ‘doubly-extended’ cognitive phenomenon: not only is it robustly grounded in the agent’s bodily engagement with the world, as hinted by Clark, but it also further extends this engagement into the social world through embodied social dynamics.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, N. Gangopadhyay & K. Tylen. 2014. “The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement.” Cogntive Systems Research. 29-30: 31-39. P. 32.


“A growing number of studies are indeed suggesting that language evolved (and keeps evolving) from a pressure for increasingly sophisticated means of socio-cultural coordination and cooperation: by producing material symbols, humans manipulate public cognitive niches open – at least potentially – to other individuals thereby enabling intersubjective cognitive activities.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, N. Gangopadhyay & K. Tylen. 2014. “The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement.” Cogntive Systems Research. 29-30: 31-39. P. 34.


“We are not the first to suggest that the extended mind hypothesis applies to interpersonal interactions. Tollefsen (2006) and Theiner et al. (2010) have argued for collective minds, relying on the case of transactive memory: long-term interpersonal relationships can lead to a distribution of information storage and retrieval across partners: e.g. one partner remembering time and date of events, the other how to drive to their location, each of them contributing to mark things as to be remembered and cueing each other in remembering them correctly. Transactive memory is functionally equivalent to biological memory and to the use of a notebook as memory support: the partners are mostly available and accessible to each other and they actively create, maintain and retrieve endorsed information in a way that makes them complementary.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, N. Gangopadhyay & K. Tylen. 2014. “The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement.” Cogntive Systems Research. 29-30: 31-39. P. 34. References: Tollefsen, D. 2006. “From extended mind to collective mind.” Cognitive Systems Research. 7(2-3), 140-50. Theiner, G., C. Allen & R. Goldstone. 2010. “Recognizing group cognition.” Cognitive Systems Research. 11(4), 378-395.


“... Tollefsen and Dale discuss how low-level behavioural coordination creates in certain cases a feeling of joint agency between the individuals involved.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, N. Gangopadhyay & K. Tylen. 2014. “The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement.” Cogntive Systems Research. 29-30: 31-39. P. 34. Reference: Tollefsen, D. & R. Dale. 2012. “Naturalizing joint action: A process-based approach.” Philosophical Psychology. 25(3), 385-407.


“Individuals’ behaviour in conversation is not free-floating, but typically fulfil[s] roles in larger interactional scripts, which act as scaffolding and constraining the possibilities of actions and interpretation in joint activities.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, N. Gangopadhyay & K. Tylen. 2014. “The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement.” Cogntive Systems Research. 29-30: 31-39. P. 34.


“Language enables individuals to coordinate their cognitive processes in evolutionarily unprecedented ways, effectively constituting dialogically extended minds.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, N. Gangopadhyay & K. Tylen. 2014. “The dialogically extended mind: Language as skilful intersubjective engagement.” Cogntive Systems Research. 29-30: 31-39. P. 37.


“According to embodied views of cognition, cognitive processes are constrained by our body, that is, human-like cognition cannot occur independently of a human-like body. In the embodied view, cognition is not for knowing; rather, ‘cognition is for action’. Proponents of grounded views make a similar argument but posit that the involvement of the body is not exhaustive of cognition, which is grounded in many ways. In fact, while initially the label ‘embodied’ was used in a more comprehensive way, in the recent literature a slight distinction between embodied and grounded approaches, and between the terms ‘embodied’ and ‘grounded,’ is emerging. According to this view cognition can be grounded in multiple ways. These include not only bodily states but also situations, actions, etc.” Borghi, Anna, C. Scorolli, D. Caligiore, G. Baldassarre & L. Tummolini. 2013. “The embodied mind extended: using words as social tools.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 4. Art. 214. P. 1.


“When it comes to language processing, EG [embodied-grounded] views argue that language is grounded in perception and action systems. Comprehending language would imply activating a simulation, consisting in a re-enactment of the previous interaction with objects, situations, etc., to which linguistic expressions refer.” Borghi, Anna, C. Scorolli, D. Caligiore, G. Baldassarre & L. Tummolini. 2013. “The embodied mind extended: using words as social tools.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 4. Art. 214. P. 1.


“While in psychology and cognitive science the propositional view has dominated for a long time and the referential view was introduced by EG theorists as an alternative to it, in philosophy the referential view of language has been widely criticized since at least the seminal work of Wittgenstein....” Borghi, Anna, C. Scorolli, D. Caligiore, G. Baldassarre & L. Tummolini. 2013. “The embodied mind extended: using words as social tools.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 4. Art. 214. P. 2.


“Here we propose that words and tools share a further similarity: we consider the possibility that when we use words to reach for something, word use expands the near space, modifying the representation of the relationship between our own body and the objects in space, similarly to what happens after tool use....

“Recent experimental evidence supports the idea that words can be considered as tools that extend the bodily space.” Borghi, Anna, C. Scorolli, D. Caligiore, G. Baldassarre & L. Tummolini. 2013. “The embodied mind extended: using words as social tools.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 4. Art. 214. P. 4.


“The main reason that primates live in groups is as a defence against predators. An animal’s risk of being caught by a predator increases as it becomes more terrestrial and occupies more open habitats with fewer trees to provide refuges. Under these conditions, group size increases, and to support this their social relationships shift to being ever more intensely bonded, presumably in order to ensure that individuals stick together and come to each other’s aid when necessary.

“Living in close proximity to other individuals may have its benefits, but it also has its costs. These arise from three separate sources: direct and indirect costs, and freeriding. The direct costs arise from conflicts within the group: altercations between individuals over food or the safest resting sites. All of these inevitably increase in frequency as groups get larger. The indirect costs are the fact that more travel time has to be allocated within the waking day as group size increases in order to allow the group to visit enough food patches to satisfy everyone’s nutritional requirements, and that means less time is available for other activities.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 37.


“Monkeys and apes neutralize the stresses created by living in groups by forming coalitions that buffer their members against harassment.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 39.


“We have shown, using both reaction time tests and neuroimaging, that mentalizing tasks are significantly more demanding than equivalent factual memory tasks and that there is a correlation between the amount of neural activity in the core mentalizing network and the level of intentionality at which someone is working. The higher the level of intentionality required by the task, the more neurons have to be recruited to get the answer right. More importantly, we found that people who can work at higher orders of intentionality have larger orbitofrontal regions in the prefrontal cortex. The social brain really is genuinely costly, and, since the volume of neural matter recruited to handle the higher orders of intentionality is proportional to the level of intentionality at which the subject is working, species that need to be able to work at higher orders of intentionality will need bigger brains.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 46.


“In primates at least, infanticide seems to have been the crucial factor driving the evolution of monogamous mating systems.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 54.


“The fundamental point is that as social group size increases, females will face increasing stresses and males will be forced into competition with each other.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 55.


“The social brain relationship manifests itself in primates as a cognitive limit on social group size that gives rise to a correlation between social group size and brain size....

“More importantly, the relationship is really one between behavioural complexity and brain size, with group size itself being an emergent property: the number of relationships an individual can maintain depends on the complexity of its social behaviour, which is in turn dependent on its cognitive abilities (and hence brain size).” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 61.


“So between them, these two datasets [an ethnographic dataset for numbers in hunter-gatherer groups and a Christmas card dataset] suggest a natural sequence of grouping layers running from an innermost core of 5 to an outermost grouping of 1,500 in a very distinct pattern: roughly 5-15-50-150-500-1,500. Gratifyingly, another study subsequently showed the same pattern in a different hunter-gatherer dataset. More interestingly, we also found the same scaling ratio in the hierarchical structure of the social systems of other mammal species that live in complex societies (chimpanzees, baboons, elephants and orcas), suggesting that this pattern may be widely characteristic of mammals that have complex social systems.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 79.


“It seems likely that the difference between species with more and less complex social systems lies in the number of layers they have rather than the sizes of the layers themselves. Humans, for example, have six layers, while chimpanzees and baboons have only three, and the decidedly less smart colobus monkeys have only one (or at most two) layers.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 81.


“... baboons, like all Old World monkeys, can process unripe fruit, but apes cannot. This obliges apes to travel further in search of food patches offering ripe fruit, and so causes their travel time requirements to explode as foraging group size increases and habitat quality deteriorates....” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 104.


“In no hominin, including all the australopithecine species, are males the same size as females, making it implausible that any of them were obligate monogamists.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 132.


“... there is one behaviour that might just allow several people to be ‘groomed’ simultaneously: laughter.... ...the rapid series of exhalations in human laughter empties the lungs, leaving us exhausted and gasping for breath. Since, as we have shown in a series of experiments, this stress on the chest muscles triggers endorphin activation, then it might be possible to use laughter as a form of grooming at a distance, and so trigger an endorphin effect in several individuals at the same time.

“Laughter is the perfect candidate for this because not only does it trigger endorphin activation in the brain, but few human behaviours are quite as contagious. Laughter is up to 30 times more likely to occur when watching a comedy video in a group than when watching the same video alone.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 167.


“Cooking has another unexpected benefit. It turns out, from recent studies of the control mechanisms of feeding behaviour in rodents, that the process of eating triggers the endorphin system. This probably explains why we feel contented and relaxed after eating a particularly large meal. If eating big meals, as for example at feasts, triggers endorphins, then doing this collectively, as cooking more or less forces us to do, may well have beneficial advantages in terms of social cohesion.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. Pp. 193-5.


“The results suggested that doing music in any form generated an endorphin surge, whereas a more static activity or passively listening to music did not. So it looks like music can also be used to trigger the pharmacological mechanism that underpins social bonding.

“Music-making has a couple of important advantages over laughter as a mechanism for social bonding. One is that it can involve many more individuals, thereby radically enlarging the ‘grooming’ circle. We do not, as yet, have any idea what the upper limit on the effectiveness of musical performance is, but it will certainly be greater than the three individuals that sems to be the upper limit for laughter.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 210.


“There is something genuinely odd about synchrony, because it seems to ramp up the endorphin production generated by physical exercise by something close to a factor of two.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 211.


“Whether larger brains were necessary to allow for better foraging skills or with the need to have large extended networks remains an open question.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 221.


“Language has considerable advantages over grooming as a bonding mechanism because it allows more efficient communication. Its efficiencies include allowing us: (1) to interact with several individuals at once; (2) to time share on other activities (we can talk while walking, cooking and eating, all of which are incompatible with grooming); (3) to acquire information about the state of the social network (on a scale that is impossible if such knowledge depends, as it does for monkeys and apes, on personal observation); and (4) to promote our interests (by advertising our good qualities or denigrating those of other individuals).... More importantly, conversations, of themselves, do not – at least, so far as we know – trigger the endorphin release that seems to be so essential for bonding.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 227.


“In this respect, there are two particular aspects of language that have potential advantages in social bonding. One is that language can be used to manipulate laughter by telling jokes: without language, laughter is a form of chorusing that is essentially a response to particular events,... Language allows us to manipulate both the frequency and context of laughter through the use of jokes, bringing it under our control and allowing us to radically increase its frequency and effect. The second important feature of fireside conversation is that it offers the opportunity for story telling. Stories are important for two reasons that bear directly on the business of bonding the extended community. One is that they enable us to construct social histories, and so emphasize how we came to form a community united by a common history; the other is that we can tell stories about the unseen world – the world of fiction and the world of spirits, thereby making both fiction and religion possible.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. Pp. 233-4.


“Based on the standard mammalian pattern, modern humans should have a 21-month pregnancy: this is the point at which human babies reach the same stage of brain development that the babies of all other primates achieve when they are born.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 245.


“But the bald fact is that it [Neanderthal material culture] really wasn’t in the same league: Neanderthal tools lacked the diversity, the creativeness and the fineness of production that characterized contemporary modern human material culture.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 251.


“... 70 per cent of the raw material of tools found at Neanderthal sites had travelled less than 25 km, whereas 60 per cent of those from contemporary modern human sites had travelled more than 25 km and some had travelled as much as 200 km.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 251.


“Daniel Nettle showed some years ago that the size of a language community (the number of speakers of a contemporary language) and the area covered by a language are correlated with latitude, or more specifically the length of the growing season. He argued that this reflected the need to have extensive exchange or trading relationships in habitats where seasonality made the climate unpredictable and the growing season very short. Large areas were needed to ensure that there was a wide choice of places to retreat to when things got tough.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 268. Reference: Nettle, D. 1999. Linguistic Diversity. Oxford UP.


“Language has the obvious advantage that shifting some aspects of social bonding from a physical channel (grooming) to a vocal channel may allow several individuals to be ‘groomed’ simultaneously, allowing us to build a larger community. Language might do this in three quite different ways. One is by telling each other how we see the world (creating a common worldview); a second is through story-telling (stories about who we are and where we have come from); and the third is through making people laugh by telling jokes.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 269.


“In a seminal series of papers, the American biologists Cory Fincher and Randy Thornhill showed that the number of adherents to a traditional religion, the size of language communities and the balance between individualism versus collectivism all correlate with latitude; humans have smaller, more inward-looking, strongly bonded communities around the equator, and larger, more outward-looking, individualistic ones nearer the poles. They were able to show that the underlying driver for this relationship is pathogen load; the tropics are a notorious hothouse for diseases, being responsible for spawning a constant stream of new ones even now. They argued that an important way of reducing health risks under conditions of high local pathogen load is to avoid mixing (and especially mating) with other groups; it is best to stick with your own community and your own diseases, since these are the ones to which you have had time to evolve an immunity.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. Pp. 280-1. Reference: Thornhill, R., C. Fincher & D. Aran. 2009. “Parasites, democratization, and the liberalization of values across contemporary countries.” Biology Reviews. 84:113-31.


“We have identified six plausible functions for the 50 and 150 layers: protection against predators, defence of territory or food resources, defence of reproductive mates, trading arrangements to minimize environmental risk, information exchange on the location of resources, and protection against raiding by neighbouring human communities. In a series of studies, we came to the conclusion that what has become known as the warfare hypothesis (defence against raiders) had by far the strongest support as an explanation. It may be no accident that the social brain equation predicts that the 150 layer appears for the first time in the archaeological record at more or less the time that we see the beginnings of the demographic explosion around 100,000 years ago.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 295.


“The problem that the Neolithic sets for us is not that humans invented agriculture, discovered how to store foods or learned how to build houses – these are relatively trivial accomplishments of the kind that humans can solve easily – but, rather, how humans managed to solve the genuinely destructive problem created by living in very large, spatially cramped settlements.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 311.


“... for nineteenth-century American utopian communes: the length of time for which a commune survived depended on how demanding it was in what it asked you to give up in order to be a member. It seems that the more you have to give up, the more willing you are to put up with the petty squabbles and fractiousness of other members, and so the longer your commune will last. But notice that this was only true of religious communes. Not only did secular communes not last as long as religious ones, but they also did not show this commitment effect.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 313.


“Communes with a religious basis typically lasted longer than communes with an exclusively secular philosophy, and their survival times increased as a function of how demanding they were.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 314.


“The results suggest that there are six main dimensions to friendship: shared language, shared place of origin, similar educational history, shared interests and hobbies, shared worldview and shared sense of humour. Sharing any two or more of these creates a friendship of a given level of emotional closeness; sharing more creates a proportionately stronger one....

“Notice that all the traits that underpin friendship are cultural in origin: none of them is biological and fixed.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. Pp. 319-20.


“In my view, the Neolithic Revolution was, as much as anything, a religious revolution. It is marked by a switch from more casual forms of shamanic religion to more organized forms of doctrinal religion in which discipline is imposed on the members from above by a hierarchy of religious specialists....” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 327.


“The real story of how we came to be who we are begins with the appearance of the first Homo species, conventionally Homo ergaster but arguably some of their immediate and more transient precursors (Homo rudolfensis and H. gautengensis). From there on in, it was a constant battle with time budgets under pressure from environmental factors that were selecting for ever larger community sizes – initially, perhaps, the need to provide protection from predators, but later the need to maintain trading networks for access to ephemeral resources, transmuting later still into the need for defence against conspecific raiding.” Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Penguin Books. P. 344.


“A behavior setting involves a cohesive set of standing patterns of behavior and those patterns’ physical surroundings... They involve a set of physical resources, which often provide a spatial boundary to the setting (e.g., the walls of a classroom or church) as well as structuring the behavior of those within....

“In Barker’s original work examining the natural flow of behavior of residents in a small town, he and his field team found that the differences between the behavior of individuals tended to be greater within a person between settings than between people within settings.” McGann, Marek. 2014. “Enacting a social ecology: radically embodied intersubjectivity.” Frontiers in Psychology. Vol. 5. Art.1321. P. 6. Reference: Barker, R. 1968. Ecological Psychology. Stanford UP.


“Heft argues that the physical settings which are complementary or similar in structure to the behaviors they support can be considered affordances for joint action.” McGann, Marek. 2014. “Enacting a social ecology: radically embodied intersubjectivity.” Frontiers in Psychology. Vol. 5. Art.1321. P. 6. Reference: Heft, H. 2011. “E.B. Holt’s ‘recession of the stimulus’ and the emergence of the ‘situation’ in psychology.” From: Charles, E. (Ed). A New Look at New Realism: E.B Holt Reconsidered. Transaction Publishers.


“Experiments on humans showed that partners engage in joint actions by modifying their kinematics, in particular by making their behavior more predictable and discernible. This increase in predictability seems to be achieved by minimizing the variability of co-actors’ movement or by selecting movement trajectories that allow a faster disambiguation of an action from alternative ones.” Visco-Comandini, Federica, S. Ferrari-Toniolo, E. Satta, O. Papazachariadis, R. Gupta, L. Nalbant & A. Battaglia-Mayer. 2015. “Do non-human primates cooperate? Evidences of motor coordination during a joint action task in macaque monkeys.” Cortex. 70:115-127. P. 116.


“Therefore our findings suggest that during cooperative action there exists a reciprocal ‘adaptation’ or a reduction in ‘start synchronicity’, measured through the absolute difference between RTs [reaction times] of each interacting subject....

“When considering the duration of the execution phase, we also found a consistent pattern across monkeys, since it took more time to perform cooperative than individual action, as it has been shown in previous work.” Visco-Comandini, Federica, S. Ferrari-Toniolo, E. Satta, O. Papazachariadis, R. Gupta, L. Nalbant & A. Battaglia-Mayer. 2015. “Do non-human primates cooperate? Evidences of motor coordination during a joint action task in macaque monkeys.” Cortex. 70:115-127. P. 124.


“We start with the poles of spontaneous coordination and explicit instruction, which provide a stark way of sketching these normative distinctions. Between these poles, however, lies a continuum involving convention and conventionalization of communicative practices. Indeed, the implicit conventionalization of technique, of ways of going about and accomplishing tasks, points to the establishment of standards of correctness independent of explicit declaration and decree. A spectrum is thus charted, stretching from the convergence of communicative practices, driven and determined by conditions of success, to the development of convention, involving emerging norms of implicit correctness, to the articulation of instructions, which, for the purposes of this paper, defines a kind of endpoint of explicitly stated standards of correctness.” Elias, John & K. Tylen. 2014. “Instituting interaction: normative transformations in human communicative practices.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Art. 1057. P. 2.


“This transition from transient, emergent coordinative activity to instructions about that activity can serve as an entryway into instituted practices proper.... Instructions, however, introduce standards of correct practice and action by explicitly representing those practices and actions, and thus give rise to a distinction between conditions of success versus correctness. However, this stark contrast between implicit practice and explicit instruction, while illustrative here at the outset, belies a more continuous picture involving the gradual conventionalization of communicative practice, in which conditions of correctness come into play prior to, and independently of, the introduction of instruction.” Elias, John & K. Tylen. 2014. “Instituting interaction: normative transformations in human communicative practices.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Art. 1057. Pp. 3-4.


“Through this recognition of patterns comprised of communal histories of interaction, a tacit sense of correctness is instituted, a sense of a more or less right way of doing something, relative to the community one engages in.

“Establishing conditions of correctness has a number of significant implications. Firstly, when a particular means of achieving an end has been established as a way of accomplishment, as a style of doing characteristic of a community, such instituted activity can become an ‘object,’ so to speak, of joint attention, a temporal structure around which to coordinate. Conventions, as reliable patterns of interaction, can serve as coordinative structures in the course of an activity, facilitating its flow.” Elias, John & K. Tylen. 2014. “Instituting interaction: normative transformations in human communicative practices.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Art. 1057. P. 9.


“It is with the dawning awareness of the possibility of being mistaken, that this or that word may be applied correctly or incorrectly, that the child starts to have a sense of the meanings of the words being used. For this possibility for error is not merely a matter of failure: a word is wrong not because it somehow fails to work on some occasion. Rather a word is right or wrong because its use has been established or instituted as such. There is much more to be said on this subject, of course. Suffice it to say that, with the introduction and institution of correctness, the instrument of language is no longer merely instrumental but intrinsically meaningful, in its sensitivity to correctness and the violation thereof.” Elias, John & K. Tylen. 2014. “Instituting interaction: normative transformations in human communicative practices.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Art. 1057. P. 10.


“And with the emergence of convention and the introduction of instruction comes an instituted environment that not only selects but sanctions certain actions, constituting a significant normative shift in social organization.” Elias, John & K. Tylen. 2014. “Instituting interaction: normative transformations in human communicative practices.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Art. 1057. P. 10.


“Again, we’ve been keen to proffer a conception of linguistic interaction as basically coordinative rather than representational. Such a view points to a role for language in the instituting of interaction that does not depend on the idea of declaring institutional facts into existence, of creating institutional reality by perfomatively representing it as such.” Elias, John & K. Tylen. 2014. “Instituting interaction: normative transformations in human communicative practices.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Art. 1057. P. 10.


“Equally, however, environmental archaeological data also indicate the collapse of such early agricultural societies in some regions because farming practices destroyed the environment. Continuous settlement then required further NC [niche construction] (e.g. slope terracing) to counteract these negative effects.” Riede, Felix. 2011. “Adaptation and niche construction in human prehistory: a case study from the southern Scandinavian Late Glacial.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 366: 793-808. P. 795.


“As gravity clumped the early chondrites together–and as crushing pressure, scalding temperature, corrosive water, and violent impacts reworked the growing planetesimals–more and more new minerals emerged. All together, more than 250 different minerals have been found in all the varieties of meteorites–a twenty-fold increase over the dozen presolar ur-minerals. These varied solids, which include the first fine-grained clays, sheetlike mica, and semiprecious zircon, became the building blocks of Earth and other planets.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 21.


“Each heat-driven step separated and concentrated elements; each step led to an increasingly layered, differentiated planet.

“The rise of continents was yet another important step in the differentiation of Earth. As the outer crustal layers of basalt cooled and hardened, they formed a lidlike, heat-trapping cover to the partially molten mantle beneath. Basalt, reheated from below, began to melt at relatively low temperatures, especially in the presence of water–as chilly as 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. As the temperature increased, so did the percent of basalt melting–first 5 percent, then 10 percent, eventually up to 25 percent melt. In an echo of peridotite melting, the resulting magma was sharply different in composition from its host basaltic rock. Most notably, this new melt was much richer in silicon, with a significantly enhanced component of sodium and potassium as well. Water, too, concentrated in this hot fluid, as did dozens of rare trace elements–beryllium lithium, uranium, zircon, tantalum, and many more. This new silicon-rich magma was much less dense than its parent basalt, so it inevitably pushed its way toward the surface, forming the first granite.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 103.


“With the origin of granite, we see for the first time a significant divergence of Earth’s mineral evolution from that of some of its planetary neighbors. Granite formation requires abundant basalt near the planetary surface as well as intense internal heat to remelt it.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 104.


“By the same token, granite is 10 percent less dense than the basalt on which it floats. As the Earth’s partially melted basalt crust generated layer upon layer of granite, iceberglike protrusions began to form.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 105.


“A 1994 NASA panel chaired by Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute agreed on a streamlined sentence: ‘Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution....’

“So Joyce has revised his definition to include the characteristic of novelty: ‘Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of incorporating novelty and undergoing Darwinian evolution.’” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. Pp. 129-30.


“Atoms in Earth’s mantle have on average more electrons poised to engage in chemical reactions than atoms in the crust. The mantle is more ‘reduced’ and the surface more ‘oxidized,’ in the jargon of chemistry. When reduced and oxidized chemicals meet–for example, when reduced magma and gases from the mantle breach the more oxidized surface in a volcanic eruption–they often undergo an energy-liberating chemical reaction. In the process, electrons transfer from the former to the latter.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 150.


“Nevertheless, these earliest life-forms did little more than mimic the chemistry that had already begun (albeit more slowly) on the previously nonliving world.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 151.


“Life, it seems, exploits any accessible energy source. Over and over again microbes have figured out new ways to collect light for growth and reproduction–at least five separate pathways, extending deep into earth’s evolutionary history.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 162.


“We suggest that fully two-thirds of the approximately forth-five hundred known mineral species could not have formed prior to the Great Oxidation Event, and that most of Earth’s rich mineral diversity probably could not occur on a nonliving world.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 177.


“Hence the narrative of this book, in which planets progress from mineralogical simplicity to complexity, from only about a dozen minerals in the dust and gas that made our Solar System to more than forth-five hundred known mineral species on earth today–two-thirds of which could not exist in a nonliving world.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 201.


“Minerals change life, even as life changes minerals.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 226.


“A principal mode of clay mineral formation is weathering, especially weathering by chemical alteration under the wet, acidic conditions of the late Neoproterozoic....

“One of the most striking properties of clay minerals is their ability to bind to organic biomolecules. An increased production of clay minerals would have sequestered carbon-rich biomass, and as the clay minerals washed into the oceans, they wold have sequestered that carbon in thick piles of fine-grained sediments. According to the Kennedy scenario, burial of carbon led to the rise of oxygen, which further accelerated the chemical production of clay minerals on land, which led to even more carbon burial. Hence, the ‘clay mineral factory’ may have contributed directly to the rise of atmospheric oxygen and the evolution of the modern living world.” Hazen, Robert. 2012. The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet. Penguin. P. 227.


“Within a cultural evolutionary framework, the key biological adaptations that underlie our species’ ecological success are the socio-cognitive mechanisms that permit high-fidelity social learning such that traits can be selectively preserved, shared and accumulated without degradation or loss.” Mesoudi, Alex. 2016. “Cultural evolution: integrating psychology, evolution and culture.” Current Opinion in Psychology. 7:17-22. Pp. 17-8.


“... I wish to note two features that distinguish the extended mind approach from distributed cognition. First, extended mind picks out a kind of cognition. In the extended mind view, mind may sometimes extend beyond the brain, and sometimes it does not. Extended cognition refers only to that subset of cognitive events that involve interaction of internal and external resources. The individuation of cases of extended mind depends on empirical claims that are grounded in a container metaphor for mind. The extension of mind is manifest in links and relations that cross the usual boundary of the mind container. Second, extended mind assumes a center in the cognitive system; the organism (or the organism’s brain), which is the normal mind container with respect to which cognition can be said to extend.

“Distributed cognition is not a kind of cognition; it is a perspective on all of cognition. Distributed cognition begins with the assumption that all instances of cognition can be seen as emerging from distributed processes. For any process there is always a way to see it as distributed.” Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. P. 36.


“When the focus is on systems that involve the interaction of persons with their immediate material and social environment, the intersection of distributed cognition with extended mind is substantial. Unlike extended mind, however, distributed cognition does not assume a center for any cognitive system. Nor does it grant a priori importance to the boundaries of skin or skull. For distributed cognition, the existence of boundaries and centers are empirical questions. Centers and boundaries are features that are determined by the relative density of information flow across a system. Some systems have a clear center while other systems have multiple centers or no center at all.” Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. P. 37.


“The practice of queuing for service consists of three interlocking component practices. First, there is a cooperative social practice of forming linear arrangements of bodies. Second, there are spatial material (and perhaps architectural) practices that designate some location as the source of service. Third, there is a socially shared individual mental practice of seeing the linear arrangement of bodies with respect to the service location as a queue. These practices are mutually supportive and depend on one another for their meaning and their very raison d’etre....

“Seeing a line as a queue is an example of the mapping of a conceptual structure, what in cognitive grammar is called a trajector, onto a physical array. This mapping of imagined structure onto perceived structure produces a conceptual blend which gives rise to a particular emergent property: a sequential ordering of the bodies of the individuals in the queue. The sequence of access to service is not present in either the physical line of people or in the trajector. It emerges only when some particular viewer blends the conceptual trajector with the perception of an appropriately ordered and situated physical array. Seeing the line as a queue is a cognitive practice because it makes possible a set of inferences. Who is next in line? Who arrived before whom?” Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. P. 39.


“When a line is being seen as a queue, other elements of the setting will be seen as instances of other roles in the queuing for service practice. This sort of fit suggests that cultural practices are composed of coherent constellations of mutually supportive component practices. In such a system, increasing the likelihood of any component increases the likelihood of the other components.” Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. P. 40.


“Forming a line from a group is a physical form of dimensionality reduction. A group of people occupying two dimensions of a surface approximates a one-dimensional array when they form a queue. This dimensionality reduction does not take place in any person’s mind. It takes place in the space shared by the participants to the practice. Once the dimensionality reduction in physical space has emerged, however, it supports or affords the cognitive practices of making inferences on the line ‘seen as’ a queue. The experience of a one-dimensional line is more predictable than the experience of a two-dimensional crowd. The experience of a queue has lower entropy than the experience of a crowd. This increase in predictability and structure is a property of the distributed system, not of any individual mind.” Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. P. 40.


“Learning to read requires the domestication of visual attention. Similar processes of domestication of visual attention are at work in other sorts of reading including reading natural phenomena such as the night sky, reading static cultural notations such as those found in mathematics or music, and reading dynamic cultural representations as in flying an airplane on instruments. In all of these activities, the domestication of visual attention produces culturally conventional trajectories of attention across spatial arrays of objects.” Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. P. 41.


“At the moment the first officer read the chart while the captain read the waypoint list, the practices of the pilots were coordinated and complementary. When both looked at the same blank field on the waypoint list, their practices were congruent. This complementarity and congruence of practices determine important performance characteristics of the system, including such things as the probability of the formation and retention of memories or of noticing an alert or detecting an error.” Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. Pp. 44-5.


“The practice of superimposing a trajector on a real or imagined array of objects is very productive and there are many other practices in this family. A wide variety of other kinds of practices enter into symbiotic relations with members of the family: arrangements of bodies; architectural features; ways of speaking, and verbal mnemonics; moral principles; arrangements of marks on surfaces; domesticated patterns of visual attention; the physical form of commercially produced writing surfaces; and more....

“The variety of the examples listed above reminds us that the cultural cognitive ecosystem is heterogeneous and complex. As an object of study, this cognitive ecosystem falls into the cracks among the academic disciplines as they are currently organized. Because no field or discipline has yet taken ownership of cultural cognitive ecosystems, little is known about their function.” Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. P. 45.


“Like any ecosystem, the cultural-cognitive ecosystem can be seen as a constraint satisfaction system that settles into a subset of possible configurations of elements. It is a dynamical system in which certain configurations of elements (what we know as stable practices) emerge (self-assemble) preferentially. In this perspective, constraints exist in many places and interact with one another through a variety of mechanisms of constraint satisfaction. Some of these are neural mechanisms; others are implemented in material tools; and still others are emergent in social processes of collective intelligence, the development of conventions, for example,...” Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. Pp. 45-6.


“We have observed that cultural practices have internal coherence. They consist of mutually supporting component practices and artifacts. If it is assumed that the assembly of functional systems proceeds via constraint satisfaction, then these conjectures follow,

• The alignment of components and the internal coherence of practices is dynamic and adaptive.
• Which practices assemble at any moment depends on the local structure of the ecosystem (which elements are available in local time and space),
• Experience, training, and the design of environments can all be seen as ways to bias the probability of the dynamic formation of particular practices (bias the assembly process),
• The stability, resilience, or persistence of a practice depends on the network of relations to other practices within which it is embedded. This includes membership in a family of practices as described above.,
• Interlocking relations among practices may produce conditions of multiple determination of particular features,
• The dynamics of practice formation and maintenance may include positive feedback loops such that the more prevalent a practice becomes, the more probable its formation,
• Learning in the ecosystem includes changes that are outside of individual persons, in artifacts, for example.”
Hutchins, Edwin. 2014. “The cultural ecosystem of human cognition.” Philosophical Psychology. V. 27. No. 1. 34-49. P. 46.


“The classical approach to cognitive science encourages the following view of the division of labor between psychology and neuroscience. Cognitive psychology provides analyses of the cognitive operations an individual must perform in order to carry out a cognitive task. Cognitive neuroscience then seeks to determine how these cognitive operations are carried out by brain regions and networks of brain regions.... There is no room in this view of the division of labor between psychology and neuroscience for the body and the environment to play anything other than a peripheral role in cognitive processes.” Kiverstein, Julian & M. Miller. 2015. “The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. V. 9. Art. 237. P. 2.


“A radical embodied cognitive neuroscience will take its analyses of psychological function not from cognitive psychology but instead from ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory.” Kiverstein, Julian & M. Miller. 2015. “The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. V. 9. Art. 237. P. 2.


“More recently, psychological constructionists have begun to argue that emotions do not map onto distinct regions and networks in the brain but are instead the result of dynamic interactions between large-scale networks that compute domain-general functions.” Kiverstein, Julian & M. Miller. 2015. “The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. V. 9. Art. 237. P. 5.


“Pluripotency refers to the well-established finding that one and the same [brain] region can be involved in the performance of multiple functions, e.g., language processing, movement preparation, imitation and imagery related tasks. Degeneracy refers to the finding that different neural structures can perform one and the same function. Taken together these findings suggest a many-to-many mapping of structure to function at the level of brain regions.” Kiverstein, Julian & M. Miller. 2015. “The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. V. 9. Art. 237. P. 5.


“Second we wanted to show that ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory under the heading of radical embodied cognitive science may be able to provide such an account of cognitive function. However if we do look to embodied cognitive science to play this role [of determining cognitive functions for neuroscience to investigate], this means giving up on a brain-centered view of cognitive function. We will no longer be able to claim that the brain is the organ of the mind. Instead we will need to think about mind and the cognitive processes that make up the mind at the level of the whole brain-body-environment system.” Kiverstein, Julian & M. Miller. 2015. “The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. V. 9. Art. 237. P. 9.


“‘Niche-construction’ denotes an evolutionary process whereby the activities of organisms modify their habitat, to which in turn the organisms evolve to adapt, thus creating their own ‘ecological niche’ in the environment. This concept will be extended in this paper to include the ‘cognitive niche’ as a newly acquired class of cognitive capacity, and the ‘neural niche’ as a portion of neural tissue added through expansion of the brain.” Iriki, Atsushi & M. Taoka. 2012. “Triadic (ecological, neural, cognitive) niche construction: a scenario of human brain evolution extrapolating tool use and language from the control of reaching actions.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367: 10-23. P. 10.


“If we looked at ourselves through our own externalized eyes, we would observe ourselves as external objects.... This leads to the perception of our own intrinsically intransitive movement as transitive, i.e. to the acquisition of a sense of the self (as the subject), and leading to the movement of ourselves or our body parts perceived as objects.” Iriki, Atsushi & M. Taoka. 2012. “Triadic (ecological, neural, cognitive) niche construction: a scenario of human brain evolution extrapolating tool use and language from the control of reaching actions.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367: 10-23. P. 11.


“We may hypothesize that once the ‘self’ has been bifurcated into a subjective self and an objective self, the mind and/or intentionality emerges as a function that bridges those fragmented ‘selves’ and reunites them; ... As a result of this self-objectification and emergence of the ‘mind’, a recognition of the ‘core self’ that continues across time from the past through the present towards the future may subsequently arise. Once the future self is recognized as having a core that is identical to that of the present self, one might wish to save the present information for future use. This can be accomplished by taking notes or drawing pictures, which requires an external device for memorizing facts; thus an ‘externalization of the brain’ is produced....” Iriki, Atsushi & M. Taoka. 2012. “Triadic (ecological, neural, cognitive) niche construction: a scenario of human brain evolution extrapolating tool use and language from the control of reaching actions.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367: 10-23. P. 11.


“Although Japanese macaques normally do not use tools in their natural habitat, two weeks of extensive training will enable these animals to use a hand-held rake to retrieve a distant food object located out of reach. This training must imply the ability to reorganize the image of the body to one in which the rake is incorporated as an extension of the forearm.” Iriki, Atsushi & M. Taoka. 2012. “Triadic (ecological, neural, cognitive) niche construction: a scenario of human brain evolution extrapolating tool use and language from the control of reaching actions.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367: 10-23. P. 11.


“Although the evidence obtained to date remains fragmentary and more detailed biological examinations are in progress, these initial findings indicate that the brain is much more adaptive than was previously believed; exposure to a novel cultural environment induces the brain to exhibit not only functional plasticity, but also extensive and persistent morphological change.” Iriki, Atsushi & M. Taoka. 2012. “Triadic (ecological, neural, cognitive) niche construction: a scenario of human brain evolution extrapolating tool use and language from the control of reaching actions.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society: B. 367: 10-23. P. 13.


“Increasingly, researchers are considering the processes by which the joint action of remembering occurs to help explain why collaborative memory performance is worse than (and conversely, why it can sometimes be better than) individual memory performance.” Szary, Janelle, R. Dale, C. Kello & T. Rhodes. 2015. “Patterns of interaction-dominant dynamics in individual versus collaborative memory foraging.” Cogn Process. 16:389-99. P. 390.


“The temporal distributions of memory retrieval differ depending on social-interaction contexts. Specifically, when participants work collaboratively on a free recall task, their recall behavior becomes less Pareto and more lognormal, on both the individual and group levels. This indicates that collaborative memory behavior should be regarded as an interaction-dominant process, but with feedback constraints. We note, however, that our results do not indicate a perfect fit to either lognormal or Pareto distributions for any dataset. The log ratio results, which show that interacting dyads have distributions that are closer to being fit by the Pareto as compared to distributions from the artificial, noninteracting groups, suggest that collaborating groups may still exhibit some interdependent feedback processes. In fact, Holden et al. Propose a ‘cocktail model’ in which a system’s behavior is a mixture of lognormal and power law, the proportions of which are determined by the existing constraints on component interactions.” Szary, Janelle, R. Dale, C. Kello & T. Rhodes. 2015. “Patterns of interaction-dominant dynamics in individual versus collaborative memory foraging.” Cogn Process. 16:389-99. P. 398. Reference: Holden, J., G. Van Orden & M. Turvey. 2009. “Dispersion of response times reveals cognitive dynamics.” Psychol Rev. 116(2):318-342.


“There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world’s languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of frequent breakdowns in communication. In a sample of 12 languages of 8 language families of varied typological profiles we find a system of ‘other-initiated repair’, where the recipient of an unclear message can signal trouble and the sender can repair the original message. We find that this system is frequently used (on average about once per 1.4 minutes in any language), and that it has detailed common properties, contrary to assumptions of radical cultural variation.” Dingemanse, Mark, S. Roberts, J. Baranova, J. Blythe, P. Drew, S. Floyd, R. Gisladottir, K. Kendrick, S. Levinson, E. Manrique, G. Rossi & N. Enfield. 2015. “Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems.” PLOS One. DOI:10.1371. P. 1.


“Three main practices for repair initiation recur across all of the languages in our sample: (I) Open Request signals a problem with the trouble source while leaving open where or what it is, and requests clarification (example: ‘Huh?’); (II) Restricted Request requests specification or clarification of a specific component of the trouble source (example: ‘Who?’); (III) Restricted Offer offers a candidate for what was just said and asks for confirmation (example: ‘she had a boy?’). These repair initiator types go from least specific (open request) to most specific (restricted offer) in terms of the amount of information they contain about the communication trouble and the possible solution.” Dingemanse, Mark, S. Roberts, J. Baranova, J. Blythe, P. Drew, S. Floyd, R. Gisladottir, K. Kendrick, S. Levinson, E. Manrique, G. Rossi & N. Enfield. 2015. “Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems.” PLOS One. DOI:10.1371. P. 5.


“While linguistic details of repair initiators can vary from language to language, both the general shape of the system and its principles of use in informal conversation are strongly similar across different languages, suggesting that we are tapping into the very infrastructure for social interaction.” Dingemanse, Mark, S. Roberts, J. Baranova, J. Blythe, P. Drew, S. Floyd, R. Gisladottir, K. Kendrick, S. Levinson, E. Manrique, G. Rossi & N. Enfield. 2015. “Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems.” PLOS One. DOI:10.1371. P. 11.


“If language is universally and quintessentially human, what is at its core? The repair system we observe is one of the crucial safeguarding mechanisms for coherence in social interactions. It exhibits and exploits three elements that are crucial to human language and arguably unique to our species: self-referentiality, social intelligence, and collaborative action. If there is a universal core to language, these are the kinds of things it is made of.” Dingemanse, Mark, S. Roberts, J. Baranova, J. Blythe, P. Drew, S. Floyd, R. Gisladottir, K. Kendrick, S. Levinson, E. Manrique, G. Rossi & N. Enfield. 2015. “Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems.” PLOS One. DOI:10.1371. P. 11.


“Roughly, two main currents have recently come to attack the traditional geography of the mental as being exclusively confined to individuals: First, there is an increasing number of social ontologists who claim that there are ‘mental commons’, ‘group agents’, ‘plural subjects’, or ‘groups with minds of their own’. However one refers to them all these authors agree that these collectives have intentions, attitudes, aims, preferences, or beliefs, i.e., paradigmatic mental states of their own such that they cannot be properly explained, predicted, or evaluated solely by reference to facts about their individual members.

“Second, there is an ever-growing body of, largely empirical, evidence from research in social cognition that speaks for so-called socially distributed cognition, shared extended minds, collaborative or transactive memory systems, and, more generally, for the group cognition thesis. All these works strongly suggest that there are cognitive processes (such as representation, memory, learning, environmental control, problem solving, or creativity) which cannot be reduced to the cognitive architecture or capacities of individual cognizers or their aggregate.” Szanto, Thomas. 2014. “How to share a mind: Reconsidering the group mind thesis.” Phenom Cogn Sci. 13:99-120. P. 101.


“Social ontology must directly confront the hypothesis that there are groups with genuine minds of their own. As a first step down this road, I have attempted to demonstrate that given specific rational integration of the mental properties of individuals, individuals can in fact share mental properties that are not their own property, as it were, precisely because those are properties of a group with a mind of its own.

“In order to do so, I have suggested to keep apart mental properties and conscious properties and put forward the zombie conception of group minds. I have argued that the zombie conception is immune to a number of negative intuitions raised against zombies, as well as to standard challenges of GMT [group mind thesis]. Moreover, I have shown that groups can indeed instantiate control properties of minds, as they are commonly conceived.” Szanto, Thomas. 2014. “How to share a mind: Reconsidering the group mind thesis.” Phenom Cogn Sci. 13:99-120. P. 117.


“At least four emergent, group-level explanations have been raised to address findings that larger groups solve problems more quickly than do smaller groups. First, members of larger groups benefit from cooperative interactions such as shared vigilance for predators and improved efficiency in foraging. This benefit could permit greater investment in time and energy devoted to solving problems, although only neophobia and foraging behavior have been shown to be influenced by so-called ‘shared risk’, thus far. Second, the ‘pool of competency’ hypothesis posits that larger groups may simply be more likely to contain an individual, such as an innovator or producer, who is able to solve the problem, as has been found in house sparrows and great tits. Third, individuals may have genetic or fixed cognitive capacities and may choose to join groups of different sizes based on those existing traits, with the result that members of larger groups are better problem-solvers. There is evidence of such fixed cognitive ability and social strategy in house sparrows and great tits. Fourth, group members may engage in making cooperative decisions; pooling information from a greater number of individuals has been shown to improve performance in solving problems in swarms of honeybees and schools of fish.” Sewall, Kendra. 2015. “Social Complexity as a Driver of Communication and Cognition.” Integrative and Comparative Biology. V. 55. No. 3. Pp. 384-95. Pp. 385-6.


“Contextual learning occurs when a receiver learns to associate a signal with a context or referent as a result of experience with other individuals’ signals and responses. For example, vervet monkeys must learn to associate different variants of alarm calls (meaning leopard, eagle, or snake) with these particular classes of predator and to both produce the correct variant upon contacting a predator and to respond appropriately (run into the trees, look up for an eagle, or look down for a snake) when hearing a particular variant of an alarm call.” Sewall, Kendra. 2015. “Social Complexity as a Driver of Communication and Cognition.” Integrative and Comparative Biology. V. 55. No. 3. Pp. 384-95. Pp. 386-7.


“While bird song is used in attracting mates and defending territories, calls mediate social interactions ranging from alerting companions to the presence of predators, to coordinating foraging efforts. One sub-category of calls, known as ‘contact’ calls, is particularly taxonomically widespread. Contact calls are produced by animals when reuniting or coordinating behaviors with companions and they therefore mediate social recognition and many social interactions.” Sewall, Kendra. 2015. “Social Complexity as a Driver of Communication and Cognition.” Integrative and Comparative Biology. V. 55. No. 3. Pp. 384-95. P. 387.


“Sociality has the potential to drive the evolution both of improved contextual learning and of call-production learning, which in turn permit the encoding of more complex social interaction.” Sewall, Kendra. 2015. “Social Complexity as a Driver of Communication and Cognition.” Integrative and Comparative Biology. V. 55. No. 3. Pp. 384-95. P. 387.


“Across taxa, contact-call production learning has been proposed to serve several specific functions, but a unifying theme is that it permits the formation of new social associations within fission-fusion groups. For example, the ‘Password’ or ‘Badge’ hypothesis posits that learned contact calls signal group-membership in large social groups of birds and bats that reunite to share roosts, or collectively defend food resources.” Sewall, Kendra. 2015. “Social Complexity as a Driver of Communication and Cognition.” Integrative and Comparative Biology. V. 55. No. 3. Pp. 384-95. P. 388.


“While demographic history and frequency of social interaction help explain the maintenance of tool use traditions, we can also consider three main hypotheses that are currently proposed for tool use emergence, especially among primates and birds. These are necessity, opportunity, and relative profitability, with tool use in different groups respectively driven by a need to overcome food scarcity, to exploit available resources, or to gain an adaptive advantage over non-tool-users.” Haslam, Michael. 2014. “On the Tool Use Behavior of the Bonobo-Chimpanzee Last Common Ancestor, and the Origins of Hominine Stone Tool Use.” American Journal of Primatology. 76:910-918. P. 913.


“Genetic data indicate that, approximately 45 to 60 kya, a very rapid population expansion occurred outside of Africa, and spread in all directions across the Eurasian continents, eventually populating the entire world. We dub this event the Great Expansion.” Henn, Brenna, L. Cavalli-Sforza & M. Feldman. 2012. “The great human expansion.” PNAS. V. 109. No. 44. 17758-64. P. 17758.


“The defining genetic feature of populations historically residing outside of Africa is the tremendous reduction in genetic diversity compared with populations residing in sub-Saharan Africa.... It is generally assumed that the bottleneck occurred as a small group(s) with an effective population size of only approximately 1,000 to 2,500 individuals moved from the African continent into the Near East.” Henn, Brenna, L. Cavalli-Sforza & M. Feldman. 2012. “The great human expansion.” PNAS. V. 109. No. 44. 17758-64. P. 17758.


“Harman has built a philosophy that aims to make objects in relation, and not just relations per se, the basis of an object-oriented ontology. By working with a concept of emergence missing in Latour’s work, Harman provides a way to account for a world of hybrid forms, new social actors and how these actors are performed that maintains irreducibility where Latourian accounts cannot. An object is emergent (it is more than its parts) and at the same time it is also more than its engagements (it is also withdrawn). This double irreducibility allows objects to surprise other objects and us.” Pierides, Dean & D. Woodman. 2012. “Object-oriented sociology and organizing in the face of emergency: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and the material turn.” The British Journal of Sociology. V. 63. Issue 4. 662-679. P. 667. References: Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. OUP. Harman, Graham. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Re.press.


“Unlike Latour, Harman argues for starting with basic asymmetry between an actor’s components and its alliances.” Pierides, Dean & D. Woodman. 2012. “Object-oriented sociology and organizing in the face of emergency: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and the material turn.” The British Journal of Sociology. V. 63. Issue 4. 662-679. P. 668. References: Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. OUP. Harman, Graham. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Re.press.


“When a scientific realist objects to Latour’s democracy of actors, it is on the basis that the reality of the world exists ‘whether we like it or not’. Harman sides with Latour when this claim is made to endorse the division between human and world and the social and natural. Yet he sides with the scientific realist when Latour refuses that a thing can have a reality apart from its relations.” Pierides, Dean & D. Woodman. 2012. “Object-oriented sociology and organizing in the face of emergency: Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and the material turn.” The British Journal of Sociology. V. 63. Issue 4. 662-679. P. 669. References: Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. OUP. Harman, Graham. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Re.press.


“This is exactly what defines modernism: an unquestionable confidence in the human ability to know itself and the world, thus ruling both without reference to any other authority than human reason.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. Pp. 248-9.


... contemporary social theory is less a common enterprise than a discursive medium through which different perspectives account for our world today.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 249.


“Today, Castells claims, production is primarily ‘informationalism’ – that is, the control, manipulation and distribution of information as both a product and a means of organizing other products. He identifies five characteristics that distinguish ‘informational capitalism’, the emergent economic paradigm of our age: information becomes the fundamental economic good; information technologies dominate; economic systems organize themselves in global networks; relations of production become increasingly flexible; different technologies tend to converge.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. Pp. 250-1. Reference: Castells, Manuel. 1998. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age. 1998.


“... network logic undermines the sense of identify of both individual and collective actors.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 251. Referring to the logic of Manuel Castells.


“For Castells, social movements ... are attempts at identify construction in response to the global network mentality with its emphasis on the ephemeral. Castells’s well documented analysis shows how social movements today advance their agendas by subverting the network logic.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 251. Reference is to Manuel Castells.


“For instance, people no longer take institutions for granted but constantly reflect on and choose institutions. Previously, marriage and the family were given. Now, individuals can select from a variety of options, of which marriage is only one: ...” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 255. Citing the work of Ulrich Beck. Beck, Ulrich & E. Beck-Gensheim. 2001. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. Sage.


“... Beck coined the term ‘risk’ to refer to any such (often for a long time undetectable) danger that humanity has brought upon itself. Hence the term ‘risk society’ to refer to how, in society today, people are constantly subjected to negative outcomes of previous attempts to control nature....

“Risk society is actually a society of uncertainty, in which humanity has unwittingly caused problems for itself, and in which no one, not even with the help of science, really knows the precise dangers to which they are subjected. Ignorance, rather than probabilistic knowledge, characterizes this type of society. One of the recurrent themes of Beck’s work is indeed that current society differs from previous ones in that people are now confronted with systemic uncertainty.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. Pp. 257-8. Reference: Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modoernity. Sage.


“What are the dangers that Beck identifies as the ‘second modernity’, and in which ways is sociology badly equipped to analyse them? First, Beck argues that various modern dualities are being eroded or blurred for instance, the duality between life and death, between citizen and foreigner, and between culture and nature....

“Second, Beck notes that sociology often assumes that geographical proximity is essential to social interactions. However, because of recent developments in telecommunication, individuals are now able to interact in a meaningful way with others in faraway places. Social proximity no longer rests on physical proximity. This explains why immigrants can remain very much in touch with the politics, culture and sports of their home country and with family members left behind. They are in touch with and operate in different localities. Most people today live a ‘dialogic existence’: they have to straddle between different cultures and they have to resolve cultural differences.

“Third, for Beck, sociology often takes for granted that individuals are confronted with and determined by pre-existing social institutions and groups. Beck’s point is best exemplified by Durkheim’s view that social facts, the subject-matter of sociology should study the extent to which people’s actions and attitudes are determined by institutions and groups which pre-date them. But this Durkheimian view assumes that people have little say in what institutions or groups affect them. Beck argues that, under conditions of the second modernity, this view is unduly rigid. In the reflexive world of today, people often choose which groups they wish to belong to and which they want to avoid. Beck’s notion of ‘reflexive modernization’ refers to this process: people no longer take for granted institutions, norms and practices, but they constantly reflect upon their validity and consider altering them or taking different options altogether.

“Fourth, contemporary society is, according to Beck, characterized by increasing ‘individualization’. Individual biographies are no longer prescribed by society; people are regularly constructing their own narratives and their own notions of identity. Whereas in the first modernity people were still constrained by informal rules and conventions tied to class, gender and ethnicity, this is now less and less the case....

“[Fifth], Beck has argued in favour of what he calls cosmopolitanism in the social sciences. Central to this cosmopolitan agenda is the rejection of ‘methodological nationalism’. Beck contends that many sociologists take for granted that society is identical to the nation state: they assume that societies can be studied as relatively autonomous entities. They acknowledge that nation-states are in competition with each other, and there might be economic exchanges between them. But they would insist that societies, as nation-states, are clearly demarcated entities. Beck’s point is that recent transformations have made this methodological nationalism untenable. That is, the twenty-first century is the era of cosmopolitanism: ‘modern’ dualities, such as the global versus the local, and the international versus the national have dissolved.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. Pp. 258-60. Reference: Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modoernity. Sage.


“... reflexivity and individualization are not equally prevalent amongst different social classes; they are particularly common amongst the educated upper middle classes.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 261.


“In modernity, order was no longer conceived as preordained; it was considered to be man-made and fragile. Importantly, Bauman argued that once it was believed that people, not God, created order, imperfections could no longer be tolerated. People could always do better, and with their newfound freedom came the moral obligation to improve on what they had achieved so far. Initially, modernity was accompanied by tolerance towards, and even encouragement of, diversity. Very soon, however, diversity was seen as antithetical to order. Ongoing attempts to reach perfection require planning, and planning is easier when faced with homogeneity.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 263. Reference: Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Polity.


“With the emergence of the modern nation-state, intellectuals acquire a prominent role, helping to direct society and people in the direction of a more rational, ordered and altogether more perfect future.... Because intellectuals have better access to superior or objective knowledge, they are like legislators, able to arbitrate in various disputes. Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 265.


“Bauman’s distinction between legislators and interpreters echoes Richard Rorty’s between epistemology and hermeneutics. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argues that the assumption of commensurability underlies any epistemology. To presuppose commensurability is to assume that it is possible to uncover a set of rules that enable us to judge between opposing knowledge claims. In contrast, hermeneutics helps bring about a conversation between different cultural traditions. Both epistemology and hermeneutics pursue consensus, but whereas the former believes that there is a common ground prior to the conversation, the latter rejects this assumption.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 266. Reference: Bauman, Zygmunt. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters. Polity.


“In Liquid Society and Liquid Love, Bauman argues that in the current neoliberal climate individuals have become subject to unbridled market forces, constantly in need of being flexible and able to reinvent themselves whenever required. Under these circumstances social bonds have weakened dramatically, and Bauman uses the metaphor of liquidity to capture the transience of social relationships and institutions today.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 266. Reference: Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Society. Polity. 2003. Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Polity


“Whereas Castells et al. tend to focus on information outputs, Sassen calls our attention to the work of those who produce these outputs. In short, Sassen questions the dominant representation of the global information economy as placeless and argues instead that new types of spatialization of power have been emerging in the past couple of decades.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 229. Reference: Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton UP.


“Sassen claims that the global grid of cities is the most strategic place for the formation of transnational identities and communities. Traditional sources of identity, such as the nation or the village, no longer perform their function in global cities.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. P. 271. Reference: Sassen, Saskia. 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton UP.


“What is scalar thought and why is it so important to overcome it? Scalar thought assumes exclusive, hierarchical and a-historical relationships among different political levels or analytical scales. For instance, in political science it is customary to study macro, meso and micro features of democracy and citizenship.... Tracing a transnational process such as economic globalization without ignoring its territoriality and institutional grounding has led Sassen to question scalar thought’s tendency to reify particular analytical scales. The national scale, for instance, actually encompasses ‘a simultaneity of scales, spaces, and relations, some national in the historic sense of the word, some denationalized or in the process of becoming so, and some global’.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. Pp. 272-3. Subquote: Sassen, Saskia. 2007. A Sociology of Globalization. Princeton UP. P. 42.


“In The Fall of Public Man, perhaps his best-known work, Sennett makes a powerful case against the rise of the self-centred cultural mood that emerged as a consequence of the student revolts of the late 1960s.... The more we focus on the depths of our intimate self, the less we are able to open ourselves to civilized relations with our fellow citizens. The cost of this ideology of intimacy has been enormous. We have lost the old humanistic sense of treating strangers as strangers, i.e., as individuals who are worthy of our respect for the sole reason that they are human beings....

“A staunch defender of the public domain, he has repeatedly argued that people ought to realize the extent to which their lives are closely interwoven with the physical spaces, the buildings, parks and coffee houses, that make up the cities in which they live. If individuals begin to look at their cities in this way, the narcissism responsible for modern urban alienation can be replaced by a public culture in which anonymity goes hand in hand with community.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. Pp. 274-5. Reference: Sennett, Richard. 1974. The Fall of Public Man. Faber and Faber.


“In contrast [to the objective knowledge of logical positivists], pragmatists insist that scientific knowledge is an intervention in the world and that, as an intervention, it is necessarily shaped by the interests or focus of the researchers involved....

“In contrast [to a view of subjectivity as both inaccurate and a copying of the external world], the pragmatist world is indicative of what Hilary Putnam called the ‘democratization of inquiry’: devoid of foundations, people are encouraged to reassess their views in the light of new empirical evidence.” Baert, Patrick & F. Carreira da Silva. 2010. Social Theory in the Twentieth century and Beyond. Second Edition. Polity. Pp. 295-6. Reference: Putnam, Hilary. 2004. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Harvard UP.


“There is already an official narrative of the Anthropocene: ‘we’, the human species, unconsciously destroyed nature to the point of hijacking the Earth system into a new geological epoch. In the late twentieth century, a handful of Earth system scientists finally opened our eyes. So now we know; now we are aware of the global consequences of human action.

“This story of awakening is a fable. The opposition between a blind past and a clear-sighted present, besides being historically false, depoliticizes the long history of the Anthropocene. It serves above all to credit our own excellence...

“In its managerial variant, the moral of the official account consists in giving the engineers of the Earth system the keys to ‘Spaceship Earth’; in its philosophical and incantatory variant, it consists in calling first and foremost for a revolution in morality and thought, which alone will allow the conclusion of an armistice between humans and non-humans, and reconciliation of all of us with the Earth.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. Pp. xii-xiii.


“The mass of humans (32 per cent), along with that of their domestic animals (65 per cent), now makes up 97 per cent of the total biomass of land vertebrates, leaving only 3 per cent for the remaining 30,000 land-dwelling vertebrate species.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 7


“Pasture, crop-land and cities, which represented 5 per cent of the Earth’s land area in 1750 and 12 per cent in 1900, today cover close to a third.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 9.


“For four of these [out of 24 parameters of the Earth system that show great acceleration], however, the limit (danger threshold of a sudden tipping of the Earth system into a catastrophic state) has already been approached (or passed): nitrogen cycle, greenhouse gas emissions, extinction of biodiversity and phosphate cycle.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 12.


“Ruddiman argues that some 5,000 years ago humans had already emitted sufficient greenhouse gases – by deforestation, rice cultivation and stock-raising – to modify the Earth’s climatic trajectory. These emissions and the warming they produced delayed the moment of entry into a new glacial episode.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 14. Reference: Ruddiman, William. University of Virginia.


“From Buffon to Lyell and Darwin, biology and geology extended terrestrial time to hundreds of millions of years, creating a context that was seemingly external, almost immobile and indifferent to human tribulations. In parallel with this, the bourgeois and industrial Enlightenment emphasized the value of man, the modern subject, as autonomous agent acting consciously on his history and settling social conflicts by dominating nature.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 19.


“... the Anthropocene is a point of no return. It indicates a geological bifurcation with no foreseeable return to the normality of the Holocene.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 21.


“... knowing that the warming of recent decades has been limited by urban and industrial emissions of sulphur dioxide (an aerosol reflecting solar radiation), particularly in Asia, the international community finds itself facing the dilemma of reducing SO2 emissions by anti-pollution measures, at the risk of increasing global warming, or instead limiting these measures or even conducting projects of geoengineering that consist in massively spraying SO2 into the atmosphere so as to limit this warming, at the cost of millions of premature deaths from respiratory diseases caused by this gas.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 25.


“We then have to envisage a double relation of internality:

“– Nature pervaded by the social...

“– Societies pervaded by nature, in which social relations and cultural norms are structured and rigidified by mechanisms that organize metabolisms of matter and energy, and that govern the social uses of nature. Far from surrounding the social, the environment traverses it, and the history of societies, cultures and socio-political regimes cannot ignore the flows of matter, energy and information that frame them.

“In this perspective of a double-framing internality, each of the two former supposed ‘compartments’ must thus be studied by combining the approaches of the so-called social and so-called natural sciences, rather than by an interdisciplinarity of adjacency in which each would reign over its own compartment. The joint history of the Earth and of human societies then appears as the co-evolution of metabolic (material-energetic) regimes and social orders. In each period, a set of world-views and social relations supports sociotechnical arrangements that organize the metabolisms of a given society and world-system and alter the functioning of the Earth system. And reciprocally, the metabolisms thus constructed have also political agency;...” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. Pp. 36-7.


“A distinction is generally made between three major ethical proposals: anthropocentric (sustainably managing the Earth for man), biocentric (respecting the intrinsic right to existence of every being on Earth) and ecocentric (‘thinking like Gaia’, in the words of J. Baird Callicot, following on Aldo Leopold).” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 40.


“... in 1850, by exchanging £1,000 of textiles manufactured in Manchester for £1,000 of American raw cotton, Britain gained 46 per cent in terms of embodied labour (unequal exchange) and 6,000 per cent in terms of embodied hectares, thus releasing its own domestic space from the environmental constraint of having to produce that much fibre,...” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 233.


“If we consider the evolution of the balance of trade in materials between the different parts of the world, it seems that the basic ecological difference between the Communist and the capitalist systems lay in the fact that the Communist camp, for its development, exploited and degraded its own environment above all, whereas the Western countries built their own growth on a gigantic draining of mineral and renewable resources from the rest of the non-Communist world, emptying this of its high-quality energy and materials.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 246.


“The Great Acceleration thus corresponds to a capture by the Western industrial countries of the ecological surpluses of the Third World.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 250.


“Thinking the Anthropocene also means challenging its unifying grand narrative of the errant human species and its redemption by science alone. It means meticulously listening to scientists and putting their results and conclusions into public and democratic discussions, rather than sinking into a geocracy of technological and market-based ‘solutions’ to ‘manage’ the entire Earth. The less that the science of the Anthropocene pretends to stand above the world, the more solid and fruitful it will be, and the less the seductive concept of the Anthropocene will risk serving as a legitimizing philosophy for an oligarchic geopower.” Bonneuil, Christophe & J-B Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso. P. 288.


“Even with a population of seven billion, Homo sapiens is not an entirely novel force of nature. But human systems are.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1012.


“Anthromes [or anthropogenic biomes] and biomes do not vary independently. Humans preferentially seek out, use and engineer ecosystems in relation to the different opportunities for use they offer in terms of their potential productivity and other ecosystem factors. For example, temperate woodlands are now used preferentially for cultivated crops, and shrublands mostly for rangelands. Thus, factors that predict global patterns in the biomes also help to predict global patterns in the anthromes.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1014.


“Humans take advantage of these pre-existing natural variations by extracting resources and engineering ecosystems in response to the differing ecological opportunities for use offered by different parts of landscapes: for example, by clearing and farming the wooded plains first and using them more intensively, leaving the steep hillsides for grazing, hunting or shifting cultivation. Humans then build on the ecological legacies of this sustained use, expanding settlements into the oldest croplands, terracing denuded hillsides for agriculture once land is scarce and abandoning agriculturally degraded lands to forestry or wildlife conservation.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1016.


“Both land-use models agree that, as of 2000 CE, most of the terrestrial biosphere was already transformed into anthromes, leaving only about 25 per cent (HYDE) to 40 per cent (KK10) in wildlands. Both also agree that 8000 years ago the opposite was true, with about 80 per cent of the terrestrial biosphere in wildlands and 20 per cent in seminatural anthromes.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1024.


“Most importantly, both land-use models basically agree in their estimation of what is probably the simplest indicator of biospheric transformation, the time period when more than half of the terrestrial biosphere was transformed into intensively used anthromes, with KK10 putting this at 1900 and HYDE at 1950.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1024.


“Another simple indicator of biospheric transformation is the percentage of global land covered by crops, irrespective of their distribution among landscapes or biomes, with a level of 15-20 per cent being recently regarded as an unsustainable threshold. While this level has never been reached, and is currently at about 12 per cent in both models, HYDE data show it increasing dramatically in recent centuries, while KK10 indicates that contemporary levels of cultivation were reached more than 500 years ago and may have actually peaked early in the twentieth century.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1025.


“Taking the most conservative view, nearly one-third of the terrestrial biosphere has now been transformed into anthromes in which pre-existing ecosystem forms and processes have been shifted outside their native range and novel anthropogenic ecological processes predominate.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1025.


“It seems clear that the terrestrial biosphere is now predominantly anthropogenic, fundamentally distinct from the wild biosphere of the Holocene and before. From a philosophical point of view, nature is now human nature; there is no more wild nature to be found, just ecosystems in different states of human interaction, differing in wildness and humanness. As evolution and other ecological processes now occur primarily within human systems, biology and ecology must incorporate human systems into their mainstream research and educational paradigms.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1027.


“In the Anthropocene, the anthropogenic biosphere is permanent, the legacy of our ancestors, and our actions as human systems a force of nature, making the call to avoid human interference with the biosphere irrelevant.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1027.


“... there is growing evidence that agricultural systems are intensifying in the most suitable lands for production, sparing less agriculturally productive parts of landscapes, and leading to increasing forest cover in many nations. Human systems may be moving in a sustainable direction, with anthromes evolving with them.” Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35. P. 1028.


“Humans do not live as individuals outside of social groups (at least not for long or typically). We are always interacting with multiple others in temporally and spatially dynamic social relationships as we interface with an ecology that is also partially socially mediated. Although we may use individual humans as the core unit for modeling evolutionary processes, changes, and responses, actual people almost never engage with evolutionarily relevant challenges (be they nutritional, social, ecological, economic, political, etc.) by themselves, outside of a social (cultural) network, or even outside of spatial proximity, or without reference, to other humans.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution.” American Anthropologist. V. 117. No. 2. Pp. 302-15. P. 303.


“When analytical models are introduced, they are often modeled as a single individual interacting in a landscape populated by other single individuals or as groups competing with other groups, with the dyadic encounter (between individuals or between groups) as the core pattern of interface between them. But heightened social and behavioral density and concomitant social complexity is a widespread, and potentially ancient, primate pattern, and the social networks of many primates are, multidimensional and not best modeled as sequences of dyadic exchanges at either the individual or group level. So, in thinking about human evolution, social and behavioral complexity and multifaceted interactions, not single trait or dyadic encounter foci, should be the baseline.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution.” American Anthropologist. V. 117. No. 2. Pp. 302-15. P. 304.


“In an evolutionary approach, we cannot fall back on a treatment of culture as primarily understandable and measurable via constituent ‘variants’ or other heritable particles characteristic of many gene-culture coevolution approaches. Such approaches see cultural evolution as fundamentally Darwinian in its basic structure, with genes and culture variants being the key targets of selection. While offering important options for modeling cultural change, such a perspective remains wed to a dual-inheritance context in which genes and culture variants are ‘obligate mutualists’ and are seen as two side-by-side yet interfacing systems being driven by natural selection.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution.” American Anthropologist. V. 117. No. 2. Pp. 302-15. P. 306.


“We are not tasked with explaining why humans live in highly social groups with complex social relationships and networks that cut across biological kinship with relatively high levels of cooperation because this is a pattern found in the extant hominoids and is evolutionarily basal for humans and all hominins. This baseline includes the following: dynamic multiadult social organization (with possibility of fission-fusion communities), increased social cognition relative to other primates, high social reciprocity, local social tradition and innovation, and simple tool manufacture and use.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution.” American Anthropologist. V. 117. No. 2. Pp. 302-15. P. 307.


“Using the concept of the human niche(s) and thinking about the dynamics of human communities across our evolutionary history in the context of the extended evolutionary synthesis force us to prioritize the integration of individuals, materials, social networks, communities, and local ecologies. This enables a kind of anthropology in which attention is paid to the dynamic feedback loops between ecological innovation, social complexity, symbols and interpretation, and cultural transmission. Such an approach forces us to incorporate the material with the cognitive and the behavioral with the morphological as key elements in evolutionary processes.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution.” American Anthropologist. V. 117. No. 2. Pp. 302-15. P. 310.


“Since Darwin, there have been at least two major conceptual advances in the study of adaptation. First, the advent of population genetics united Darwin’s theory with Mendelian genetics, by showing how natural selection would work via changes in gene frequency. Second, Hamilton showed that consequences for relatives have to be factored in to provide a more general definition of fitness. Scott-Phillips, Thomas, K. Laland, D. Shuker, T. Dickins & S. West. 2013. “The Niche Construction Perspective: A Critical Appraisal.” Evolution. 68-5: 1231-1243. P. 1234.


“The standard approach recognizes that organisms will be selected to change their environment in adaptive ways, but it does not consider niche construction to be a cause of organism-environment fit. Rather, it tends to focus on those aspects of niche construction that are themselves adaptations–which are, by definition, the product of selection. As advocates can envisage traits (e.g., human housing) that enhance the fit between organism and environment but are not strictly adaptations, they find the standard position suboptimal.” Scott-Phillips, Thomas, K. Laland, D. Shuker, T. Dickins & S. West. 2013. “The Niche Construction Perspective: A Critical Appraisal.” Evolution. 68-5: 1231-1243. Pp. 1234-5.


“The skeptics see a number of problems with the niche construction view of adaptation. Here we highlight three in particular:

“(a) Does niche construction adapt environments to organisms in a systematic way?...

“Niche construction can lead to both increases and decreases in fitness, and they see no basis on which to argue that one is favored over the other....”

“(b) When explaining adaptation, is niche construction equivalent to natural selection?...

“Niche construction, like all environmental change, can cause evolutionary processes to occur, but this does not make it an evolutionary process itself....”

“(c) Does the niche construction perspective make an unambiguous, general prediction about adaptation?”
Scott-Phillips, Thomas, K. Laland, D. Shuker, T. Dickins & S. West. 2013. “The Niche Construction Perspective: A Critical Appraisal.” Evolution. 68-5: 1231-1243. Pp. 1235-6.


“Taken together, the evolutionary appearance of sponge-type filter feeding would have revolutionized contemporaneous marine structure, tipping primary productivity from its longstanding cyanobacterial condition to an alternative stable state in which eukaryotes thrive, oxygen minimum zones are suppressed, and marine-shelf environments become progressively ventilated.

“In this light, there is indeed a causal correlation between the perturbations of the Cryogenian-Cambrian earth system and early animal evolution, though not in the simple oxygen-driven fashion in which it is most often presented. By recognizing the pervasive effects of animals on Earth-surface processes, many of the interconnecting threads of Neoproterozoic history can be reconciled in terms of step-wise biological innovation and its compounding feedback on both the environment and other organisms.” Butterfield, Nicholas. 2015. “The Neoproterozoic. Current Biology. 25, R859-R863. P. R863.


“However, for all hominins subsequent to ~3.5 million years ago (Ma) new isotopic studies identify a diverse diet incorporating a broad range of plants using the C3 and C4 photosynthetic pathways.” Anton, Susan, R. Potts & L. Aiello. 2014. “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective.” Science. Vol. 345. Issue 6192. P. 1236828-1.


“Thus, the East African fossil record provides evidence of at least three partly contemporary species of Homo from ~2 to 1.5 Ma, all of which exhibit, on average, larger brains and bodies than Australopithecus.” Anton, Susan, R. Potts & L. Aiello. 2014. “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective.” Science. Vol. 345. Issue 6192. P. 1236828-4.


“The mosaic of features in A. sediba (~1.98 Ma) and variation in the Dmanisi H. erectus sample (~1.8 Ma), both of which are contemporaneous with the three African groups, suggest that the early diversification of Homo was a period of morphological experimentation.” Anton, Susan, R. Potts & L. Aiello. 2014. “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective.” Science. Vol. 345. Issue 6192. P. 1236828-5.


“However, a current synthesis of stratigraphic, eolian dust, lake, faunal, stable isotopic, volcanologic, and tectonic data results in a far more dynamic picture of East African environments in which fluctuating moisture and aridity, shifting resource regimes, and spatial heterogeneity were the dominant features of the settings in which early Homo evolved. In contrast to the traditional model of a stable or progressively arid savanna, evidence of climate and landscape variability highlights a different set of adaptive problems in which capacities to buffer and adjust to environmental dynamics at diverse temporal and spatial scales were at a premium in hominin and other contemporaneous animal populations.” Anton, Susan, R. Potts & L. Aiello. 2014. “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective.” Science. Vol. 345. Issue 6192. P. 1236828-7.


“... evidence of stone tool-assisted foraging is intermittent before 2.0 Ma. Core-flake-hammerstone technology (Oldowan) is temporally persistent beginning ~2.0 Ma; along with the acquisition of large animal tissues at least partly by hunting and butchery, the exploitation of diverse terrestrial and aquatic resources, and tool-edge wear consistent with processing underground tubers and roots. Stone tools were transported from as far away as 12 km from source, which underscores the energetic trade-off between the cost of stone transport and the energetic returns from tool use. The Oldowan also provided the technological basis for expansion into southern and northern Africa and western Asia by 1.85 Ma, and the appearance of the Acheulean by 1.76 Ma may have further enhanced adaptive potential.” Anton, Susan, R. Potts & L. Aiello. 2014. “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective.” Science. Vol. 345. Issue 6192. P. 1236828-8.


“We emphasize that flexibility is just one possible reaction to these environmental challenges and need not be the one that all or even most animals took at this time. Lessons from extant comparators suggest that intraspecific phenotypic plasticity provides a more rapid response to environmental challenges than genetic change but that genetic change can follow. We expect that this is precisely what occurred with the evolution of Homo. Different species (1470 group, 1813 group, and H. erectus) used different strategies. In the face of a dynamic and fluctuating environment, we suggest that the unique combination of larger brain size, the potential for diverse body sizes, inferred dietary flexibility, and cooperation enabled H. erectus to attain a level of niche construction and adaptive versatility that allowed this species to outpace its congeners.” Anton, Susan, R. Potts & L. Aiello. 2014. “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective.” Science. Vol. 345. Issue 6192. P. 1236828-9.


“... a brain consistently > 700 cm3, which occurred after ~1.8 Ma, connotes altricial neonates and heightened cooperation among H. erectus adults. Based on first molar dental histology and eruption, the tempo of life history was slower in H. erectus than in Austalopithecus yet was similar to that of extant apes. Far more prolonged phasing of growth typical of H. sapiens, with implications for intensive social cooperation, is evident in the middle Pleistocene, which is also when definitive evidence of hearths and shelters occurs in the archaeological record, implying strong centrally located social cooperation.” Anton, Susan, R. Potts & L. Aiello. 2014. “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective.” Science. Vol. 345. Issue 6192. P. 1236828-10.


“Developmental plasticity and ecological versatility were at a premium in the habitats in which early Homo evolved. Although plasticity across biological levels (molecular to behavioral) was favored in dynamic habitats, both extrinsic (e.g., environmental) factors as well as biological and social feedback mechanisms were complexly entwined in the evolution of Homo and can no longer stand as alternative explanatory hypotheses.” Anton, Susan, R. Potts & L. Aiello. 2014. “Evolution of early Homo: An integrated biological perspective.” Science. Vol. 345. Issue 6192. P. 1236828-10.


“Outlines of a political microeconomics have been presented elsewhere. Some elements can be indicated here:

“1. Neoclassical Economic Man assumptions are replaced with Political Economic Person (PEP) assumptions. An individual is understood as an actor guided by her ideological orientation....

“4. Neoclassical ideas of focusing on ‘optimal’ solutions to problems are downplayed in relation to a view of decision-making as a ‘matching’ process between an actor’s ideological orientation and expected impacts of each alternative considered....

“6. Neoclassical CBA [cost benefit analysis] is replaced by Positional Analysis (PA). PA is an approach to decision-making at various levels from the individual, through organizations to local, regional, national and global societies or communities....

“Individuals are understood in socio-psychological and cultural terms rather than in neoclassical mechanistic terms. Not only ideological orientation but also concepts such as role, motive, relationship, trust, identity, dissonance, conflict and power are relevant. Individuals adapt to a context that is social, cultural, institutional, and physical and that changes over time. The ambition is not so much to study regularities in the behavior of individuals over time but rather to make the behavior and arguments of specific actors in specific situations visible. Ethical issues of fairness, exploitation, responsibility, and accountability are part of this.” Soederbaum, Peter. 2015. “Varieties of ecological economics: Do we need a more open and radical version of ecological economics?” Ecological Economics. 119: 420-423. Pp. 421-2.


“~13,800 BP Megafaunal Extinctions and Vegetation Change.
“11,700 BP Pleistocene-Holocene Boundary.
“11,000-9,000 BP Human Niche Construction and Domestication.
“8000-5000 BP Agriculture, Forest Clearance, and Atmospheric Change
“5000-4000 BP Agriculture, Pastoralism, and Atmospheric Change
“2000 BP Anthropogenic Soils.
“AD 1500 Columbian Exchange
“AD 1750-1800 Industrial Revolution.
“AD 1950 Radionuclides.
“A sampling of some of the proposed temporal boundaries for the Holocene-Anthropcene boundary.” Braje, Todd. 2015. “Earth Systems, Human Agency, and the Anthropocene: Planet Earth in the Human Age.” J. Archaeol Res. 23:369-396. P. 370.


“While still in its infancy, judged by the writings and remarks of environmental scientist Ellis, the end-goal of a good Anthropocene is the geo-engineering of the planet and a celebration of the adaptability of humans:...” Braje, Todd. 2015. “Earth Systems, Human Agency, and the Anthropocene: Planet Earth in the Human Age.” J. Archaeol Res. 23:369-396. P. 380. Reference: Ellis, Erle. 2011. “Anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: A. 369: 1010-35.


“The transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene at the Industrial Revolution or some other recent date may reinforce the faulty notion that people of the past lived in harmony with nature or, perhaps even more damaging, that human action has changed the world so dramatically that the past no longer matters. An Anthropocene conceived as created by fundamentally different anthropogenic processes than those operating in the past severs the important relationship between the past, present, and future and focuses our attention in one direction, toward an even more anthropogenic future.” Braje, Todd. 2015. “Earth Systems, Human Agency, and the Anthropocene: Planet Earth in the Human Age.” J. Archaeol Res. 23:369-396. P. 385.


“The current research indicates that the new geological era of the Anthropocene calls for a new ontology to guide the organisation of human activities. The ontology proposed here takes a realist and ecocentric turn to avoid the pitfalls of the antirealist and anthropocentric approaches. Drawing from object-oriented and ecological philosophies, the study proposes three essential qualities common to all objects, namely autonomy, intrinsicality, and uniqueness....

“The outline labelled object-oriented ecosophy facilitates explaining and assigning different agencies depending on the degree of autonomy, the release of objects from an instrumental ethical rationale, and the reasoning behind exercising caution around objects and encouraging their conservation. When the suggested qualities are assumed in organising activities, objects become capable of unfolding in their own ways (autonomy), acquire rights to exist on their own (intrinsicality), and are respected for what they are (uniqueness).” Heikkurinen, Pasi, J. Rinkinen, T. Jaervensivu, K. Wilen & T. Ruuska. 2016. “Organising in the Anthropocene: an ontological outline for ecocentric theorising.” Journal of Cleaner Production. 113: 705-714. P. 712.


“Homo sapiens has physically transformed the surface of planet Earth. For the past 6000 years, agricultural settlements have developed into urban cores. During the past 500 years, these regional settlements became tightly connected because of development of a diverse infrastructure transporting persons, materials, and information. Urbanization formed a global network of urban systems, including colonized terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. This network is called the anthroposphere. The notion metabolism is used to comprehend all physical flows and stocks of matter and energy within the anthroposphere.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 1.


“Mankind’s sphere of life, a complex technical system of energy, material, and information flows, is called the anthroposphere. It is part of planet Earth’s biosphere. We think of the anthroposphere as a living system that evolves with its own history. In analogy to the physiologic processes in plants, animals, and ecosystems, the metabolism of the anthroposphere includes the uptake, transport, and storage of all substances, the total chemical transformations within the sphere, and the quantity and quality of all refuse.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 1.


“From a metabolic point of view, the contemporary idiosyncrasies of urban culture are high population density, high stocks and exchange rates of information and goods, and a vital dependency on sources and sinks for energy and matter far beyond the settlement borders.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 2.


“Cities as a whole are the most complex anthropogenic systems....

“In 1950, only about 14% of the world’s population lived in an urban environment; at the beginning of the twenty-first century, almost half of the people, 3 billion, live in cities. The current picture in population growth worldwide shows a higher rate in urban areas (1.8% annual rate) than in rural areas (0.1%), mainly because of migration from rural to urban environments.... Today, it appears that the urbanization of planet Earth is an irreversible process.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 3.


“The twentieth century urbanization led to a ‘dilution’ of urban settlement from a dense center into a network, with a high variety of nodes and connections. The distinct separation of rural and urban segments within a cultural landscape disappeared. The once concentric and regional hinterland diffused into a global set of hinterlands.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 5.


“Confucius, ... reflected the characteristics of a feudal system of his time as follows:

“‘A state needs three things: sufficient food, sufficient military equipment, and the confidence of the people in their government.’ When he was asked which one he would eliminate first, he answered: ‘Military equipment.’ And next? ‘Food, because everyone must die, and life is not worth much unless people have confidence in their government.’” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 8.


“For many historians, this publication [of The Limits to Growth in 1972] was just a revisit of the Malthusian hypothesis stated 170 years earlier.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 13.


“The so-called anthropogenic metabolism of a person is at least 10 times larger than the physiologic metabolism and comprises all goods needed to reside, to work, to communicate, to eat, to breathe, to clean, and so forth. It is interesting to note that information about the physiologic metabolism of men is exceptionally abundant, whereas information about the also highly important anthropogenic metabolism is still rather scarce.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 28.
 

“During the cultural evolution, different metabolic systems developed, although the physiologic metabolism of the human individual did not change significantly.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 29.



“The material turnover of a modern citizen is about one order of magnitude larger than that in an ancient city of the same size; in contrast to old cities, material flows consist mainly of water and air for the human activities TO CLEAN, TO RESIDE, and TO TRANSPORT. With a growing fraction of global population living in cities, and due to high population densities and high per capita spending power, cities have become the hot spots of material flow and stock density.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 31.


“Since about 2009, about 1 million new substances are identified each year, and about 30,000 chemical substances are marketed in amounts above 1 Mg, with about 10,000 in amounts over 10 Mg. In parallel to the growth of flows and stocks of goods, the composition of goods has become more complex, too.” Baccini, Peter & P. Brunner. 2012. Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design – second edition. MIT Press. P. 54.


“The word ‘to steal’ is another key to interpreting human nature. As another element in the story, ‘stealing’ further suggests that humans do not have their own nature but instead have a ‘stolen’ nature by way of Prometheus. So while the nature of all other animals rests in their own bodies – for example, the nature of tigers or the nature of moles is to be found in their anatomies and physiologies – the nature of humans exists outside their bodies. Human nature is outside the body in an ability to use the arts and fire.” Li, Bocong. 2015. “Human nature, the means-ends relationship, and alienation: Themes for potential East-West collaboration.” Technology in Society. 43:60-64. P. 61.


“In contrast with the devices of modern technology such as automatic HVAC systems and digital watches Borgmann contrasts focal things and their associated practices such as wood burning stoves and time pieces that call forth regular manual physical engagement. In technological devices ends become increasingly independent of and separate from means.

“In this sense, as Borgmann notes, modern technology is a little like magic. As Borgmann says, ‘Only in magic are ends literally independent of means. The inevitable explicit concern with the machinery takes place in labor’. Through traditional labor a worker comes to recognize how means implicate ends: how work on the farm yields the food we eat or how the artisan’s work produces goods such as clothes and shelter.” Li, Bocong. 2015. “Human nature, the means-ends relationship, and alienation: Themes for potential East-West collaboration.” Technology in Society. 43:60-64. P. 62. Reference: Borgmann, Albert. 1984. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: a Philosophical Inquiry. University of Chicago Press.


“Historically not only has the means-ends relationship been central to the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, but it has occasioned discussion of the concept of alienation, in which there is some form of break between means and ends....

“As part of this reflection, I would suggest that alienation comes in at least three forms: (1) A means-ends imbalance in which the ends break away from the means to an extreme degree [‘magic alienation’]; (2) a means-ends imbalance in which the means overwhelm and ultimately betray the ends; and (3) symbol alienation, a relatively new form of alienation....

“The second type of imbalanced means-ends relationship is in some sense opposed to the first. In this case, the means overwhelm the ends rather than serve them. Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936) so vividly depicts this type of alienation in satirical style that we could call it a ‘modern times alienation’.” Li, Bocong. 2015. “Human nature, the means-ends relationship, and alienation: Themes for potential East-West collaboration.” Technology in Society. 43:60-64. P. 63.


“That means, considering the transformation of energy in the economic process, one would look at the output of energy transformation, which is useful work, and not at the input which is exergy. Then, improvements of the thermodynamic efficiency of transforming exergy into useful work can be identified as separate determinants of the energy-growth link. As a result, Ayres and Warr have shown that growth of useful work closely tracks GDP growth, combined with changes in the thermodynamic efficiency.” Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. 2015. “Energy, growth, and evolution: Towards a naturalistic ontology of economics.” Ecological Economics. 119:432-442. P. 435. Reference: Ayres, Robert & B. Warr. 2009. The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity. Edward Elgar.


“It is important to recognize that in an interconnected world with ever growing international trade flows, analyzing the relationship between energy and growth is misleading as long as it is only done for single countries.” Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. 2015. “Energy, growth, and evolution: Towards a naturalistic ontology of economics.” Ecological Economics. 119:432-442. P. 435.


“We need to distinguish between the structural evolution of living systems that in turn requires energetic investments, and the resulting changes of the power flows through these structures.” Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. 2015. “Energy, growth, and evolution: Towards a naturalistic ontology of economics.” Ecological Economics. 119:432-442. P. 435.


“... we cannot expect evolution to obey simple one-dimensional maximal principles because of the functional complexity of power flows resulting from selective pressures on both efficiency and maximum performance.

“We can relate Vermeij’s theory to one of the founding contributions to biophysics, Lotka’s Maximum Power Principle (MPP).” Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. 2015. “Energy, growth, and evolution: Towards a naturalistic ontology of economics.” Ecological Economics. 119:432-442. P. 435. References: Vermeij, Geerat. 2004. Nature: An Economic History. Princeton UP. Lotka, Alfred. 1922. “Contribution to the energetics of evolution.” PNAS. 8:151-4.


“In this framework, the idea plays the pivotal role that living systems evolve into the direction of maximizing power throughputs and thereby the production of entropy in the context of the larger system of which they are a part.” Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. 2015. “Energy, growth, and evolution: Towards a naturalistic ontology of economics.” Ecological Economics. 119:432-442. P. 439.


“This idea [MEP or maximum entropy production] has been recently suggested by Haff who applies the Rayleigh-Benard cell model in order to interpret economic processes from the MEP angle. In this model, there is a heat flow between two plates with different temperatures, and an interaction between advection across most of the distance between the plates and diffusion via the boundary layers of the plates. Whether the heat flow switches from conduction to convection depends on the Rayleigh number which is a measure and control parameter describing different physical conditions of the fluid. Haff proposes thinking of the economic system in a similar way as connecting a ‘hot’ spot, that is, a potential source of energy, with a ‘cold’ spot, the demand side. Markets and prices correspond to the role of the Rayleigh number in determining the flow of energy. Then, we can approach this process in terms of local energy flows. This is exactly what we observed about the comparison between China and Britain. Market conditions, technology and availability of coal played together in triggering a rapid ‘convection’ of energy flows, that is a collective and concerted transition to a new regime with a much enhanced rate of dissipation of energy and hence entropy production. This is a sudden release of a ‘hang up’ in entropy production in the Earth System and thus plays together with the general mechanisms of entropy production.” Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. 2015. “Energy, growth, and evolution: Towards a naturalistic ontology of economics.” Ecological Economics. 119:432-442. P. 439. Reference: Haff, Peter. 2014. “Maximum entropy production by technology.” Dewar, Roderick, C. Lineweaver, R. Niven, K. Regenauer-Lieb (Eds). Beyond the Second Law, Entropy Production in Non-equilibrium Systems. Springer. Pp. 397-414.


“In practice, however, it is difficult to place a strict dividing line between ‘social’ and ‘nonsocial’ cognition, for at least two reasons. First, among group-living animals, many interactions with the nonsocial environment have a social component.... Second, ... the ability to remember nonsocial stimuli (e.g. location of cached food) or social stimuli (e.g. a dominance hierarchy) may be governed by many of the same underlying general mechanisms, making it difficult to distinguish whether skills in modern species have arisen through social or nonsocial pressures. Consistent with this view, measures of cognitive skill in primates are correlated across multiple domains (e.g. behavioural innovation, social learning, tool use and extractive foraging), suggesting that ‘social, technical and ecological abilities have coevolved’.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 191. Subquote: Reader, S., Y. Hager & K. Laland. 2011. “The evolution of primate general and cultural intelligence.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 366: 1017-1027. P. 1017.


“Behaviour that suggests individual recognition is well documented in many insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, and occurs in the visual, olfactory and auditory modalities.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 193.


“Many insects distinguish between individuals from different colonies but not among individuals within a colony, presumably because a more detailed level of recognition would require an enormous increase in memory without bringing additional benefits. Mechanisms of recognition can therefore be ranked in order of increasing complexity according to whether they involve discrimination among broad classes, among individuals within these classes, or simultaneous classification at multiple levels.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 193.


“... knowing about other individuals’ relationships is akin to having a Euclidean map of your surroundings, whereas knowing only about your own relationship is more like dead reckoning.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 194.


“If a female Japanese quail, Coturnix japonica, observes a particular male mating with another female, this experience increases her subsequent willingness to mate both with that male and with other males that share his physical features. By contrast, if a male quail has observed a particular female mating with another male, this experience decreases his subsequent willingness to mate with that female. In socially monogamous chickadees, females that hear their mate apparently lose an aggressive encounter against a neighbouring male engage in significantly more extrapair matings than do females that hear their mate apparently win an encounter.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 194.


“Individual recognition and the recognition of others’ relationships appear to be widespread among animals. But animal societies are multidimensional: at any one time an individual can be classified according to its identity, dominance rank, close associates, reproductive state, or even the rank, associations and reproductive state of its current mating partner.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 194.


“To summarize, some form of recognition of other animals’ relationships has not yet been documented in insects but appears to be widespread among fish, birds, hyaenas and nonhuman primates. Many animals are skilled observers of other animals’ behaviour. They appear to recognize who is dominant to whom, and who mates, grooms or interacts with whom in a particular way. However, while the classification of other animals’ interactions along a single dimension is widespread, studies of baboons and macaques provide the only evidence to date that animals recognize other individuals’ relations along two or more dimensions simultaneously.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 195.


“For example, Crockford et al. found that chimpanzees that had recently engaged in a grooming bout with a relative or a closely bonded nonrelative subsequently experienced elevated levels of urinary oxytocin levels. No such increases were detected, however, after the same individuals had engaged in a grooming bout with a group member with whom they did not share a close bond. In other words, chimpanzees did not find the behavioural act of grooming per se to be emotionally rewarding; rather, it was the underlying relationship that made the difference. Chimpanzees showed even greater increases in levels of urinary oxytocin after food sharing,....” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 199. Reference: Crockford, C., R. Wittig, K. Langergraber, T. Ziegler, K. Zuberbuhler & T. Deschner. 2013. “Urinary oxytocin and social bonding in related and unrelated wild chimpanzees.” Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 280:1471-5.


“Experiments conducted on dogs, pigs, and cows suggest that animals find problem solving to be emotionally rewarding, and that they derive more satisfaction from completing a task to obtain a reward than from simply obtaining the reward without effort.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 199.


“As noted earlier, male chimpanzees appear to monitor both the direct and the indirect connections of other males, since in one study the most successful males were those who formed alliances with those individuals who did not form alliances with others.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2015. “Social cognition.” Animal Behaviour. 103: 191-202. P. 199.


“Beggars [of meat among chimpanzees] get very close to the possessor and stare at its face or at the prey. The cadger might reach forward and touch the possessor’s chin, mouth, or meat. Sometimes the beggar is rewarded with a choice morsel, a bit of skin or bone, or the masticated wadge of leaves that the possessor has chewed with bits of meat. Alternatively, the possessor may turn its back, move away, or express irritation by vocalizing, pushing, or striking at the beggar. At Gombe camp, 29 percent of solicitations were rewarded. Teleki never saw a vigorous fight over meat....

“Extensive sharing of prey inspired suggestions that chimpanzee hunting is motivated by undefined social factors in addition to having some unmeasured nutritional importance.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. Pp. 311-2. Reference: Teleki, G. 1973. The Predatory Behavior of Wild Chimpanzees. Bucknell UP.


“In contrast, Gilby’s observations on the alpha male in the Gombe Kasakela community supported Wrangham’s sharing under pressure hypothesis that it is more energetically efficient to comply with a persistent beggar than to defend a carcass. Indeed, the alpha male shared in 100 percent of bouts with persistent beggars versus 38 percent with low-intensity beggars.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. P. 314. References: Gilby, I. 2001. “Why do wild male chimpanzees share meat with females? One alternative in the ‘meat for sex’ hypothesis.” From: The Apes: Challenges for the 21st Century, Conference Proceedings, May 10-12, 2000. Pp. 90-93. Brookfield IL, Brookfield Zoo. Wrangham, R.W. 1997. [unclear reference]


“Between 1977 and 1990, Mahale researchers documented the intragroup killing of seven 1- to 10-month-old male infants of immigrant females that had been part of M group for zero to five years. Six of the infants were cannibalized, and on six occasions the captors or the first-observed possessors were alpha or beta males in M group. The alpha male, Ntologi, killed >4 of the infants, and all the infants died while being eaten. In all cases, up to fourteen group members obtained bits of the prey via sharing or gleaning scraps. No mother ate bits of her own infant, and none of the mothers left the group. The mothers had mated more with immature and subadult males than with higher-ranking males, and none was known to have engaged in restrictive matings with high-ranking males.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. P. 319.


“Unlike chimpanzees and humans, bonobos and orangutans seldom engage in cannibalism.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. P. 319.


“In a phylogenetic analysis of food sharing in sixty-eight nonhuman primate species, including bonobos, chimpanzees, mountain gorillas, Western gorillas, Sumatran and Bornean orangutans, siamang, and white-handed and buff-cheeked gibbons, Jaeggi and Van Schaik concluded the following:

• “Sharing with offspring is predicted by the relative difficulty of processing dietary items, as measured by the degree of extractive foraging; not by overall dietary quality.
• “Interadult food sharing only evolved in species that already shared with offspring, regardless of diet.
• “Intersexual sharing coevolved with the opportunity for female mate choice.
• “Homosexual sharing coevolved with coalition formation.

“Jaeggi and Van Schaik further concluded that their analysis supports the hypothesis that among adults food sharing is traded for mating and coalition support.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. P. 324-5. Reference: Jaeggi, A. V. & C. P. Van Schaik. 2011. “The evolution of food sharing in primates.” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. 65:2125-40.


“Gombe chimpanzees also used leaves as drinking sops and toilet wipes.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. P. 336.


“Although a western chimpanzee made and persistently employed a series of four wooden jabbing sticks and probes to reach a store of stingless bee honey in the Gambia, the central chimpanzees of the Congo Basin and Loango National Park, Gabon, have exhibited the greatest diversity of tool use, including up to five tools deployed sequentially to obtain honey.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. Pp. 337-8.


“The chimpanzees collect the nuts from the trees or the ground, then carry handfuls and mouthfuls to anvils where they carefully position them one by one and crack them open with a hammer. Terrestrially, they commonly employ hammers that have been left near an anvil.

“Alternatively, to harvest nuts arboreally, a chimpanzee carries a hammer up a tree, holds onto it while gathering nuts, and cracks them one by one on a horizontal bough. Although some stone hammers are quite heavy (range: 0.9–41.7 kg), Tai chimpanzees sometimes carry them between nutting sites. Clearly, arboreal nutting requires considerable coordination and some forethought.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. P. 339.


“Further, males crack coula nuts terrestrially when the nuts are dry and easier to open, whereas the females excel at cracking the fresh, tougher nuts.

“Males probably fail to master panda nut cracking and arboreal coula nutting because they
• “monitor the activities of other group members,
• “can see farther on the ground than in trees,
• “tend to move away from nutting sites in response to others rather than continuing to feed on nuts, and
• “would have to concentrate on keeping their balance and their grasp on nuts and hammer to crack coula nuts in a tree.

“This makes sense given that chimpanzee intermale relationships are complex and they must also be attuned to predators and other chimpanzee groups that might attack them or trespass their range.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. Pp. 340-1.


“Rumbaugh and Washburn concluded that because they exhibit emergent behaviors like humans, apes and other animals think. They defined emergent behaviors as ‘abilities to acquire concepts, to learn insightfully, to learn complex skills and behaviors via observation, to make and use tools, to learn the basic dimensions of language, and in many other ways to manifest advanced intelligence:...

“Emergent behaviors have no clear history of past reinforcement; instead they appear unexpectedly and are consistent with a logical or adaptive function appropriate to both new and familiar situations. They are not subject to stimulus control, and their acquisition can rarely be charted. They reflect the organism’s experience with classes of experiences instead of constrained training....

“Contrary to traditional behaviorists who described behaviors as responses to positive, negative, or absence of reinforcing stimuli, Rumbaugh et al. cogently argued, following Hebb, that the brains of species ‘are uniquely designed to perceive and to relate stimulus events that are contiguous, salient and relevant to adaptation.” Tuttle, Russell. 2014. Apes and Human Evolution. Harvard UP. Pp. 390-1. References: Rumbaugh, D.M. & D.A. Washburn. 2003. Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings. Yale UP. Rumbaugh, D.M., J.E. King, M.J. Beran, D.A. Washburn & K.L. Gould. 2007. “A salience theory of language and behavior: with perspectives on neurobiology and cognition.” International Journal of Primatology. 28:973-996. P. 973. Hebb, D.O. 1949. The Organization of Behavior, a Neuropsychological Theory. Wiley.

“In Searle’s view, and as we will see in more detail later, what is needed is a new attitude of ‘we-intention’. In Gilbert’s view, and as we will see in more detail later, what is needed is a new relation of ‘joint commitment’ between the participants, a relation that necessitates distinctive mutual obligations... My approach, in contrast, begins by distinguishing, in the individual case, between simple goal-directed agency and planning agency. Once individual planning agency is on board, the step to modest sociality need not involve a fundamental discontinuity....” Bratman, Michael. 2014. Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together. Oxford UP. P. 9.


“The middle path I seek is an augmented individualism. It is an individualism that builds on a rich story of our individual planning agency, one that goes beyond the desire-belief model in philosophy....” Bratman, Michael. 2014. Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together. Oxford UP. P. 11.


“As we might say, the shared-ness or joint-ness of shared intention consists of relevant contents of the plan states of each and relevant interconnections and interdependencies between the planning psychologies of each, all in relevant contexts. This augmented individualism depends then on a rich model of the individual agent as a planning agent whose agency is temporally extended.” Bratman, Michael. 2014. Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together. Oxford UP. Pp. 11-12.


“In such modest sociality it is because there is such a shared intention that there is relevant, coordinated joint activity, related coordinated planning, and (in many cases) related bargaining.” Bratman, Michael. 2014. Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together. Oxford UP. P. 153.


“The basic thesis agrees with both Gilbert and Searle that the kind of sociality we are after should be distinguished from mere strategic interaction and equilibrium in a context of common knowledge....

“The basic thesis agrees with Gilbert that modest sociality essentially involves interpersonal interconnections that go beyond common knowledge. And this emphasis on relevant interpersonal interconnections goes beyond Searle’s appeal to special attitudes of each of the individuals. In contrast with Gilbert, however, the basic thesis tries to understand these interconnections primarily in terms of resources made available by the planning theory of individual agency, and without an essential appeal to relations of mutual obligation, or even to beliefs about such obligations....

“The basic thesis can nevertheless recognize the significance to many cases of modest sociality of familiar forms of mutual obligation.” Bratman, Michael. 2014. Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together. Oxford UP. Pp. 154-5.


“These shared intention-like attitudes will frequently be partial in the sense that they so far leave matters open that will need to be resolved as time goes by. And they will frequently be partial in the further sense that there is only partial agreement among the participants in their reasons for participating in the sharing. This is the pervasiveness of partiality in our sociality.” Bratman, Michael. 2014. Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together. Oxford UP. P. 156.


“Rather than seeing cultural evolution as ‘taking off’ from a terminal point of biological evolution, we should rather see evolutionary biological processes as having been ‘captured’ by an emergent cultural process, with ontogenetic processes as a crucial catalyst and product of the co-evolution of culture and biology’... ‘the evolution of infancy was the biological mechanism through which the potential for intergenerational cultural transmission created by tool use was optimized.” Sinha, Chris. 1988. Language and representation: a socio-naturalistic approach to human development. Harvester-Wheatsheaf. P. 104, 108. Quoted in: Sinha, Chris. 2015. “Ontogenesis, semiosis and the epigenetic dynamics of biocultural niche construction.” Cognitive Development. 36:202-209. P. 202.


“As Boivin has pointed out ‘Tools, technologies, and other aspects of the material world of humans and their predecessors have largely been seen as the outcome of evolutionary developments, and little attempt has been made to investigate their potential role as selection forces during the course of human evolution.’ The same can be said of the biocultural niche of language, which is not separate from the other material and symbolic components or niche-structures that make up the human biocultural complex.” Sinha, Chris. 2015. “Ontogenesis, semiosis and the epigenetic dynamics of biocultural niche construction.” Cognitive Development. 36:202-209. P. 206. Subquote from Boivin, N. 2008. Material cultures, material minds: the role of things in human thought, society and evolution. Cambridge UP. P. 190.


“The self-constructed human biocultural complex both favored the emergence and elaboration of language, as proposed by Odling-Smee and Laland; and, because language is co-constitutive of the complex, was fundamentally transformed into a symbolic niche or semiosphere continuous with what we might call the material-artefactual technosphere.” Sinha, Chris. 2015. “Ontogenesis, semiosis and the epigenetic dynamics of biocultural niche construction.” Cognitive Development. 36:202-209. P. 206. Reference: Odling-Smee, J. & K. Laland. 2009. “Cultural niche-construction: evolution’s cradle of language.” From: Botha, Rudolf & C. Knight (Eds). The Prehistory of Language. Pp. 99-121. Oxford UP.


“Within HBE (human behavioral ecology), culture is simply the outcome of dynamic interactions between socially shared intent, behavior, and the environment, not a unit of study.” Codding, Brian & D. Bird. 2015. “Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science.” 56:9-20. Journal of Archaeological Science. P. 11.


“If resources within modified patches become dense and predic[t]able, this may also lead to increasing territoriality.” Codding, Brian & D. Bird. 2015. “Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science.” 56:9-20. Journal of Archaeological Science. P. 14.


“By shifting to a delayed return economy, individuals will experience greater levels of risk that their efforts may not be rewarded. Due to an uncertain future potentially beset by crop failure, needy relatives and raiding parties, the benefits of low-level production need to be significantly higher than wild foods, which was not likely the case with early domesticates. Tucker shows how this problem may be overcome by reducing future uncertainty, which could be accomplished by external factors (i.e. increased climatic stability) or internal factors (i.e., securing stored food). While both were necessary for the adoption of agriculture, explaining the latter is of the utmost importance to explain full time food producers.” Codding, Brian & D. Bird. 2015. “Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science.” 56:9-20. Journal of Archaeological Science. P. 15. Reference: Tucker, B.T. 2006. “A future discounting explanation for the persistence of a mixed foraging-horticulture strategy among the Mikea of Madagascar.” From: Kennett, D.J. & B. Winterhalder (Eds.) Pp. 22-40. Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture. University of California Press.


“... the transition to a delayed return food production system may have co-evolved with incremental shifts from public to private goods. Even limited resource privatization–which may be incentivized by regular environmental modification–would increase the proportion of acquired foods that producers are able to keep....

“In such transitional contexts, individuals may find it more profitable to take lower return resources than would be predicted by the prey choice model if those resources can be kept private.” Codding, Brian & D. Bird. 2015. “Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science.” 56:9-20. Journal of Archaeological Science. P. 15.


“In the non-human world, this [positive density dependence when a habitat stays suitable even with increasing population] is generally thought to be the result of grouping effects like shared vigilance or access to mates. In the human world, this could also be due to a variety of other factors from habitat modification to economies of scale. In either case, this has the effect of delaying the point at which individuals would move to the next habitat.” Codding, Brian & D. Bird. 2015. “Behavioral ecology and the future of archaeological science.” 56:9-20. Journal of Archaeological Science. P. 15.


“An alternative view, now sometimes called the embodied, embedded, enactive, extended (4E) cognition approach, is united by its opposition to traditional cognitivism and methodological individualism. Despite the differences between the separate views they all seem to agree on the necessity to place active agency at the center of cognition and the importance of cognition’s scaffolding through developmental, ecological, and cultural niche construction.” Stotz, Karola. 2014. “Extended evolutionary psychology: the importance of transgenerational developmental plasticity.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Article 908. P. 1.


“‘Experience is the contribution to development of the effects of stimulation from all available sources (external and internal), including their functional trace effects surviving from earlier development’. Within this wide range of processes learning is only a relatively small part’. To take this really on board one needs to acknowledge that physiological regulation and the regulation of behavior cannot be sharply separated, since their underlying mechanisms do not necessarily belong to distinctly different classes. This is especially so in early development. Reintroducing the concept of experience is not another way of saying that all behavior is learned, but a vehicle to bring home the inadequacy of the distinction between innate and acquired. It implicitly questions why ‘instinct’ and ‘learning’ should be the only two choices available to us for understanding behavioral development.” Stotz, Karola. 2014. “Extended evolutionary psychology: the importance of transgenerational developmental plasticity.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Article 908. P. 5. Subquote: Schneirla, Theodore. As quoted by Lehrman, D.S. 1970. “Semantic & conceptual issues in the nature-nurture problem.” Pp. 17-52. From: Lehrman, D.S. (Ed.) Development & Evolution of Behaviour. W.H. Freeman.


“Amongst the oldest of the research agendas investigating processes of transgenerational transmission of nongenetic resources is work on ‘parental effects....’

“The mechanisms that can create a parental effect include: parental gene products (mRNAs, ncRNAs, proteins); cytoplasmic inheritance (mitochondria, plastids, membranes, signaling factors, chemical gradients, intra-cellular symbionts; often investigated separately as maternal inheritance); oviposition (the placement of eggs in insects, fish, and reptiles can effect food availability and quality, temperature and light conditions, and protection against predators and other adverse conditions, and hence has important consequences for the fitness of the offspring); gut organisms (which are often necessary for the normal development of intestines and the immune system, and daily metabolism); sex determination (via maternal influence on temperature exposure in reptiles, hormonal influence on gamete selection in birds); nutritional provisioning (prenatally through seeds, eggs, and placenta, postnatal feeding particularly in mammals and birds, that not only provides sustenance for the offspring but influences later food preferences, feeding behavior, and metabolism); parental care and rearing practices (warmth, protection, and emotional attachment, e.g., differential licking in rats, teaching and learning); social status (in hierarchically organized mammals, such as primates, offspring often inherit the social status of the mother), among other things.” Stotz, Karola. 2014. “Extended evolutionary psychology: the importance of transgenerational developmental plasticity.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Article 908. P. 7.


“I suggest that the distinctive feature of parental effects is that it is a phenomenological concept. So parental effects should not be defined by any specific mechanism that brings them about. Second, parental effects should not be defined as adaptations, since their evolutionary significance does not depend on this– the correlations have the same impact on the dynamics of evolution whether or not they are adaptations.” Stotz, Karola. 2014. “Extended evolutionary psychology: the importance of transgenerational developmental plasticity.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Article 908. P. 8.


“West and King define the ontogenetic niche as a set of ecological and social circumstances inherited by organisms.” Stotz, Karola. 2014. “Extended evolutionary psychology: the importance of transgenerational developmental plasticity.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Article 908. P. 8. Reference: West, M.J. & A.P. King. 1987. “Settling nature and nurture into an ontogenetic niche.” Dev. Psychobiol. 20:549-562. P. 550.


“As argued here, an extended evolutionary theory is reciprocally related to the view of a cognitive system as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended, promoted recently by many proponents in cognitive science.” Stotz, Karola. 2014. “Extended evolutionary psychology: the importance of transgenerational developmental plasticity.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 5. Article 908. P. 10.


“Socially tolerant, cohesive social systems are thought to be particularly favourable for socially biased learning.” Fragaszy, D.M., D. Biro, Y. Eshchar, T. Humle, P. Izar, B. Resende & E. Visalberghi. 2013. “The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid primates learning to use tools.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368: 20120410. P. 1.


“... we propose that enduring artefacts associated with technical activities scaffold individuals’ learning these skills in non-human species, and thus promote the maintenance of technical traditions, much as they do in humans.” Fragaszy, D.M., D. Biro, Y. Eshchar, T. Humle, P. Izar, B. Resende & E. Visalberghi. 2013. “The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid primates learning to use tools.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368: 20120410. P. 2.


“Across the studies with chimpanzees, we see two major parallels. First, youngest individuals re-use tools, and others’ tolerance for young individuals allows them to be near others while they use tools. Infant chimpanzees are nearly universally tolerated and frequently obtain tools or manipulate materials relevant to tool-use activity while others are active at a tool-use site. Older juveniles typically have to wait for tools and tool-use sites to be abandoned before they can go there or retrieve the tools. Second, for tool-use behaviours that include a manufacturing phase, younger individuals are less likely to manufacture a tool and more likely to use one previously used by another.” Fragaszy, D.M., D. Biro, Y. Eshchar, T. Humle, P. Izar, B. Resende & E. Visalberghi. 2013. “The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid primates learning to use tools.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368: 20120410. P. 6.


“Young crows [New Caledonian] follow their parents for several weeks after fledging, and scrounge food from them. They first exclusively use tools previously used by their parents, gradually manufacturing their own after many months. Thus, parents scaffold the young birds’ learning to use tools.” Fragaszy, D.M., D. Biro, Y. Eshchar, T. Humle, P. Izar, B. Resende & E. Visalberghi. 2013. “The fourth dimension of tool use: temporally enduring artefacts aid primates learning to use tools.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368: 20120410. P. 6.


“Here we present four processes, natural pedagogy, activity theory, distributed cognition, and situated learning, in which we focus on how the construction of a learning environment by culturally knowledgeable others affects the acquisition of beliefs and practices by novices, and consider how cultural novices are active participants in this process.” Flynn, Emma, K. Laland, R. Kendal & J. Kendal. 2013. “Developmental niche construction.” Developmental Science. 16:2. Pp. 296-313. P. 300.


“Natural pedagogy suggests that cultural experts construct a cultural niche, facilitating the acquisition of cultural knowledge by the novices by gaining their attention, through processes such as motionese, motherese, calling their name, and use of ostensive cues to highlight relevant aspects of the behaviour.” Flynn, Emma, K. Laland, R. Kendal & J. Kendal. 2013. “Developmental niche construction.” Developmental Science. 16:2. Pp. 296-313. P. 301.


“The field of distributed cognition considers cognition in terms of the change in relational structures, including components that are internal and external to the mind. Hence, the focus is on the interaction of people and artefacts, rather than just assessing individual cognition ‘within the head’.” Flynn, Emma, K. Laland, R. Kendal & J. Kendal. 2013. “Developmental niche construction.” Developmental Science. 16:2. Pp. 296-313. P. 304.


“In this book we define behavior as self-propelled movement producing a functional interaction between an animal and its environment.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 5.


“Animals that can forgo a present benefit can thus enjoy a higher return over the longer term by pursuing a different sequence of behaviors than would be dictated by responding to current conditions at each moment. The adaptive value of behavior can thus be increased by calculating responses over longer time frames–that is by gaining control over their own behavior.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 7.


“We propose that there have been three major evolutionary innovations in behavioral control in the lineage leading to humans.... The first transition produced the invention of the reflex arc in simple unicellular animals, which enabled behavior that had immediate benefits. The second was the invention of the motivational behavior production system in vertebrates. This system allowed animals to pursue goals that helped them meet their needs, integrated over a longer time horizon than simple reflexes. The final major transition produced the executive control of behavior in higher mammals. This brain system allowed such animals to plan a sequence of behaviors over a long period and so reap even greater rewards from their interactions with their environments.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 8.


“We suggest that behavior has been designed by evolutionary processes to put animals into new situations with respect to the world, with three sorts of functional advantage. First, animals could improve the state of their own bodies–for example by consuming foods, avoiding predators and parasites, keeping themselves warm and hydrated, and by engaging in reproduction. Such behavior produces immediate survival and reproduction benefits.

“The second sort of state that animals can get themselves into is one where they have changed their relationship with the world such that they are better able to get evolutionary benefits in the future. They might, for example, invest in a pair-bond so as to be able to bring up offspring more successfully, fight to establish a territory such that they can benefit from its produce, or invest in improving their status so as to get access to resources in future.

“Finally, animals can act to change the state of their own abilities. They can invest in learning about the world and their own influence within it, thus gaining skills and abilities that can eventually also be parlayed into functional benefits. We call these three types of end-state that animals can seek physiological, situational, and aptitudinal.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. Pp. 16-7.


“This analysis suggests, then, that behavior improves any of three kinds of end-states; those that improve the state of the body, the state of the world, or the state of the behavioral control system (i.e., brain). Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 18.


“Two dimensions of emotion appear to independently influence this type of memory encoding arousal (from calm to excited) and valence (positive to negative). Memories are more easily formed about, and at, times during which the animal is aroused; information that has not been associated with physiological excitement is more difficult to recall later....

“Similarly, valence can have an independent effect in enhancing long-term memory: items that are not arousing but that have positive or negative valence can be better remembered than neutral items.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 42.


“The lizard indulging in angry displays and aggressive behavior–which is costly in the short term, but beneficial in the long term–could be said to be motivated by a need to defend its territory–the hoard emotion. The human is motivated to make sacrifices to maintain a pair-bond by the need to invest in pair-bond love.

“An emotion, then, motivates a sequence of behaviors which changes the state of the world or the animal’s relationship to it in a way likely to lead to future fitness benefits.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 49.


“The subjective nature of feelings has led people to identify them with motivation, even though, from our perspective, they are not the instigators, nor the promoters, of action. They typically rise to consciousness, and so become felt, after the fact, rather than representing the impetus to engage in sustained goal-directed behavior of a particular type. This post-facto nature suggests a link to psychological rewards after behavior, rather than spurs to action to meet needs. It is rather the meeting of a need that is commonly followed by a release of rewarding neurochemicals that produce a feeling of well-being. This reinforcement helps an animal to learn how to meet its needs better in future.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 50.


“Social behaviors are thus highly interdependent, where outcomes for each party depend on the particular strategy adopted by the other (i.e., strategies are asymmetric).... Engaging in social emotions can thus be seen as a form of strategic game playing.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 54.


“In the human lineage more emotions were added as social life became more complex, from mother-child relationships in early mammals, to clans in carnivores, to hierarchical groups in primates, to nuclear families, to ultrasocial groups.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 55.


“Social organization Motive Origin Cooperative mechanism
“Mother + dependent Nurture Early mammals Kin selection
child
“Clan (small group of Affiliation Carnivores Direct reciprocity
related individuals) (reciprocal altruism)
“Larger, hierarchically Status Primates Indirect reciprocity
organized groups (reputation/gossip)
“Nuclear family (Parental Attract, Pair- Humans Mutual genetic interest
pair + dependent offspring) bond love (in offspring)
“Ultrasocial groups (very Justice Humans Strong reciprocity (third-
large groups of unrelated party punishment)
individuals)”
Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 55.


“Many mammalian societies are organized by rank but not by status. Rank involves differential access to resources, but is due primarily to domination through physiological size and strength. However, primates can achieve high status through social means.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 57.


“While attract produces investment in self to help gain a pair-bond, love, in humans, drives investment in the special others that are family partners. Species requiring significant parental investment have the problem of parents securing long-term resource investments from each other. Through pair-bond love, individuals seek to build and defend a pair-bond such that offspring with a long period of dependence on parents can be brought up.... Pair-bond love is the motived BPU [behavior production unit] that maintains the social end-state of a long-term mated relationship.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 59.


“... we have argued that new emotions arose over time as life became more complex in the lineage leading to humans. We have postulated only eight basic emotions. Two are ecological and arose in reptiles: hoard and create [niche construct]; six are social and arose in mammals: nuture, affiliate, status, attract, pair-bond love, and justice....

“The earlier ecological emotions, arising in reptiles, are largely territorial and competitive. By contrast, mammalian developments in emotional life are essentially prosocial, designed to help manage family life through cooperative activities of various kinds.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 60.


“Certainly, successful achievement of a social goal results in a psychological reward, which reinforces the tendency to behave in the same way in future. As result, we conceive of consciously perceived feelings of satisfaction, joy, or sadness as a part of the reward feedback system, and not definitive of emotion.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 62.


“Since social emotions serve to manipulate the behavior of others, much of the behavior they motivate has communicative functions.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 62.


“We emphasize that our approach defines emotions not by the feelings that often accompany them buy by their behavioral purposes.... A feeling is the private, phenomenological experience of the perceived consequences of emotional behavior.... For example, a feeling of anger can accompany action associated with the various BPUs of hoard, status, love and justice. For these reasons, feelings are unreliable indicators of motives.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 63.


“As we saw, mammals use internal representations of end-states to guide behavior. However, these are singular and do not connect with one another. The ability to plan takes this ability to represent possible future states a significant step further. The ability to plan behavior depends on being able to hold and manipulate representations in working memory. Higher primates gained greater control over their behavior by evolving the ability to represent representations–that is, to ‘meta-represent.’” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 66.


“The essence of meta-representation is the ability to hold a complex set of representations within one’s own mind and manipulate it while continuing to maintain a consistent body of knowledge about the world. Representations can include chains of possible future events and even simulations of the likely behavior of other animals and their thought processes, which enables an animal to engage in more sophisticated prosocial and competitive strategies.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. Pp. 66-67.


“We propose that the psychological novelty made possible by meta-representation is what we will call ‘planning.’ By planning we mean behavior designed to reach arbitrarily distant or abstract end-states, which we call ‘objectives’. Planning requires the ability to generate representations of future action sequences and their likely outcomes. This internal trial of foreseen behavior allows multiple hypotheses or plans to be generated and tested without physical effort or risk. In some cases this allows the plan to die instead of the animal, with obvious evolutionary benefits.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 68.


“Declarative memory comes in two varieties, both of which are required for planning. First, we postulate, was episodic memory, which came onstream with the ability to mentally represent complex combinations of ‘what,’ ‘where,’ and ‘when’ about an imagined event. Memories of episodes are organized primarily by time, so that an animal can recall events in sequence–a primary requirement for planning effectively.

“Episodic memories are ‘one-shot’ consolidations that tie together many elements in a linked memory. One form is the so-called flashbulb memory of a particularly emotional event such as the death of a president, or a terrorist attack....

“Semantic memories are the second type of declarative memory. Semantic memories store general knowledge about conditions in the world–‘facts’ that can be reported verbally, such as that plastic is artificially made or that blue eyes are rare.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. Pp. 70-71.


“The two types of declarative memory are related to one another. Episodic memories can depend heavily on semantic knowledge about the components of events–for example, if the memory concerns a man being bitten by a dog, then semantic knowledge about dogs (such as that they can be vicious) will be recalled to help ‘fill in’ the episode. It is also argued that over time episodic memories lose their specificity, gradually degrading into semantic ones via a process that involves losing time and place referents for the constituent elements of the memory, which become more generalized knowledge of facts rather than events (for example, all dogs are vicious).” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 71.


“We therefore propose that executive abilities evolved in two stage. In primates, the planning ability was implicit, or below awareness, while sometime on the way to modern humans came the additional capacity to be able to make explicitly represented, conscious plans. The latter stage involved self-consciousness, theory of mind, symbolic reasoning, and language. As a result, there should be two systems for planning: implicit and explicit....

“Implicit cognition is presumably inaccessible to consciousness due to its sub-symbolic, distributed representation in the brain, while explicit knowledge is captured (in computational models, at least) by symbolic, localized representations in which each processing unit is more easily interpretable and has a clearer conceptual meaning.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. Pp.72-3.


“In particular, the ability to pursue long-term objectives required seeing goals as a means rather than an (ultimate) end, thus creating the chains of goals that can characterize plans. This ability derived from meta-representation: goals could themselves be represented within a larger frame. Given the ability to meta-represent, goals could also be treated hierarchically, such that one goal could be elevated among others.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 73.


“Indeed, some argue that consciousness is not involved in behavior production at all because it is a consequence, not a cause of behavior.... From this perspective, action is a consequence of implicit cognition, whereas consciousness is post-facto awareness of a rationale for what has already happened. If true, this makes consciousness superfluous to the production of current behavior, but not to learning and planning future behavior. Consciousness then is a form of learning through which new variations on behavioral strategies are acquired.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 75.


“The homeostatic property cluster (HPC) concept of natural kinds is now widely taken to be the best foundation for biological and social kinds. HPC kinds are ‘homeostatic’ because some force causes deviations in the qualities of members to return toward a central tendency. HPC kinds are the result of the same causal force acting on all of its members. While the Aristotelian, essentialist position assumes that the members of a kind are similar due to a shared essence or intrinsic property, HPC theory allows a broad range of properties and mechanisms jointly to constitute the kind.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 83.


“Behavioral ‘inheritance,’ on the other hand, involves memory and innate brain structures as storehouses of information, which are used by BPUs to produce phenotypes in the form of behavior. In effect, genetic information is ‘read off’ genes to produce proteins; similarly, psychological information is ‘read off’ neurons to produce behavior when neurons are excited into firing, which then stimulate motor commands to the body.... A given BPU thus produces behavior (as its phenotypic product) from memories (as its genotype), much like a ribosome uses DNA to produce a protein.” Aunger, Robert & V. Curtis. 2016. Gaining Control: How Human Behavior Evolved. Oxford UP. P. 97.


“Moreover, we supplement cooking by pre-engineering our food sources. Over the last 10,000 years, selective breeding has improved the food value of domestic stocks (and reduced the toxins found in the tastier but more challenging wild types). Before domestication, hominin foragers improved the nutrition value of food before preparation by targeted foraging. Our distant ancestors selected heavily defended but high value foods.” Sterelny, Kim. 2010. “Minds: extended or scaffolded?” Phenom Cogn Sci. 9:465-481. P. 467.


“Our under-powered jaws, short gut, small teeth and mouth fit our niche because we eat soft, rich and easily digested food. Our digestive system is environmentally scaffolded. But is my soup pot, my food processor and my fine collection of choppers part of my digestive system? As far as I know, no one has defended an extended stomach hypothesis,...” Sterelny, Kim. 2010. “Minds: extended or scaffolded?” Phenom Cogn Sci. 9:465-481. P. 468.


“The precise relationship between extended phenotypes and constructed niches is contested, but at most a subset of niche construction cases fit Dawkins’s model. In particular, neither my culinary examples nor Clark’s cognitive examples fit the nest [of a bird] model. Most extended mind examples are examples of adaptive plasticity: of a novel yet adaptive phenotype [example used is of a personal notebook as a memory aid].... The extended mind, as Clark, Wheeler, Wilson, Sutton and [sic] co-conceive of it, is not a special case of an extended phenotype. It is a special case of adaptive phenotypic plasticity.” Sterelny, Kim. 2010. “Minds: extended or scaffolded?” Phenom Cogn Sci. 9:465-481. P. 469.


“The scaffolded mind hypothesis proposes that human cognitive capacities both depend on and have been transformed by environmental resources. Often these resources have been preserved, built or modified precisely because they enhance cognitive capacity. The extended mind hypothesis proposed that human cognitive systems include external components.” Sterelny, Kim. 2010. “Minds: extended or scaffolded?” Phenom Cogn Sci. 9:465-481. P. 472.


“For the craftsman and the cricketer, their special tools feel like an extension of their body. Likewise, the extended mind framework seems most natural with highly individualised and entrenched cognitive resources.” Sterelny, Kim. 2010. “Minds: extended or scaffolded?” Phenom Cogn Sci. 9:465-481. P. 476.


“Thus, the cognitive competence of generation N+1 individually and collectively depends on cognitive provisioning by generation N. The most critical, mind-and-brain-shaping environmental supports for cognition are these cumulatively built, collectively provided tools for thinking, tools that are provided to many or all of a generation by many or all of the previous generation.” Sterelny, Kim. 2010. “Minds: extended or scaffolded?” Phenom Cogn Sci. 9:465-481. P. 479.


“It is true that the extended mind model seems very plausible when we focus on highly trusted, individualised and entrenched, single-user resources. But that is one corner in a 3D space of environmental scaffolds of cognitive competence and that in turn is just one case of the environmental support of adaptive phenotypes. No clear error is made in reserving a special label for this region of space, though obviously the boundary between external components of the agent’s mind and mere resources for that mind must be arbitrary. But I do not see how privileging that region would be helpful. It obscures the fact that extended mind cases are special cases of a general phenomenon. If I am right about language and the like, the most crucial environmental supports for cognition do not lie within th extended mind region.” Sterelny, Kim. 2010. “Minds: extended or scaffolded?” Phenom Cogn Sci. 9:465-481. P. 480.


“In inquiries concerning agency and action, philosophers have developed theories which link intention, reasons, motivation and (occasionally) emotion. These theories generally apply to individual action only and not all of them can be straightforwardly generalised to joint action.” Butterfill, Stephen & N. Sebanz. 2011. “Editorial: Joint Action: What is Shared?” Rev Phil Psych. 2:137-146. P. 137.


“But there is much disagreement concerning what is sufficient for joint actions to be intentional as joint actions. Some hold that this involves a special attitude while others have explored the idea that it may involve a special kind of subject, a plural agent, a special kind of reasoning, team reasoning, or distinctive patterns of interlocking obligations or commitments. Opposing all such views, Michael Bratman argues that shared intentions can be realised by multiple ordinary individual intentions and other attitudes whose contents interlock in a distinctive way.” Butterfill, Stephen & N. Sebanz. 2011. “Editorial: Joint Action: What is Shared?” Rev Phil Psych. 2:137-146. Pp. 137-8. Reference: Bratman, Michael. 2009. “Modest sociality and the distinctiveness of intention.” Philosophical Studies. 144(1): 149-165.


“Overall, then, joint action raises a tangle of philosophical, developmental and cognitive questions. Many of these questions are naturally understood to be about sharing, about the sharing of intentions, emotions, task representations, and action plans.” Butterfill, Stephen & N. Sebanz. 2011. “Editorial: Joint Action: What is Shared?” Rev Phil Psych. 2:137-146. P. 139.


“Most research in both philosophy and psychology focuses exclusively on cases where, as when Ollie and Stan carry a piano home together, each agent’s participation is necessary for an outcome to occur. That is, researchers tend to assume what Elliot refers to as the ‘mutualistic paradigm’. However, as Elliot observes, humans freely play their parts in activities where no individual agent’s contribution is necessary for success. For instance, committee work routinely goes on without all those involved participating, and in many cases would not lead to greatly different outcomes if one person more or less were to cooperate.... This is referred to as participant rationality. The problem, then , is to understand the evolution and development of participant rationality: how does it come about that humans are able to cooperate not only when their contribution to an activity is necessary to secure an outcome but also when their contribution is not?” Butterfill, Stephen & N. Sebanz. 2011. “Editorial: Joint Action: What is Shared?” Rev Phil Psych. 2:137-146. Pp. 141-2. Reference: Elliot – article in same review issue.


“Infants engage in social interaction with adults from very early on in life but it is not until the end of their second year that children start to be able to intentionally coordinate their actions with peers independently of adult guidance. How does the ability to intentionally coordinate actions with others develop and what kinds of representations sustain joint action in young children? Brownell proposes that joint action abilities emerge as the result of a long learning process in joint engagement with adults, where adults actively structure joint activities by, for example, imposing turn-taking. Thanks to this structuring, infants gradually come to have a command of the structures, timings and communicative practices involved in joint action.... It may be sufficient to assume that two-year olds understand how others’ actions pertain to their own goals. Such a ‘me with you’ representation allows for coordination without requiring that children represent a goal other than their own.” Butterfill, Stephen & N. Sebanz. 2011. “Editorial: Joint Action: What is Shared?” Rev Phil Psych. 2:137-146. P. 142. Reference: Brownell – article in same review issue.


“In line with the ecological approach to perception, Seemann stresses that perception is an active process that relies on the relation between individuals and the world. In joint actions such as passing a football back and forth, a person’s perceptual experience is shaped by their partner’s actions and attention, which are in turn related to their own. This constitutes a sharing of simple feelings, which is given when two or more individuals have perceptual experiences that are ‘constitutively tied not only to their own body state but also to that of the other person’. Rather than two individuals having the same experiences, each person has a role in the individuation of the other’s perceptual experience. According to Seemann, this sharing of simple feelings enables joint engagement. It follows that the basic unit of analysis for joint action is not the individual, but the system of interacting individuals.” Butterfill, Stephen & N. Sebanz. 2011. “Editorial: Joint Action: What is Shared?” Rev Phil Psych. 2:137-146. P. 143. Reference: Seemann – article in same review issue.


“A further strand of Michael’s paper concerns attempts to characterise forms of joint action which do not presuppose abilities to understand notions such as commitment, knowledge and intention. Here Michael argues that shared emotion may serve at least some of the functions that commitment is thought to serve in joint action. In short, emotion matters for understanding both how joint action is possible and what it is.” Butterfill, Stephen & N. Sebanz. 2011. “Editorial: Joint Action: What is Shared?” Rev Phil Psych. 2:137-146. P. 143. Reference: Michael – article in same review issue.


“A dominant way of thinking about joint action has been to begin with notions of shared intention or collective intentionality which, as several researchers have argued, presuppose cognitively and conceptually demanding theory of mind skills. By contrast, empirical research has focused on the contribution of lower-level mechanisms of coordination in explaining joint action, and on cases of joint action where full blown theory of mind skills may be absent. Thus there is a gap between the dominant philosophical approach and the experimental investigation of joint action phenomena.” Butterfill, Stephen & N. Sebanz. 2011. “Editorial: Joint Action: What is Shared?” Rev Phil Psych. 2:137-146. Pp. 144-5.


“This means that, essentially, a double domestication process is under way, with selection for fruit production on the aboveground genetic entities, and for drought and disease resistance by the different taxa used to receive the grafts.” Young, Kenneth. 2016. “Biogeography of the Anthropocene: Domestication.” Progress in Physical Geography. 40:161-174. P. 164.


“... the cultivation of either rice of wheat implied major differences in social organization, with psychological and cultural differences still apparent today in people when crossing from wheat-dominated landscapes in northern China to the paddy rice fields of the south.” Young, Kenneth. 2016. “Biogeography of the Anthropocene: Domestication.” Progress in Physical Geography. 40:161-174. P. 165.


“...Nunn and Qian deduce that about a fourth of urban growth in the Old World between 1700 and 1900 can be traced to the availability of potatoes arriving from the New World to serve as a new food source.” Young, Kenneth. 2016. “Biogeography of the Anthropocene: Domestication.” Progress in Physical Geography. 40:161-174. P. 165. Reference: Nunn, N. & N. Qian. 2011. “The potato’s contribution to population and urbanization: Evidence from a historical experiment.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 126:593-650.


“The complete genomes of 11 useful animal species are now known, illustrating, similar to the case with crops, a two stage process of a) initial domestication followed by b) splitting into breeds. The taming of the wild entity may reduce fear and aggressiveness with regard to people, but also may include selection to increase sociality within the domesticated taxon and hence the feasibility of maintaining it under bounded and crowded conditions;...” Young, Kenneth. 2016. “Biogeography of the Anthropocene: Domestication.” Progress in Physical Geography. 40:161-174. P. 166.


“Let me encapsulate Socrates’ presupposition in the following formula:

“P If intelligence bestows a certain order on something, that thing has that order because its having that order is best.

“What this hypothetical formulation is intended to stress is the conceptual link in Socrates’ thinking between intelligent agency and the explanatory efficacy of goodness. Only intelligent agents bring about certain states of affairs because they are good, though good states of affairs may arise by chance....

“Aristotle, like Plato, will only allow the good outcome of a process to explain it if that good outcome was somehow responsible for the process.” Lennox, James. 2001. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science. Cambridge UP. Pp. 282-3.


“The good rhetorician is, according to the Gorgias, just like other craftsmen. The maker of good laws is a practitioner of statecraft, a craft parallel in many ways to weaving. And, as we’ve seen, the divine intelligence which is responsible for our world having the character it does is also a craftsman.” Lennox, James. 2001. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science. Cambridge UP. P. 287.


“The chief methodological message of the Timaeus is that, of any feature of the physical world we must ask two distinct questions, and seek out two distinct ‘becauses’:(I) What are the physical interactions required to produce the result? (Ii) What is the good for the sake of which these physical processes are cooperating to produce this result?

“... he [the Demiurge] made use of causes of this sort as subservient, while he himself contrived the good in all things that come to be. We must accordingly distinguish two kinds of causal account, the necessary and the divine.”
Lennox, James. 2001. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science. Cambridge UP. P. 293. Subquote is from Plato. Timaeus.


“An ordering and unifying of elements is here [in the craftsman model in the Timaeus] achieved by creating relations of proportionality and commensurability among them and their changes.” Lennox, James. 2001. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science. Cambridge UP. P. 297.


“... I emphasize that theories of embodied cognition–considered from an anthropological perspective–suggest the following prediction. The emotional, proprioceptive, and interoceptive experiences that result from successfully constructing or reconstructing socially salient associations between present and past, general and specific, other and self, known and unknown themselves constitute an embodied, unconscious heroic narrative representation of self successfully constructing a coherent, durable aspect of the world....

“Moreover, I hope to make the case that embodied narratives are complex because they are simultaneously adaptive phenotypes and part of our dynamically evolving niche. In this context, embodied narratives have been gradually transformed in the hominin lineage, from private iconic constructions to socially shared, recursively elaborated and endlessly mashed up forms.” Stutz, Aaron. 2014. “Embodied niche construction in the hominin lineage: semiotic structure and sustained attention in human embodied cognition.” Frontiers in Psychology. Vol. 5. Art. 834. August. P. 4.


“Adaptive interfaces in most vertebrate animal niches constitute–and are constituted by–two non-nested hierarchically structured levels of embodied attention to the immediate surroundings. First, distributed embodied cognitive management of environmental interaction can be monitored and managed through higher-level neural connections in the brain–or even by the relatively distal spinal cord. In either case, environmental interaction effectively proceeds with little centralized higher cognitive interpretation and direction of bodily activity. This allows grasping, gross limb movements, management of torso posture, head movements, chewing, and dynamic gazing/visual scanning to occur efficiently, without constantly raising overall bodily alertness levels–and without overwhelming higher cognitive decision-making systems for determining the present focus of selective attention. Second, higher cognitive processes can take place at the same time as the substantially decentralized orchestration of behavior operates. Higher constructive cognitive processes would be able to manage modal and cross-modal learning and perception of relevant environmental objects, deixis with respect to those objects, memory construction, and–perhaps most importantly–tactical decision-making about changing short-term equilibrium goals.” Stutz, Aaron. 2014. “Embodied niche construction in the hominin lineage: semiotic structure and sustained attention in human embodied cognition.” Frontiers in Psychology. Vol. 5. Art. 834. August. P. 5.


“In general, the semiotic structuration of embodied cognition is important when partially decentralized cognition and action affords the animal’s short-term homeostatic behavior pattern in the extrasomatic environment, freeing up attention toward receiving and decoding information that might imply the relevance of altering behavioral and affective homeostatic targets. I speculate that what may have become relatively evolutionarily derived in humans–already early in the divergence of the hominin lineage from that of the panins–was the cognitive capacity to construct iconic narratives, in which dramatically changing affective states are temporally contextualized in a representation of a problem (e.g., hunger during the search for food) and its resolution (satiation during feeding). Such iconic narratives should be considered as an emergent part of the embodied interface with the environment, helping the animal to sustain attention on a difficult-to-obtain goal (dragging a stone anvil to the base of a nut tree), or a social dilemma (accepting or rejecting a solicitation to engage in a social coalition).” Stutz, Aaron. 2014. “Embodied niche construction in the hominin lineage: semiotic structure and sustained attention in human embodied cognition.” Frontiers in Psychology. Vol. 5. Art. 834. August. P. 6.


“The ability to construct abstract, iconic representations from concrete visual, auditory, and haptic perception is an embodied behavioral adaptation. However, the representations themselves–along with their semiotic, indexically or metaphorically evoked connections to other learned signs, perceived objects and events, memories, and embodied mental simulations–become part of the niche, constituting a dynamic part of the interface between the body and the extrasomatic environment.” Stutz, Aaron. 2014. “Embodied niche construction in the hominin lineage: semiotic structure and sustained attention in human embodied cognition.” Frontiers in Psychology. Vol. 5. Art. 834. August. P. 7.


“Thus, three interrelated social behavioral patterns would have defined the embodied aspects of the obligate bipedal niche: adult female reciprocal cooperative alloparenting (and–possibly–midwifery); male cooperative foraging and food transport; and male provisioning of mates. This behavioral nexus would have constituted a dynamic interface between the body and a socially intense, yet strongly ecologically structured extrasomatic environment.” Stutz, Aaron. 2014. “Embodied niche construction in the hominin lineage: semiotic structure and sustained attention in human embodied cognition.” Frontiers in Psychology. Vol. 5. Art. 834. August. P. 10.


“Treating language as a biocultural niche permits the unification, in a non-reductionist fashion, of the evolutionary dynamic of symbolic culture (the semiosphere) with that of material culture (the technosphere).” Sinha, Chris. 2015. “Language and other artifacts: socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction.” Frontiers in Psychology. V. 6. Art. 1601. P. 3.


“The difference [between Aristotle and Descartes] is that biology is conceptually paradigmatic for physics in Aristotle, whereas for Descartes, the physics of local motion swallows biology whole.” Grene, Marjorie & D. Depew. 2004. The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. Cambridge UP. P. 37.


“... we consider Descartes, first, as a thinker schooled in the late Aristotelian tradition, who turned against it from within it, and then as the thinker who abolished life from nature – the inventor of the bête-machine.” Grene, Marjorie & D. Depew. 2004. The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. Cambridge UP. P. 38.


“In Aristotle’s thought, ... form is emphatically prior to matter....” Grene, Marjorie & D. Depew. 2004. The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. Cambridge UP. P. 39.


“Throughout the hierarchy of matter/form relations [in Aristotle’s thought], moreover, the substances we find around us were all this-suches, potentialities organized by a form that made them the kinds of things they were. In the view of Thomists, matter is the principle of individuation. It is relatively accidental. It is form that provides the specific character that marks the substance as being what it essentially is: a being of a given kind.... Form gives a nature; matter singles out one instance of a nature from another.

“By the early seventeenth century, however, in many writers at least, this relationship is oddly reversed. Forms are formalities that contract a chunk of matter, first to a species, then a genus, then an individual. Thus, matter now exists as everywhere the same, while form marks off one individual from another.... Form, on the other hand, is now moving close to becoming simply the shape of pieces of matter.” Grene, Marjorie & D. Depew. 2004. The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. Cambridge UP. P. 40.


“Descartes, who was, as it turned out, a highly original mathematician, wanted to apply mathematical methods to physical problems. But this was something that, on Aristotelian principles, could not – or should not – be done.... Nevertheless, in Aristotelian methodology, there was supposed to be a sharp separation between physics, or natural philosophy, which dealt with the full, qualitied nature of real existent substances, and mathematics, which dealt abstractly with the merely quantitative aspect of such substances, whether discrete or continuous. So to produce a mathematical physics, it was necessary to break loose from the Aristotelian foundation of our knowledge of nature in order to be able to use mathematical principles and methods directly in the understanding of the natural world. To this end, a good deal of Scholastic baggage had to be discarded, particularly the deeply empirical basis of Aristotle’s, or the Aristootelians’, method of gaining knowledge.” Grene, Marjorie & D. Depew. 2004. The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. Cambridge UP. P. 44.


“Thus if we look in the Meditations for things Descartes failed to doubt – and believed no one could doubt – we find an impressive list. To embark on this intellectual adventure in the first place he had to have a firm grasp of a number of concepts. He had to know what thought is, what extension is, and so on. He also claimed to know – and apparently believed we all knew – indubitably maxims such as the causal principle: that a cause must contain, either formally or eminently, at least as much reality as its effect. Understanding causal connections in terms of degrees of reality is a very traditional process, which the ‘new mechanical philosophy’ that Descartes himself was initiating would soon abandon. (Indeed, it would be completely abandoned in Descartes’s own lifetime in the more radical modernism of Thomas Hobbes).” Grene, Marjorie & D. Depew. 2004. The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. Cambridge UP. Pp. 44-5.


“How did Descartes come to hold this view? As we have seen, he wanted to alter the method and therewith the doctrines of Scholastic physics. The School, he held, had never solved a single problem, whereas with his method one could go on, in the right order, to answer all the questions that would ever confront the human mind. Both parties to this dispute agree, of course, that God made the world as He made it.” Grene, Marjorie & D. Depew. 2004. The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. Cambridge UP. P. 47.


“In general, it is awareness of the uniqueness of the living, of its deep difference from the non-living, that Harvey shares with Aristotle. Harvey even seems to have believed that there is non-life only as a falling off from life – a very different conception from Descartes’s reduction of animals to beast-machines.” Grene, Marjorie & D. Depew. 2004. The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. Cambridge UP. P. 60.


“We examine whether there are differences in levels of cooperation across discrete populations [of humans] of the same endogamous cultural group, and we find that environmental drivers (local ecology and demography) are responsible for behavioral variation across our study populations.” Lamba, Shakti & R. Mace. 2011. “Demography and ecology drive variation in cooperation across human populations.” PNAS. V. 108. No. 35. August 30. P.14426.


“... behavioral variation currently attributed to cultural norms may, in fact, be driven by ecological and demographic differences between populations. Thus, existing cross-cultural data do not provide support for cultural group selection models of the evolution of cooperation.” Lamba, Shakti & R. Mace. 2011. “Demography and ecology drive variation in cooperation across human populations.” PNAS. V. 108. No. 35. August 30. P.14429.


“The relatively slow life histories of primates compared to most other mammals make it likely that during the course of their long lives most individuals will experience an array of social options that reflect dynamic relationships between constraining and responding traits.” Strier, Karen, P. Lee & A. Ives. 2014. “Behavioral Flexibility and the Evolution of Primate Social States.” PLOS One. DOI:10.1371. December 3. P. 2.


“Recently, Shultz et al built on the strong phylogenetic signal found in the basic demographic structures within the primate order to reconstruct the evolutionary pathways leading to different types of social organization. Their tests support a stepwise model composed of several transitions, mainly unilateral, where the development of sociality proceeds from solitary life to loose aggregations of several males and females, to stable multi-male – multi-female groups and then to pairs or unimale groups. The initial switch to sociality coincides with a shift from noctural to diurnal activity, which supports the hypothesis that group-living represents a protective strategy against predators. If these conclusions were to be confirmed, it would mean that the evolution of some aspects of primate social systems follow directional patterns.” Thierry, Bernard. 2013. “Identifying constraints in the evolution of primate societies.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 368: 20120342. P. 3. Reference: Shultz, S., C. Opie & A. Atkinson. 2011. “Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates.” Nature. 479:219-222.


“By creating institutions, humans have been able to move from the default ‘Hobbesian’ rules of the ‘game of life’, determined by physical/environmental constraints, into self-created rules of social organization where cooperation can be individually advantageous even in large groups of unrelated individuals. Examples include rules of food sharing in hunter-gatherers, rules for the usage of irrigation systems in agriculturalists, property rights and systems for sharing reputation between mediaeval traders.” Powers, Simon, C. Van Schaik & L. Lehmann. 2016. “How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371:1687. P. 1.


“Because they presuppose the presence of high-level socio-cognitive capacities, standard accounts of cooperation hardly apply to those who do not possess propositional knowledge about others’ intentions, such as young children or animals,...” Fantasia, Valentina, H. De Jaegher & A. Fasulo. 2014. “We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation.” Frontiers of Psychology. August. V. 5. Article 874. P. 2.


“... these approaches [mind-reading ones] have explained shared intentionality from an observer’s perspective, but not from a participant’s one.... Shotter nicely summarized these alternative positions: ‘Motives, intentions, sentiments are (...) directly perceived by those directly involved in [a joint action] as first person actors and second person recipients in that activity. Only third person observers have to make inferences.’” Fantasia, Valentina, H. De Jaegher & A. Fasulo. 2014. “We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation.” Frontiers of Psychology. August. V. 5. Article 874. P. 3. Reference: Shotter, J. 1983. “‘Duality of structure’ and ‘intentionality’ in an ecological psychology.” J. Theory Soc. Behav. 13:19-44. P. 39.


“Enaction is a non-reductive naturalistic approach that proposes a deep continuity between living and cognitive processes. It is a scientific program that explores several phases along this life-mind continuum, based on six mutually supporting, operational concepts: autonomy, sense-making, embodiment, emergence, experience, and participatory sense-making.” Fantasia, Valentina, H. De Jaegher & A. Fasulo. 2014. “We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation.” Frontiers of Psychology. August. V. 5. Article 874. P. 4.


“In our view, ‘taking account of the other’s interests and objectives’ does not need inferencing, as we argued, but happens through embodied interactions that are meaningful in the given situation and in the interactional history.... This is not only the case for positive co-operations but also for situations in which we argue and disagree about something, where some complementarity is still needed in order for the disagreement even to be played out. This means that there are different forms, layers, and aspects of cooperation: embodied, in time, in space, in topic, imitative or complementary, etc.” Fantasia, Valentina, H. De Jaegher & A. Fasulo. 2014. “We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation.” Frontiers of Psychology. August. V. 5. Article 874. P. 6.


“Under a perspective that considers social interactions as basic forms of cooperation by participating in shared, meaningful interactions, infants practice their ability to make sense of and coordinate with the caregiver’s action, becoming increasingly skilled in their social participation.” Fantasia, Valentina, H. De Jaegher & A. Fasulo. 2014. “We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation.” Frontiers of Psychology. August. V. 5. Article 874. P. 7.


“... cooperation is a multi-layered process that may take different forms.” Fantasia, Valentina, H. De Jaegher & A. Fasulo. 2014. “We can work it out: an enactive look at cooperation.” Frontiers of Psychology. August. V. 5. Article 874. P. 8.


“Recent studies portray conversation as the progressive entrainment of linguistic behaviors of two or more individuals. In other words, interlocutors engaged in dialog spontaneously align their linguistic behaviors on multiple levels from prosody to syntax, thus increasing the coordination of attention, action and conceptualization.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, J. Raczaszek-Leonardi & K. Tylen. 2014. “Dialog as interpersonal synergy.” New Ideas in Psychology. 32: 147-157. P. 147.


“Inspired by dynamical systems theory, the model of dialog as synergy thus reconceptualizes reciprocal imitation as part of a complex process in which interactional patterns are jointly curbed and shaped by situational and task constraints.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, J. Raczaszek-Leonardi & K. Tylen. 2014. “Dialog as interpersonal synergy.” New Ideas in Psychology. 32: 147-157. P. 147.


“An adequate model of dialog should therefore specify how local task requirements come to guide and constrain alignment and, even more importantly, distribute complementary (rather than identical) actions among interlocutors making them temporally coupled, selectively aligned, and fulfilling different roles in the interaction. Assuming a broader perspective, dialogs are thus conceived as functional coordination of cognitive systems.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, J. Raczaszek-Leonardi & K. Tylen. 2014. “Dialog as interpersonal synergy.” New Ideas in Psychology. 32: 147-157. P. 149.


“The analysis revealed prominent indiscriminate alignment in all dyads: interlocutors displayed a high probability of picking up and employing words used by the other in the previous interaction. However, the more a dyad indiscriminately repeated each other’s words, the lower the collective benefit they gained from cooperation. Automatic linguistic alignment seemed to be deleterious to coordination on the task. In contrast, the participants’ reciprocal, selective adaptation to vocabularies of expressing confidence (task motivated selective alignment), turned out to correlate positively with the collective benefit gained from cooperation.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, J. Raczaszek-Leonardi & K. Tylen. 2014. “Dialog as interpersonal synergy.” New Ideas in Psychology. 32: 147-157. P. 151.


“Complementarity can be defined as the way components doing quite different things come to form a coherent whole. A structure initiated by one component is completed (rather than copied) by the other. In other words – contrary to synchronization – complementary coordination is successful if the components do different things, but in a way that constitutes a coherent structure on a higher level.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, J. Raczaszek-Leonardi & K. Tylen. 2014. “Dialog as interpersonal synergy.” New Ideas in Psychology. 32: 147-157. P. 152.


“It has to be re-stated that different levels of linguistic coordination might require different types of dynamics. While on the lower physiological levels of dialog (posture, visual attention, speech rate, etc.) good coordination seems to depend mainly on synchronization and alignment, on ‘higher’ linguistic levels, we observe quite the opposite: here good coordination, while relying on a certain degree of synchronization and alignment, at the systemic level shows complementary dynamics and emergence of interactional routines.” Fusaroli, Riccardo, J. Raczaszek-Leonardi & K. Tylen. 2014. “Dialog as interpersonal synergy.” New Ideas in Psychology. 32: 147-157. P. 154.


“On the one hand, phenomenologists question the unobservability of mental states and insist that we can directly perceive e.g. the other’s emotions or basic intentions in facial expressions, voice intonations, gestures and bodily postures. On the other hand, the idea that understanding others always involves ascribing full-blown mental states has been questioned. Perceiving contextualized behavior is thought, in some cases, to constitute a non-inferential understanding of a basic kind of intentionality that does not involve propositional attitudes. Thus, in different ways, a case has been made for the notion of ‘direct social perception’ (DSP).” Abramova, Ekaterina & M. Slors. 2015. “Social cognition in simple action coordination: A case for direct perception.” Consciousness and Cognition. 36: 519-531. Pp. 519-20.


“Other such examples include carrying pieces of furniture together or jointly lifting planks while each participant touches only one side of the plank. In such cases coordinated joint action is usually required to start simultaneously. The actions of the individuals involved contribute to one kind of handling of a physical object. Thus, participants need to track the actions of the other participant in order to execute her own part. We can refer to this kind of action coordination as contributive action coordination.” Abramova, Ekaterina & M. Slors. 2015. “Social cognition in simple action coordination: A case for direct perception.” Consciousness and Cognition. 36: 519-531. P. 522.


“Or think of two waste collectors stepping off a garbage truck and walking toward a stack of bin bags. As one walks toward the left-hand side of the stack, the other will facilitate coordinated action by approaching the right-hand side. In such cases it is usually not necessary to start acting simultaneously. This is because the overall joint task can be broken down into a set of actions that can be executed by individuals without requiring the help of others and often without constantly keeping track of the other’s actions. We shall refer to this kind of action coordination as distributive action coordination.” Abramova, Ekaterina & M. Slors. 2015. “Social cognition in simple action coordination: A case for direct perception.” Consciousness and Cognition. 36: 519-531. P. 522.


“Any environment of any organism can be said to contain a plethora of different affordances. But only a very tiny fragment of those can actually be said to be involved in the actions an organism engages in. It is thus useful to distinguish between what Rietveld and Kiverstein call the ‘landscape of affordances’ and the ‘field of affordances’. Whereas the former refers to all action possibilities available to a form of life, the latter refers to action possibilities that an organism–a person say–is potentially responsive to in a given situation, depending on e.g. psychological factors such as (shared) goals or needs. Thus, the field is a situation-specific, individual subset of the landscape of affordances. An important part of the notion of the field of affordances is that it can dynamically change, corresponding to changes in the situation or internal state:...” Abramova, Ekaterina & M. Slors. 2015. “Social cognition in simple action coordination: A case for direct perception.” Consciousness and Cognition. 36: 519-531. P. 524. Reference: Rietveld, E. & J. Kiverstein. 2014. “A rich landscape of affordances.” Ecological Psychology. 26(4): 325-352.


“Briefly put: perception of the other’s actions mediates the perceived array of possible relevant actions directed at our environment. What I see my partner doing directly and non-inferentially determines the action possibilities that are salient to me.” Abramova, Ekaterina & M. Slors. 2015. “Social cognition in simple action coordination: A case for direct perception.” Consciousness and Cognition. 36: 519-531. P. 524.


“What we would like to suggest is that in such cases of contributive action coordination it is not the actions of others that affect another person’s field of affordances, but the perceived affordances for the other. Furthermore, the influence of perceiving affordances for another person is not limiting but augmenting in nature. Thus, in the plank-lifting case, the field of affordances of a person standing at one end of a plank is changed when she sees another person at the other end of the plank. The plank becomes ‘jointly liftable’ for her because she recognizes the availability of exactly the same affordance for the other person as well. In such a case the slightest motion of one of the people involved might trigger the joint action of lifting the plank.” Abramova, Ekaterina & M. Slors. 2015. “Social cognition in simple action coordination: A case for direct perception.” Consciousness and Cognition. 36: 519-531. P. 528.


“... in addition to speaking of affordances for oneself and perceived affordances for another, there may be good reason to speak about the fields of affordances for dyads or groups.” Abramova, Ekaterina & M. Slors. 2015. “Social cognition in simple action coordination: A case for direct perception.” Consciousness and Cognition. 36: 519-531. P. 529.


“It is quite widely agreed that human adults’ reflections on thoughts and actions, their own and others’, involve a range of commonsense psychological concepts including belief, desire, intention, knowledge and perception. Children’s abilities to deploy these concepts improve in fluency and sophistication over more than three years. Several psychologists have claimed that children first engage in joint action from around their first birthday and that engaging in joint action facilitates these early improvements. Joint actions that young children engage in include tidying up the toys together, cooperatively pulling handles in sequence to make a dog-puppet sing, bouncing a ball on a large trampoline together and pretending to row a boat together. The psychologists claim that engaging in joint actions like these plays some role in the early development of abilities to use concepts like belief, desire, intention, knowledge and perception, and in the development of higher forms of cognition more generally. My question is what joint action could be given that some version of this claim is true.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. Pp. 23-4.


“Joint actions involving shared intention presuppose, and so cannot significantly foster the development of, sophisticated uses of psychological concepts. What we need, then, is to identify a form of joint action that requires as little psychological sophistication as possible; by presupposing less we make it possible to explain more.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. P. 35.


“Some ants harvest plant hair and fungus in order to build traps to capture large insects; once captured, many worker ants sting the large insects, transport them and carve them up. The ants’ behaviours have an interesting feature distinct from their being coordinated; each ant’s behaviours are individually organised around an outcome–the fly’s death–which occurs as a common effect of many ants’ behaviours. We can say that there is single activity–killing a fly–which several ants performed. In general, a plural activity is one involving two or more agents. As I shall use the term ‘plural activity’, for agents to be engaged in a plural activity it is sufficient that each agent’s activities are individually organised around a single outcome which occurs as a common effect of all the agents’ activities.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. P. 35.


“‘shared goal’ ... some cases of joint action involve structures which bind not the agents’ intentions but the goals to which their activities are directed.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. P. 37.


“Knowledge states and beliefs both count as expectations but it is not necessary to have either. In developmental research, looking times and eye movements are regularly used as measures of infants’ expectations concerning goals.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. P. 41.


“By contrast [to having a shared intention], it is possible to have a shared goal without knowing that one does. Agents can have, and act on, a shared goal without understanding their actions as comprising anything more than a plural activity.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. P. 42.


“Not every case in which actions are driven by shared goals fits intuitively with paradigm examples of joint action. Consider two drivers on a collision course in a narrow street. Suppose (perhaps unrealistically) that each acts with the goal of avoiding a collision between their cars, expects the other to do the same and expects that they will avoid collision thanks to their combined efforts. This is sufficient for avoiding a collision to be a shared goal. Suppose also that their actions are driven by a shared goal in the sense defined above. So, on the above account, their avoiding collision is a joint action. (Not all cases of avoiding a collision are joint actions, only those, if any, which are driven by shared goals.) But intuitively this case may not seem to fit with paradigms of joint action because the interaction is so minor. If this counts as joint action, then, given the right goal-relations and expectations, so could passing someone in a corridor. Should we modify the account of joint action in order to exclude this sort of case? There is an obstacle to doing that. We could elaborate a series of interactions driven by the shared goal of avoiding collision where each interaction is slightly less minor than its predecessor in the series. Whether or not intuitions support drawing a boundary, it seems that no such boundary is theoretically significant for understanding the role of joint action in development.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. Pp. 44-5.


“There is another sort of case in which actions driven by a shared goal may not intuitively fit with paradigm joint actions. Consider again the two drivers whose goal is to avoid collision. Now suppose, in addition, that the first driver hawkishly accelerates while covertly preparing to brake if necessary, causing the second driver to brake hard. Given the present account, their actions nevertheless constitute joint action. This may not fit intuitively with paradigm joint actions because the first driver dominates the second (and does so by means of deception). Again it is possible to elaborate a series of cases involving gradually varying degrees of domination.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. P. 45.


“While outright coercion is incompatible with joint action on the account I have offered, neither domination nor other failures to be cooperative are excluded.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. P. 45.


“Bratman’s account assumes that joint action involves shared intention where the functions of shared intention include coordinating paradigmatically long-term plans. Such an account may be required to characterise complex cases where success demands that agents’ plans mesh. But some cases of joint action (such as carrying a two-handled basket together) do not involve plans in the relevant sense of planning. The agents need to coordinate their activities but not their plans.” Butterfill, Stephen. 2012. “Joint Action and Development.” The Philosophical Quarterly. V. 62. No. 246. Pp. 23-47. P. 47. Reference: Bratman, M. 2007. Structures of Agency. Oxford UP.


“The systemics and GST [general system theory] are formal theories, that is, they contain no information about how the systems they describe are implemented.” Rousseau, David. 2014. “Systems Philosophy and the Unity of Knowledge.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 31: 146-159. P. 150.


“Systems Philosophy is grounded in an argument for the existence of an intelligibly organised reality underlying the phenomena of the experienced world.” Rousseau, David. 2014. “Systems Philosophy and the Unity of Knowledge.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 31: 146-159. Pp. 157-8.


“Geographers’ interests in things have related to long-standing efforts to understand the constitution of lived space.” Hicks, Dan & M. Beaudry. 2010. “Introduction: Material culture studies; a reactionary view.” Pp. 1-21. Hicks, Dan & M. Beaudry (Eds). The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford UP. P. 3.


“Central here is an understanding of both things and theories as simultaneously events and effects rather than as passive objects, active subjects, or caught up somehow in the spectral webs of networks, meshworks, or dialectical relations.” Hicks, Dan. 2010. “The Material Cultural Turn: event and effect.” Pp. 25-98. Hicks, Dan & M. Beaudry (Eds). The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford UP. P. 30.


“The effective use of objects sets humans apart from even their closest relatives in the animal kingdom. Most human actions involve objects, either as the recipient to be acted upon, or as a tool to be acted with.” Bach, Patric, T. Nicholson & M. Hudson. 2014. “The affordance-matching hypothesis: how objects guide action understanding and prediction.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. May. V. 8. Article 254. P. 2.


“For every object, humans learn not only what goals they can, in principle, achieve with it (‘function knowledge’), but also the motor behaviors that are required to achieve these goals (‘manipulation knowledge’).” Bach, Patric, T. Nicholson & M. Hudson. 2014. “The affordance-matching hypothesis: how objects guide action understanding and prediction.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. May. V. 8. Article 254. P. 2.


“The basic assumption of the affordance-matching hypothesis is that manipulation and function knowledge about objects cannot only be used during action execution, but also for predicting and understanding the actions of others.” Bach, Patric, T. Nicholson & M. Hudson. 2014. “The affordance-matching hypothesis: how objects guide action understanding and prediction.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. May. V. 8. Article 254. P. 2.


“The affordance-matching hypothesis posits that people do not only derive manipulation knowledge for the objects relevant to their goals, but also for the objects relevant for the goals of others.” Bach, Patric, T. Nicholson & M. Hudson. 2014. “The affordance-matching hypothesis: how objects guide action understanding and prediction.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. May. V. 8. Article 254. P. 4.


“The special symbiotic relationship between dogs and people comes with noteworthy design changes in the dog and none in people. This is a good indication that it is the dog that evolved into this obligatory commensal relationship, not the people. The design changes are not only physical but behavioral as well.” Coppinger, Raymond & L. Coppinger. 2016. What Is a Dog? University of Chicago Press. P. 135.


“The special relationship between people and dogs is something the dogs are initiating. Dogs are involved in an obligatory commensal symbiotic relationship with people.” Coppinger, Raymond & L. Coppinger. 2016. What Is a Dog? University of Chicago Press. P. 154.


“... the first big difference between dogs and their wild relatives is that dog sires and dams don’t take care of the juveniles–they are on their own. The second big difference is that dogs have a long critical period of socialization compared with the wild canids. For dogs, this window of social learning extends from about four to fourteen weeks of age. This allows them time to continue their social bonding after they are weaned. In contrast, species-recognition patterns in wolves, coyotes, and jackals can be in place at three weeks while they are still nursing. Dogs leave the nest and the care of their mothers at six to ten weeks. During this transition period, they need someone that will respond to their care-soliciting behaviors.” Coppinger, Raymond & L. Coppinger. 2016. What Is a Dog? University of Chicago Press. P. 159.


“Fredrick Zeuner wrote, in his book A History of the Domesticated Animals, that all our domestic animals with a few exceptions were originally crop pests. We would suggest that his title should say ‘domestic’ and not ‘domesticated.’ He should have pointed out that the domestic animals he did not deem crop pests were probably trash pests. These non-crop pests were species such as rats, mice, chickens, turkeys, and the dog. The exception to the pest/scavenger role may be the cat, which hunted domestic ats and mice in the domestic pest-ridden environment. The more mess, the more ‘domestic’ animals.” Coppinger, Raymond & L. Coppinger. 2016. What Is a Dog? University of Chicago Press. P. 220.


“E.O. Price pointed out years ago that whatever genetic changes defined our domestic animals they still have to be tamed in every generation. With dogs we refer to this taming as the critical period of socialization. But those that raise cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, or whatever know that each generation has to be socialized with people or they grow up wild.” Coppinger, Raymond & L. Coppinger. 2016. What Is a Dog? University of Chicago Press. P. 221. Reference: Price, E. 1998. “Behavioral Genetics and the Process of Animal Domestication.” Pp. 31-65. From: Grandin, T. (Ed). Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals. Academic Press.


“Domestic animals were and are attracted to human resources. Domestic animals are species that can eat in the presence of people. They are not genetically tame but are easily tamable for whatever reason. The dog isn’t all that different.” Coppinger, Raymond & L. Coppinger. 2016. What Is a Dog? University of Chicago Press. P. 221.


“The case will be made as follows: First, we distinguish ‘extended cognition’ from ‘embodied cognition’ and, more importantly, from ‘extended mind,’...” Favela, Luis & A. Chemero. 2016. “The Animal-Environment System.” Pp. 59-74. From: Coello, Yann & M. Fischer (Eds). Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1. Routledge. P. 59.


“Extended cognition refers to cognition that extends beyond the boundary of the organism. Extended mind can be said to incorporate this feature, but it also contains a stronger metaphysical feature as well, specifically, a functionalist theory about the nature of mental states.” Favela, Luis & A. Chemero. 2016. “The Animal-Environment System.” Pp. 59-74. From: Coello, Yann & M. Fischer (Eds). Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1. Routledge. P. 60.


“Although it is difficult to provide a definition of embodied cognition that adheres to all uses of the term, a few features are generally agreed upon. First, cognition is grounded in sensorimotor processes. Second, the body constrains and enables cognition. Third, there is no sharp division between cognition and noncognition in the body.” Favela, Luis & A. Chemero. 2016. “The Animal-Environment System.” Pp. 59-74. From: Coello, Yann & M. Fischer (Eds). Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1. Routledge. P. 60.


“Heidegger distinguishes three ways of experiencing tools: ready-to-hand, unready-to-hand, and present-at-hand. ‘Ready-to-hand’ refers to the experience of equipment successfully utilized, for example, hammering a nail, reading a book, or floating in a boat. When tools are ready-to-hand, users do not experience them as tools but see through them to the task they are engaged in. ‘Unready-to-hand’ refers to the temporary breakdown of the successful utilization of equipment. For example, when difficulty getting a key to turn in a locked door temporarily distracts you from the conversation you are having, the key and lock are experienced as unready-to-hand. In this case, the key and lock intrude on the conversation for a moment, and attention switches from the conversation to the suddenly obtrusive key. ‘Present-at-hand’ refers to the experience of things outside the context of their functions, as mere objects. If a little jiggling fails to get the door to open, you might pull the key out of the lock and look at its shape, color, and so on. Experiencing the key as present-at-hand is experiencing it as an object with properties and not as a useful piece of equipment.” Favela, Luis & A. Chemero. 2016. “The Animal-Environment System.” Pp. 59-74. From: Coello, Yann & M. Fischer (Eds). Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1. Routledge. P. 62.


“Each of these articles [Van Orden et al 2003; Holden et al 2009; Dotov et al 2010; Silberstein & Chemero 2012; Anderson et al 2012] claimed that cognitive systems exhibit interaction-dominant dynamics and are, therefore, interaction-dominant systems. This technical term can be read quite literally: A system exhibits interaction-dominant dynamics when the interactions among the components dominate or override the dynamics that the components would exhibit separately. Systems with interaction-dominant dynamics are not modular.” Favela, Luis & A. Chemero. 2016. “The Animal-Environment System.” Pp. 59-74. From: Coello, Yann & M. Fischer (Eds). Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1. Routledge. P. 67. References: Van Orden, G., J. Jolden & M. Turvey. 2003. “Self-organization of cognitive performance.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 132:331-350. Holden, J., G. Van Orden & M. Turvey. 2009. “Dispersion of response times reveals cognitive dynamics.” Psychological Review. 116:318-342. Dotov, D., L. Nie & A. Chemero. 2010. “A demonstration of the transition from ready-to-hand to unready-to-hand.” PloS ONE. 5, e9433.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009433. Silberstein, M. & A. Chemero. 2012. “Complexityy and extended phenomenological cognitive systems.” Topics in Cognitive Science. 4:35-50. Anderson, M., M. Richardson & A. Chemero. 2012. “Eroding the boundaries of cognition: Implications of embodiment.” Topics in Cognitive Science. 4:717-730.


“Exhibiting 1/f noise is initial evidence that a system is interaction dominant. This suggests that the mounting evidence that 1/f noise is ubiquitous to human physiological systems, behavior, and neural activity is also evidence that human physiological, cognitive, and neural systems are interaction dominant.” Favela, Luis & A. Chemero. 2016. “The Animal-Environment System.” Pp. 59-74. From: Coello, Yann & M. Fischer (Eds). Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1. Routledge. P. 68.


“The question for current purposes is whether interaction-dominant systems extend beyond the body periphery, whether person-plus-tool systems can be shown to exhibit interaction-dominant dynamics. Demonstrating this is tantamount to demonstrating that human-plus-tool systems can be as tightly integrated as the components of a beating heart are. This has been demonstrated empirically. Dotov and colleagues (2010) have shown that cognitive systems can be made to extend beyond the periphery to include artifacts that are being utilized to perform a task.” Favela, Luis & A. Chemero. 2016. “The Animal-Environment System.” Pp. 59-74. From: Coello, Yann & M. Fischer (Eds). Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1. Routledge. Pp. 69-70. Reference: Dotov, D., L. Nie & A. Chemero. 2010. “A demonstration of the transition from ready-to-hand to unready-to-hand.” PloS ONE. 5, e9433.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009433.


“We have taken the presence of 1/f scaling to be indicative of a unified system. Given this, showing that 1/f scaling is present when a human is using a tool indicates that the human-tool system is interaction dominant. Using this approach, experimental results from Dotov and colleagues (2010) indicate that human participants-plus-external-device can comprise unified, interaction-dominant systems. These human-plus-device systems are extended cognitive systems.” Favela, Luis & A. Chemero. 2016. “The Animal-Environment System.” Pp. 59-74. From: Coello, Yann & M. Fischer (Eds). Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition, Volume 1. Routledge. P. 70. Reference: Dotov, D., L. Nie & A. Chemero. 2010. “A demonstration of the transition from ready-to-hand to unready-to-hand.” PloS ONE. 5, e9433.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009433.


“The term ‘social niche construction’ is intended to denote the application of niche construction theory to social evolution.” Ryan, P.A., S. Powers & R. Watson. 2016. “Social niche construction and evolutionary transitions in individuality.” Biology and Philosophy. 31:59-79. P. 61.


“We introduce the following terminology:...

• “Social trait (ST) A trait that affects the fitness of individuals other than the actor, sometimes having values appropriately labelled ‘cooperate’ or ‘defect’.
• “Social niche The selective context in which social behaviour occurs, affecting the strength and direction of selection on it. In game theoretic terms, the social niche is the effective game being played, once all relevant factors have been taken into account.
• “Social niche modifier (SNM) A trait that alters the effective game being played by its bearers, causing it to differ from the counterfactual game they would have been playing if the SNM had not acted. Examples include factors such as population structure, relatedness, punishment, policing and side-payments.
Ryan, P.A., S. Powers & R. Watson. 2016. “Social niche construction and evolutionary transitions in individuality.” Biology and Philosophy. 31:59-79. Pp. 61-2.


“Social niche construction is a circular process in which organisms modify their own social niche in such a way as to influence the conditions of their own social evolution.” Ryan, P.A., S. Powers & R. Watson. 2016. “Social niche construction and evolutionary transitions in individuality.” Biology and Philosophy. 31:59-79. P. 62.


“Social niche construction theory predicts that whenever we find cooperative behaviour in the biological world, we expect to find co-evolved mechanisms supporting it. Without the mechanism the cooperation would not be evolutionarily stable and without the cooperation the mechanism would have no (adaptive) explanation.” Ryan, P.A., S. Powers & R. Watson. 2016. “Social niche construction and evolutionary transitions in individuality.” Biology and Philosophy. 31:59-79. Pp. 64-5.


“... each definition of a tool, attempting to distinguish between tool use and other behaviors, has proven elusive and often led to paradoxical conclusions. Hence, many investigations into what would correspond to tool use have generally concluded that this behavioral category is arbitrarily drawn, and that any definition of tool use is one of convenience rather than psychological.” Orban, Guy & F. Caruana. 2014. “The neural basis of human tool use.” Frontiers in Psychology. April. Vol. 5. Article 310. P. 7.


“... it is well known that other regions involved in tool use show dramatic changes in activity between observing an object-directed tool action and observing the same actions devoid of any goal, i.e., when the object on which the tool operates is lacking.” Orban, Guy & F. Caruana. 2014. “The neural basis of human tool use.” Frontiers in Psychology. April. Vol. 5. Article 310. P. 7.


“Switching from hand to tool action requires, besides the visual input regarding features of the target object provided by the IPS to phAIP and aSMG (for hand-object and tool-object interaction, respectively), additional information specific to tool use and presumably converging upon aSMG. These afferents include semantic information, which is particularly relevant when using familiar tools, technical reasoning, more crucial during the use of uncommon or new tools, and somatosensory feedback. It follows that the affordances of a tool cannot, by themselves, account for tool use. Furthermore, postural and intentional constraints also play a role during the planning of tool actions ...” Orban, Guy & F. Caruana. 2014. “The neural basis of human tool use.” Frontiers in Psychology. April. Vol. 5. Article 310. P. 9.


“... it appears that human tool use differs from that known to occur in nonhumans in different ways. For instance, in nonhumans, tool use is incidental and rare in the wild. By contrast, humans spontaneously engage in object-object manipulations and employ a wide range of tools everyday and during all the life, a feature that characterizes humans of all cultures through the ages. In addition, only humans are able to use a tool to create another one. A substantial body of evidence also indicates serious limitations on the ability of nonhuman animals to solve tool-use situations that are relatively simple for humans or to transfer the mechanical relationships they learn in one specific situation to other ones. In short, even if humans are not unique in using tools, there is undoubtedly something unique about the way humans use tools.

“Differences also exist at a neuroanatomical level.... In sum, not only humans possess specific behavioral characteristics, but there is also a uniquely human brain area that might be the basis for this specificity.” Reynaud, Emanuelle, M. Lesourd, J. Navarro & F. Osiurak. 2016. “On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use: A critical review of neuroimaging data.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 64: 421-437. P. 423.


“Thus, it has been argued that humans alone are able to understand observable regularities of the environment in terms of unobservable causal forces (gravity, force, shape, mass). The reasoning-based approach is akin to these theories by stressing that in humans the left IPL is critical to store mechanical knowledge necessary to reason about how tools and objects have to be used in a purposeful way. The corollary is that this kind of reasoning would be unique to humans. In broad terms, the main difference between nonhuman primate and human tool use is rather one of kind than of degree.” Reynaud, Emanuelle, M. Lesourd, J. Navarro & F. Osiurak. 2016. “On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use: A critical review of neuroimaging data.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 64: 421-437. P. 423.


“Contrary to manipulation knowledge, the study of function knowledge in the field of human tool use has received far less attention in recent years.” Reynaud, Emanuelle, M. Lesourd, J. Navarro & F. Osiurak. 2016. “On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use: A critical review of neuroimaging data.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 64: 421-437. P. 424.


“Another possibility is that function knowledge is the common process underlying both real tool use and mechanical problem solving, notably because this kind of knowledge contains information about allocentric relationships. However, neuropsychological evidence demonstrates that function knowledge and mechanical problem solving skills can be disrupted independently ruling out this possibility.” Reynaud, Emanuelle, M. Lesourd, J. Navarro & F. Osiurak. 2016. “On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use: A critical review of neuroimaging data.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 64: 421-437. P. 425.


“When people engage in everyday activities, all the needed tools and objects are not at hand in the workspace, forcing them to get them either before or during the activity. In this view, Osiurak proposed that real tool use is mainly supported by mechanical knowledge, as demonstrated by the strong link between real tool use and mechanical problem solving. Nevertheless, function knowledge might be particularly involved in single tool use. When people are presented with a tool in isolation, they have to form a representation of the examiner’s expectations. Even though function knowledge is based on personal experience, it is also a vehicle for social knowledge given that daily life activities are culturally shared. Therefore, people can access information from function knowledge to represent the examiner’s expectations and, as a consequence, identify the category to which the tool belongs as well as a potential usage and an object with which it can be used.” Reynaud, Emanuelle, M. Lesourd, J. Navarro & F. Osiurak. 2016. “On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use: A critical review of neuroimaging data.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 64: 421-437. Pp. 425-6.


“The reasoning-based approach appears to be the most appropriate framework to account for neuroimaging data on tool use. Yet, it is remarkable to observe that this approach has received only modest success from psychologists and neuroscientists alike as compared to the manipulation-based approach. One potential explanation for this lack of interest lies in the way scholars have framed the issue, perhaps putting an excessive emphasis on manipulation.” Reynaud, Emanuelle, M. Lesourd, J. Navarro & F. Osiurak. 2016. “On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use: A critical review of neuroimaging data.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 64: 421-437. P. 434.


“The present review clearly questions the manipulation knowledge hypothesis. An intriguing issue, however, is why scientists and scholars have tended, and still tend, to support this hypothesis. The recent enthusiasm for the embodied cognition approach is a good example of this. According to this approach, tool knowledge is based on the simulation of previous sensorimotor experiences with tools...” Reynaud, Emanuelle, M. Lesourd, J. Navarro & F. Osiurak. 2016. “On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use: A critical review of neuroimaging data.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 64: 421-437. P. 434.


“In this frame [manipulation-based approach to tool usage], people do not reason when using tools, they simply manipulate them. This belief is also firmly ingrained in folk psychology, as illustrated by the implicit hierarchy of intellectual work over manual work, as if using a tool did not involve any kind of intelligence or reasoning, but only the hands. One potential explanation for this belief is that people – and scientists alike – might confound ‘explanation’ with ‘understanding’. Said differently, the idea would be that, if people are not able to explain what they do, then they do not understand what they do. Such a bias can also be reported in Piaget’s works, leading developmental psychologists to think that it is not until after the first year of life that infants begin to distinguish between adequate and inadequate support. Yet, a significant amount of evidence indicates that infants as young as 4.5 months of age understand that objects cannot remain stable without support. Technically, an object resting on a support is stable if a perpendicular line drawn through the object’s center of gravity falls within the support’s boundaries. Even though adults are generally unaware of this principle, they commonly adhere to it in their predictions, suggesting that it is not necessary to be able to explain scientifically the principle of support/gravity to understand it.” Reynaud, Emanuelle, M. Lesourd, J. Navarro & F. Osiurak. 2016. “On the neurocognitive origins of human tool use: A critical review of neuroimaging data.” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 64: 421-437. P. 434.


“... the history of thought about thought is really the history about how people relate to objects in the world and to each other. I believe that when we relate to objects and other people narrowly, wholly in the present and in the particular, we are not thinking. When we relate to objects and people widely, when our present actions depend on abstract relationships, widespread in both the past and future, we are thinking. This way of thinking about thinking applies to conscious as well as unconscious thought.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. xiii.


“For Aristotle, the relation of mind to bodily movement was as a final cause to its effect.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 15.


“Narrow final causes act in the opposite direction to efficient causes. Inserting the dollar and pressing the button cause the candy to appear in the tray (efficient cause). And the future appearance of the candy causes you to insert the dollar (final cause)....

“The narrow view of final causes matches nicely with the behavioral concept of reinforcement.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. Pp. 17-18.


“On the other hand, the wide view of final causes says that the cause of putting the dollar in the slot and pressing the button is not the appearance of the candy bar as such, but the relationship between putting the dollar in the slot, pressing the button, and getting the candy bar. That is, the entire sequence of actions–the pattern of actions–is the cause of each individual component of the pattern.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 18.


“The effect (buying a bat) of a narrow final cause (playing baseball) is extrinsic to its cause. The effect (running the bases) of a wide final cause (playing baseball) is intrinsic to its cause.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 19.


“Wide final causes are not simply efficient causes in reverse,. An effect of an efficient cause follows its cause, but an effect of a final cause does not strictly precede its cause; it fits into its cause. In a sense, a particular movement must occur first in order for a pattern of movements to emerge, just as the movements of a symphony have to be played (the effects) before the symphony is played (the cause), or nine innings have to be played (the effects) before a baseball game is played (the cause). In that sense and in that sense only, a final cause follows its effects.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 20.


“Normally, for Augustine, the soul faces outward into the world and reason exercises itself in futile efforts to make sense of the chaos it finds there. But if the soul would turn inward it would face the spiritual world–which Augustine calls, at various times, Truth, Wisdom, God, or Christ, and it would know the truth automatically.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 28.


“For Augustine, however, what we see when we turn our vision inward is not private and subjective at all, but public and objective–more truly objective (because unchangeable and the same from all perspectives) than what we see when we look outward.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 30.


“Unlike Augustine’s concept of an interior but public mind, Descartes’ concept of mind was both interior and private. Descartes’ distinction–involuntary behavior controlled by a stimulus from the environment; voluntary behavior controlled by an internal mind out of direct contact with the world, but observable by introspection–is with us to this day.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 36.


“From a behavioral viewpoint, the act of (a) seeing a red light and (b) stopping at a red light are not two separate processes in a chain but rather a single process described in two different ways.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 49.


“... there seems to be a fundamental contradiction within neural identity theory. Neural identity theory claims that mental terms stand for events within the nervous system. Yet there is no single neural event or single locus in the brain invariably activated whenever a red stimulus, for example, affects behavior....

“Let us therefore seriously consider behavioral identity theory–the idea that sensations occur not in a specific place within an animal but in the animal’s overt behavior. According to behavioral identity theory, mental states are identical not to specific neural events but to behavioral patterns.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 50.


“According to behavioral identity theory, mental events are neither spiritual events taking place in another world nor neural events taking place somewhere inside the brain. They are rather actions of the person as a whole as expressed in overt behavior. The mental context of a given discrete act is not an internal event (physical or spiritual) efficiently causing the act. The mental context of a given act is rather the larger overt behavior pattern into which the act fits.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 51.


“Teleological behaviorism is a kind of behavioral identity theory. It essentially replaces Descartes’ spatial distinction between mentally and mechanically controlled actions with a temporal distinction between mentally and mechanically controlled actions.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 51.


“... discrimination (even the simple kind between sounds and their absence) is the correlation of behavior with environmental events over time.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 55.


“According to behavioral identity theory, to love your mother or anyone else is not to have your heart go pitter-patter at the sight of her but to behave toward her in a loving way over a long period of time.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 55.


“Skinnerian behaviorism differs from teleological behaviorism in two respects. First, Skinnerian behaviorists do not use mental terms as part of their scientific vocabulary, while teleological behaviorism does use mental terms. Second, Skinnerian behaviorists explain complex behavior (usually identified with the mind) in terms of unobserved, internal immediate muscular movements; teleological behaviorism explains complex behavior in terms of overt patterns extended in space and time. Teleological behaviorism claims that the mind exists outside the body at the intersection of these overt patterns and their environmental consequences.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 59.


“The difference between a self-controlled act or an altruistic act, on the one hand, and an impulsive or selfish act, on the other, is most meaningfully conceived as a difference in the extent of the overt pattern of which the act is a part. Impulsive and selfish acts are easily explained in molecular terms; their reinforcers are evident. But the reinforcers of self-controlled and altruistic acts are abstract and are spread out in time and social space. A self-controlled act may have no reinforcer whatsoever. Refusal of a single cigarette, as I said, may never be reinforced ...” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 72.


“The extension proposed by these authors [Alva Noe, Derek Melser, Andy Clark] is spatial–reaching back into the brain and extending in the other direction to the social and physical world. Mine is temporal–reaching out into the social and physical worlds of the past and the future...” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 77.


“One of the central claims of teleological behaviorism is that in psychology the term behavior should be reserved for behavior of the whole organism (i.e., overt behavior) and that the actions of the brain, the peripheral nervous system, and individual muscles are most usefully considered as components of the mechanism underlying behavior, but not as behavior itself.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 78.


“As in biological evolution, the unit selected in behavioral evolution is not always an individual organism or an individual act, but may be a group of organisms or a pattern of acts extended in time or social space–the extended self.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 81.


“... parallel to the idea of group selection of organisms (responsible for inheritance of altruistic tendencies), there is another kind of group selection–selection by reinforcement of (patterns of) responses over the lifetimes of individuals.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 87.


“What then, does tie our actions together, if not a central self? The answer is that abstract, broadly based social situations signaling consistent reinforcement contingencies (‘meta-discriminative stimuli’) can tie a person’s actions together over extended periods.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 92.


“Thought and experience both may be understood in terms of temporally extended patterns of overt behavior. A person’s self consists of the temporal extension and overlap of that person’s various overt behavioral patterns. In human as well as non-human existence, many behavioral patterns are coordinated with those of others. Their overlap–their common interest–extends our selves nearer or further into our society.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 93.


“I believe that the crucial inherited tendency necessary for the learning of altruism is a direct sensitivity to the consequences of temporally extended patterns of acts.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 95.


“... people discount the value of rewards to other people by the social distance between them, just as they discount rewards to themselves by their delay.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 97.


“The teleological behavioral extension of that Gestalt dictum [the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts] would say that the value of an activity may be greater (or less) than the sum of the values of its parts.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 102.


“One may conceive freedom not as an internal attempt to turn away from the particulars in the world but rather as an external attempt to see through them and to conceive the world abstractly. A person who does this is free from particular influences in the same sense that an ocean liner is free from the influence of small waves.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 114.


“The more complex an organism’s behavior, the more abstract are the principles that explain it.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 114.


“The self becomes incoherent, ... when different situations come to serve as signals for different, sometimes incompatible, behavioral patterns. From this viewpoint, self-examination or understanding another person is accomplished not by probing deeply within the self or another person for hidden motives but rather by exploring widely over time for superordinate signals in the person’s life (meta-discriminative stimuli) that can make behavioral patterns coherent.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 180.


“Sounds and sights correlated with behavior are, in the behaviorist’s language, called discriminative stimuli.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 181.


“We often fail to make the subtle behavioral adjustments constituting discrimination among complex, overlapping everyday-life situations. In such cases we need to discover, in our environments, still more complex and abstract sets of rules (moral rules) that may guide our behavior both in business and among our families and friends –both on stage and off, as it were. We call these rules meta-discriminative stimuli.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 181.


“In its non-mechanistic character, teleological behaviorism may seem to resemble modern holistic’ psychology. However, teleological behaviorism differs from holistic psychology in exactly the same way that it differs from cognitive psychology and neuroscience–that is, in its ultimate object, which is to understand the mind as overt behavior, observable in principle by another person. For the modern holistic psychologist, behavior is only a byproduct of the mind, which can be understood only by phenomenological observation–not by wide behavioral observation (observation over an extended time period) but by deep observation within yourself.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 182.


“... thinking is a way of acting over time, rather than a prologue to action.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 183.


“In contrast to the psychoanalyst and the cognitive therapist, a teleological behaviorist would not shy away from directly aiding patients in finding meta-discriminative stimuli in the external, temporally extended environment (ethics, religion, moral codes, examples from literature) that might guide their behavior. The relationship between therapist and client would be similar to the relationship between a graduate student and his thesis advisor.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 193.


“The immediate consequences of outsight, as we have defined it here, typically involve the giving up of immediate social reinforcement and engaging in behavior historically reinforced only as part of highly abstract patterns.” Rachlin, Howard. 2014. The Escape of the Mind. Oxford UP. P. 197.


“Thus, cultural evolution initiated a process of self-domestication, driving genetic evolution to make us prosocial, docile, rule followers who expect a world governed by social norms monitored and enforced by communities.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 5.


“The secret of our species success resides not in the power of our individual minds, but in the collective brains of our communities. Our collective brains arise from the synthesis of our cultural and social natures–from the fact that we readily learn from others (are cultural) and can, with the right norms, live in large and widely interconnected groups (are social).” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 5.


“Humans have altered more than one-third of the earth[’s] land surface. We cycle more nitrogen than all other terrestrial life forms combined and have now altered the flow of two-thirds of the earth’s rivers. Our species uses 100 times more biomass than any large species that has ever lived.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 8.


“Throughout this book, social learning refers to any time an individual’s learning is influenced by others, and it includes many different kinds of psychological processes. Individual learning refers to situations in which individuals learn by observing or interacting directly with their environment and can range from calculating the best time to hunt by observing when certain prey emerge, to engaging in trial-and-error learning with different digging tools.... Cultural learning refers to a more sophisticated subclass of social learning abilities in which individuals seek to acquire information from others, often by making inferences about their preferences, goals, beliefs, or strategies and/or by copying their actions or motor patterns.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 12-3.


“When chimpanzees played this asymmetric variant of Matching Pennies, they zoomed right in on the predicted result, the Nash equilibrium. Humans, however, systematically and consistently missed the rational predictions, ... Chimpanzees seem to be better at individual learning and strategic anticipation, at least in this game.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 19.


“In many contexts, but not all, we humans make systemic logical errors, see illusory correlations, misattribute causal forces to random processes, and give equal weight to small and large samples. Not only do humans often fall systematically short of these standard benchmarks, we actually often don’t do appreciably better than other species–like birds, bees, and rodents–on these tests. Sometimes, we do worse.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 20.


“... the more culture accumulates, the greater the selection pressures on genes for making one an adept cultural learner with a bigger brain capable of harnessing the ever-upward-spiraling body of cultural information.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 58.


“Our cultural knowledge about the natural world combined with out tools, including our food-processing techniques, allowed our ancestors to obtain a high-energy diet with much less time and effort than other species. This was crucial for brain expansion in our lineage. However, since brains need a constant supply of energy, periods of food scarcity–such as those initiated by floods, droughts, injuries, and disease–pose a serious threat to humans. To deal with this threat, natural selection needed to trim our body’s energy budget and create a storehouse for times of scarcity. The emergence of tools and weapons allowed natural selection to trade expensive tissues for fat, which is cheaper to maintain and provides an energy-storage system crucial for sustaining big brains through periods of scarcity.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 70.


“Alongside these anatomical changes, our species’ long history with complex tools has also likely shaped our learning psychology. We are cognitively primed to categorize ‘artifacts’ (e.g., tools and weapons) as separate from all other things in the world, like rocks and animals. Unlike plants, animals, and other nonliving things like water, we think about function when we think about artifacts. For example, when young children ask about artifacts they ask ‘What’s it for’ or ‘What does it do?’ instead of ‘What kind is it?’ which is their initial query when seeing a novel plant or animal.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 71.


“Children rapidly organize information about plants and animals into (1) essentialized categories (e.g., ‘cobras’ and ‘penguins’) embedded in (2) hierarchical (treelike) taxonomies that permit inferences using (3) category-based induction and (4) taxonomic inheritance.

“These are fancy cognitive science terms for rather intuitive ideas. In using essentialized categories, learners implicitly assume that membership in a category (say, ‘cats’) results from some hidden essence deep inside that all members share. This essence cannot be removed by superficial changes to an individual. For example, suppose you operate on a cat and then paint it so that this individual now looks exactly like a skunk. Is it a cat or a skunk? Or, something new, like a ‘skat’ or ‘cunk’? Children and adults will typically say that it is still a cat which currently looks like a skunk. By contrast, if a table is dismantled and reconstructed as a chair, no one thinks it’s still a table. It ‘is’ what it ‘does.’ Using category-based induction learners can readily extend information learned about one particular cat to all cats–if you see Felix go crazy over catnip, you readily infer that all cats will likely similarly respond to catnip.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 78.


“Focusing on emotions, psychologists have independently distinguished two forms of pride, which, though they have labelled them as hubristic pride and authentic pride, correspond closely to dominance-based pride and prestige-based pride.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 127.


“When a highly successful hunter achieves local recognition for his abilities (prestige), it means that when he actively cooperates, by pitching in during a turtle hunt or by supplying a community feast, others will copy his actions, inclinations, and motivations.... This, of course, means that any altruism is only altruism in the short-term sense. In the longer run, prestigious individuals who behave generously get to live in a social network that, by virtue of their own actions, becomes more generous and cooperative.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 129.


“... if I’m right, sociality and cooperation among hunter-gather[er]s, and everyone else, should depend on norms, practices, and beliefs that amplify or suppress our innate motivations and dispositions.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 154.


“Not only are individual ritual relationships more important than genetic relatedness, but individuals have three times as many ritual partners as they do close blood relations.

“Taken together, ritual and affinal relationships, both of which are culturally constructed and nonexistent in primates or other animals, explain much more about the patterns of association, cooperation, helping, and sharing than blood ties.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 164.


“Groups with superior institutions simply out last and eventually replace those with fewer cooperation-galvanizing norms.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 168.


“Several converging lines of evidence, though all admittedly indirect, suggest that intergroup competition was probably important for much of our species evolutionary history.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 169.


“By observing others, young children spontaneously infer context-specific rules for social life and assume these rules are norms–rules that others should obey. Deviations and deviants make children angry and motivate them to instill proper behavior in others.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 186.


“This experiment [staged actions with modeler and puppet where puppet sometimes does thing differently than modeler] illustrates some of the essential features that distinguish human social life in all societies from that of other species:

• “We live in a world governed by social rules, even if not everyone knows the rules.
• “Many of these rules are arbitrary, or seem arbitrary (e.g., fish taboos in Fiji).
• “Others care whether we follow these rules, and react negatively to violations.
• “We infer that others care about whether we follow these rules.”
Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 186-7.


“A Yasawan’s reputation is like a shield that protects them from exploitation or harm by others, often from those who harbor old jealousies or past grievances. Violating norms, especially repeatedly, causes this reputational shield to drop and creates an opening for others to exploit the norm violator with relative impunity. Norm violators have their property (e.g., plates, matches, tools) stolen and destroyed while they are away fishing or visiting relatives in other villages; or they have their crops stolen and gardens burned at night.... Despite their selfish motivations, these actions sustain social norms, including cooperative ones, because–crucially–perpetrators can only get away with such actions when they target a norm violator, a person with his reputational shield down. Were they to do this to someone with a good reputation, the perpetrator would himself become a norm violator and damage his or her reputation, thereby opening themselves up to gossip, thefts and property damage. This system, which Yasawans themselves can’t explicitly lay out, thereby harnesses past grievances, jealousies, and plain old self-interest to sustain social norms, including cooperative norms like contributing to village feasts.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 188.


“Over our evolutionary history, the sanctions for norm violations and the rewards for norm compliance have driven a process of self-domestication that has endowed our species with a norm psychology that has several components. First, to more effectively acquire the local norms, humans intuitively assume that the social world is rule governed, even if they don’t yet know the rules. The violation of these rules could and should have negative consequences. This outcome means that the behavior of others can be interpreted as being influenced by social rules. This also means that, at a young age, we readily develop cognitive abilities and motivations for spotting norm violations and avoiding or exploiting norm violators, as well as for monitoring and maintaining our own reputations. Second, when we learn norms we, at least partially, internalize them as goals in themselves.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 188-9.


“In short, to survive in a world governed by social rules enforced by third parties and reputations, we became norm learners with prosocial biases, norm adherers internalizing key motivations, norm-violation spotters, and reputation managers. This makes us rather unlike any other species.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 199.


“When a group of chimpanzees bumps into a lone individual from a neighboring group, hostility erupts immediately with a volley of aggressive hoots and barks. If the group is large enough, they will likely attack and kill the unlucky traveler. Human societies, even the smallest-scale ones, are quite different in this respect from chimpanzee populations because local groups, whether those are bands, villages, or single households, are enmeshed in larger tribes, or at least diffuse tribal networks.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 199-200.


“... in experiments like the Ultimatum Game, people from places as diverse as Mongolia and New Guinea willingly pay a cost to preferentially punish their co-ethnics over their non-co-ethnics for norm violations.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 204.


“... when children or adults encounter a situation in which accent or language indicate ‘same ethnicity’ but skin color indicates ‘different race,’ the ethnolinguistic markers trump the racial markers.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 205.


“Once individuals evolve to learn from one another with sufficient accuracy, social groups of individuals develop what might be called collective brains. The power of these collective brains to develop increasingly effective tools and technologies, as well as other forms of nonmaterial culture, depends in part on the size of the group of individuals engaged and on their social interconnectedness. It’s our collective brains operating over generations, and not the innate inventive power or creative abilities of individual brains, that explain our species’ fancy technologies and massive ecological success.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 212.


“Thus, along with group size, the degree of social interconnectedness is very powerful in generating cumulative cultural evolution, even more powerful than individual smarts.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 213-4.


“The point is, larger and more interconnected populations generate more sophisticated tools, techniques, weapons, and know-how because they have larger collective brains.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 218.


“This approach to understanding cumulative culture–to explaining the sophistication of technology and the size of a group’s body of know-how [based on group size and interconnectedness]–has two other less intuitive implications. First, if a population suddenly shrinks or gets socially disconnected, it can actually lose adaptive cultural information, resulting in a loss of technical skills and the disappearance of complex technologies. Second, a population’s size and social interconnectedness sets a maximum on the size of a group’s collective brain.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 218-9.


“Among humans, the size of our social groups, the intensity of our sociality, and the density of our networks depend on social norms and cultural technologies like rituals.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 224.


“Languages are a subset of culture that are composed of communicative tools (words) with rules (grammar) for using those tools.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 232.


“Skilled readers are probably worse at identifying faces, since jury-rigging the relevant brain areas impinges on the fusiform gyrus, an area that specializes in face recognition. In fact, the well-established neurological asymmetry in face processing, favoring the right side of the brain, may be due to the effects of learning to read, which drives face processing out of the left side and shifts what it can to the right side.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 261.


“As usual, participants raised their attractiveness ratings when they saw higher averages from others and reduced them when they saw lower ratings [males evaluating female photos before and after being given correct or false evaluations of others]. The brain scans reveal that seeing the different ratings of others altered their subjective evaluations of those faces. Combined with data from other similar studies, it appears that shifting to agree with others is internally (neurologically) rewarding and results in enduring neural modifications that change preferences or valuations. In short, cultural learning changes how people perceive or experience faces based on other people’s preferences. These are biological and neurological–but not genetic–changes to what people find attractive.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 265.


“While in a brain scanner, participants tasted five wines that were labeled and referenced using prices per bottle, specifically, $5, $10, $35, $45, and $90. However, unbeknown to the participants, they actually only tasted three different wines. Two of these three were labeled as ‘$5’ or ‘$45’ and as ‘$10’ or ‘$90.’ As usual, people rated the more expensive wines as better (more pleasurable), even though they were actually exactly the same wine.

“Here, however, we can have a look at people’s brains. By comparing the scans from the same wines at different prices, the results show that people drinking the more expensive wines experienced more activation in their medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region associated with the experience of pleasure or pleasantness for odors, tastes (food and drink), and music. Thus, this work suggests that while price does not affect primary sensory regions of the brain, it changes the valuation of the input from those regions. Sensory input is what it is, but cultural learning affects whether we perceive the same sensory input as better or worse.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 265-6.


“Taxi driving is the tip of an iceberg [showing better cognitive skills for mapping]. These kinds of studies, which are still in their infancy, have already shown that learning to juggle, speak German, and play the piano all have specific effects on gray and/or white matter in various parts of the brain.... Recognizing this, the emerging subdiscipline of cultural neuroscience has now begun to show the impact of day-to-day culturally transmitted routines, practices, norms, and goals on our brains. These cultural niches result in different cognitive abilities, perceptual biases, attention allocations, and motivations.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 267-8.


“More broadly, the biological pathways used by a range of placebo treatments include suppressing immune responses, releasing hormones like serotonin and dopamine, altering brain activity in particular regions, conditioning opioid receptors in respiratory centers, and reducing β-adrenergic activity in the cardiovascular systems.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 274.


“By around 2.4 million years ago, a bigger-brained (about 630 cm3) bipedal ape appeared in Africa. These apes, and there may have been more than one species, are typically considered the first members of our genus, Homo, so I’ll refer to them collectively as Early Homo. Early Homo had smaller jaws and cheek teeth, which had thinner enamel. These characteristics suggests that their anatomy was responding to the spread of know-how about food processing, of which those Oldowan tools likely played a role.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 286.


“Although researchers have long argued for an immense period of stasis in the tools and know-how of erectus, the emerging evidence is beginning to indicate that this may not be the case. By 850,000 years ago, erectus, now with a bit larger brain, is sometimes thinning his large cutting tools and creating greater symmetry.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 292-3.


“... the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov has yielded rich insights into the life of one society around 750,000 years ago. The extensive remains indicate the existence and persistence of hearths and areas for both stone-tool manufacturing and food processing. The inhabitants controlled fire and made a variety of stone tools, including hand axes, cleavers, blades, knives, awls, scrapers, and choppers. Made from flint, basalt, and limestone, tool manufacture was done on-site, often from giant slabs carried in from a distant quarry by a team. Some of the basalt slabs have notches, indicating the use of levers as part of the quarrying process.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 293-4.


“And even if the costs of brain expansion are manageable, natural selection will then tend to invest in improving animals’ individual (asocial) learning abilities, since individual learning allows innovation and behavioral flexibility even when no one else around is doing anything worth learning (when social learning isn’t useful)....

“Thus, the start-up problem means that the conditions under which there’s enough cumulative culture to begin driving genetic evolution are rare, because, early on, there wouldn’t have been enough of an accumulation to pay the costs of bigger brains. And if there had been, the most adaptive investment would be in improved individual learning, not better social learning or eventually cultural learning. So in order for natural selection to favor improved social learning, there has to be a lot of cultural stuff to learn, ...” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 297.


“For some primates, spending time on the ground–terrestriality–fosters the development of more tool types and more-complex tools, and a greater spread of those skills by social learning.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 299.


“However, as the density of males increases in a group, the payoffs from using dominance go down, since males have to fight off more competitors and keep track of more females....

“Intriguing evidence for the effect of group size on the emergence of pair-bonding has been gathered for the Ngogo chimpanzee group.... As noted, the Ngogo group is unusually large compared to typical wild chimpanzee troops. Due perhaps to the intensified competition of the larger group, detailed analyses of male and female movements across their large territory indicate that some males and females are moving around in pairs. This is odd since chimpanzees are notoriously not pair-bonders. Genetic studies show that these paired males got to preferentially father the offspring of the female he was with.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 304.


“Thus, in a large ape group in which females are immigrants, females will benefit from pair-bonding by getting access to local knowledge (along with the usual protection, food, etc.), and males will benefit from pair-bonding by mitigating fierce male-male competition.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 305.


“Overall, pair-bonding holds the potential to transform a few scattered kin-based relationships into something that looks more like a family or a kin network,...” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 306.


“So, by concealing ovulation at least partially, males are forced to be around their mates more often than they would otherwise and end up engaging in a lot of reproductively unnecessary sex.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 306.


“A combination of pair-bonding and a greater reliance on social learning will create both an expanded circle of kinship, with more enduring relationships, and greater alloparental care for offspring.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 307.


“However, the key to understanding the division of labor [for gender] is to recognize that it’s rooted in a division of information. As cultural information begins to accumulate such that no one individual can know everything, pair-bonded couples can specialize in complementary bodies of culturally acquired skills, practices, and knowledge.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 310.


“Pair-bonds can also socially connect different groups, thereby opening the flow of cultural information and increasing the size and complexity of toolkits by expanding the collective brain. This effect occurs because pair-bonds can establish enduring relationships between females and their brothers, fathers, and uncles.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 311.


“Thus, the narrow evolutionary bridge across the Rubicon I’ve constructed begins with a large ground-dwelling ape who is forced to live in larger groups (by predation) in which at least some members of both sexes have evolutionary incentives to pair-bond.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 313.


“Circumventing this constraint [the potential collapse of population numbers if mothers have to wait too many years between infants], the larger groups of social learners created by predation can also lead to the spread of pair-bonding strategies, which eventually expand kinship circles, increase social learning opportunities, and favor greater alloparental care.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 313.


“... these now outdated evolutionary views fail to recognize that the central force driving human genetic evolution for hundreds of thousands of years, or longer, has been cultural evolution. The consequences of this run deep and wide:

• “Many aspects of our physiology and anatomy make sense only as genetically evolved responses to selective pressures created by the cultural evolution of things like fire, cooking, cutting tools, projectile weapons, water containers, artifacts, tracking know-how, and communicative repertoires. Among our numerous features, these help explain our small teeth, short colons, shrunken stomachs, poor plant-detoxification abilities, accurate throwing capabilities, nuchal ligaments (head stabilizer for running), numerous eccrine sweat glands, long postreproductive lives, lowered larynxes, dexterous tongues, whitened sclera, and enlarged brains.
• “Many of our cognitive abilities and biases make sense only as genetically evolved adaptations to the presence of valuable cultural information. These evolved mechanisms include our well-honed cultural learning abilities, ‘over-imitative’ tendencies, and folkbiological capacities for organizing and enriching what we learn about plants and animals, among many others.
• “Much of our species’ status psychology, including our deferential motivations, patterns of mimicry and imitation, facets of pride, cooperative tendencies, and bodily displays, appear to be genetically evolved adaptations to a world in which valuable cultural information was unevenly distributed across the minds of other members of our social groups.
• “Our social psychology appears designed for navigating a world with social rules and reputations, where learning and complying with these rules is paramount and where different groups possess quite different norms. We internalize costly norms as goals in themselves, usually via cultural learning, and are particularly good at spotting norm violators, even when those violations have nothing to do with cooperation. To make sure we learn the best norms for our own groups and avoid the dangers of mis-coordinating with others, we preferentially use marker traits like dialect and language to distinguish potential models and then preferentially target our cultural learning and social interactions toward those who share our marker traits.”
Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. Pp. 316-7.


“... our collective brains depend heavily on the packages of social norms and institutions that weave together our communities, create interdependence, foster solidarity, and subdivide our cultural information and labor.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 318.


“It appears that as with the emergence of individual organisms from collections of cells, culture-driven genetic evolution is gradually shaping our societies into superorganisms of a sort.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 318.


“Natural selection shaped our psychology to make us docile, ashamed at norm violations, and adept at acquiring and internalizing social norms. This is the process of self-domestication.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 319.


“The threat of reputational damage and punishment created by social norms for kinship and reciprocity favors genes that further enhanced our evolved kin and reciprocity psychologies. This is how we became more cooperative than other species at both the level of family and friends, as well as at the levels of communities and tribes. Of course, this also creates an enduring tension between these levels that continues to pervade modern life and institutions, and establishes one of the major challenges to well-functioning organizations, governments, and states.

“Thus, human societies vary so much in the scale and intensity of their cooperation because different societies have culturally evolved different social norms.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 320.


“In humans, sociality and technological know-how are intimately interwoven.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 322.


“The point is that being able to construct or acquire these mini-models of causality evolved genetically because it improved cultural transmission.... By this view, the ability to construct mini causal models didn’t cause fancy tools and practices. The cultural evolution of increasingly sophisticated tools and practices first drove the emergence of this cognitive ability, and then the two entered into a culture-gene coevolutoinary duet.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 323.


“Perhaps the fist step is to recognize that people who experience very different institutions, technologies, languages, and religions, just to name a few key domains, will be both psychologically and biologically different, even if they are not genetically different.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 327.


“To move forward in our quest to better understand human life, we need to embrace a new kind of evolutionary science, one that focuses on the rich interaction and coevolution of psychology, culture, biology, history, and genes.” Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton UP. P. 331.
“Such theories [interactionist phenomenologically based theories] start from one basic insight about the nature of social cognition: the fact that we are able to understand directly and correctly emotions on the face of others and their behavior as intentional and goal-oriented from the very first experiences of encountering others. This has been called ‘primary intersubjectivity.’ It involves a kind of recognition of others that is displayed by newborns and that is characterized precisely by neither involving any kind of inferential cognitive mechanisms not any mediation through articulated thoughts, such as attributing states to others. That notwithstanding, it involves more than just mere reactions to stimuli. More precisely, it involves grasping the meaning of the other person’s reactions.” Satne, Glenda. 2014. “Interaction and self-correction.” Frontiers in Psychology. July. Vol. 5. Article 798. P. 7.


“... sensitivity to correction. It can be defined as the disposition to modify one’s own behavior regarding the application of a specific concept in the light of the consent and dissent of others with whom one is interacting in face-to-face encounters.” Satne, Glenda. 2014. “Interaction and self-correction.” Frontiers in Psychology. July. Vol. 5. Article 798. P. 8.


“Thus, the well-acknowledged idea of sociality as the trait characteristic of the emergence of the human, when understood in terms of sensitivity to correction, can also explain the emergence of normative behaviors without any explanatory gap.” Satne, Glenda. 2014. “Interaction and self-correction.” Frontiers in Psychology. July. Vol. 5. Article 798. P. 9.


“During social interaction, people receive both conscious and unconscious social cues from others’ expressions, gestures, postures, actions, and intonation. Thus, they automatically align at many levels, starting from bodily synchrony to similar orientations of interests and attention.” Hari, Ritta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. 88. October 7. P. 181.


“Already a young baby expects interaction from others, getting nervous very soon if the mother ‘freezes’ her face. Such ‘still-face’ experiments suggest that the baby has from early on communicative intentions and that she and the caretaker form an interactive system that is mutually regulated.” Hari, Ritta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. 88. October 7. P. 182.


“One promising framework for modeling various levels of brain functions, including mirroring and mentalizing, is predictive coding, a Bayesian approach to perception, action, and various cognitive functions. Here the basic assumption is that since the brain operates in uncertain conditions, it likely has to maintain probabilistic models of the surrounding world, updating them on the basis of sensory information.” Hari, Ritta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. 88. October 7. P. 183.


“Consequently, we have proposed ‘two-person neuroscience’ (2PN) as a suitable conceptual and methodological framework to study the physiological basis of human social interaction. 2PN refers to an approach to study two interacting persons at the same time, and the related conceptual framework, with a focus on dyads rather than individuals.” Hari, Ritta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. 88. October 7. P. 184.


“Now that simultaneous brain imaging of multiple subjects has become technically feasible, we should turn our attention to the analysis of the recordings. In general, a major concern in the interpretation of hyperscanning data is the inability to disentangle the correlations evoked by social interaction from other possible common sources between the subjects. A synchronous change in the data from two subjects does not necessarily imply coupling related to the social interaction but can reflect, for example, a difference in the experimental conditions affecting both subjects.” Hari, Ritta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. 88. October 7. P. 188.


“For example, each subject may be constantly switching between active, reactive, and anticipatory modes in the course of the interaction, which affects the relative timing of the recorded signals.” Hari, Ritta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. 88. October 7. P. 188.


“Would it then be possible that humans have an innate tendency to interact and synchronize with others? The origin of such a tendency would be easy to understand in all mammals who are entrained with the mother’s motor and vocalization rhythm already in the womb....

“The primacy of interaction is also supported by findings that children learn best during interaction, and much less by observing the behaviors of others.” Hari, Ritta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. 88. October 7. P. 189.


“Hart el al. noticed that although individuals have their characteristic signatures of velocity patterns in the mirror game (that they use while acting as leaders), during the togetherness epochs these movement patterns were different; they were not of either of the participants, nor were they just average or intermediate patterns but distinctly different from the individual patterns.” Hari, Ritta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. 88. October 7. P. 189. Reference: Hart, Y., L. Noy, R. Feniger-Schaal, A. Mayo, and U. Alon. 2014. “Individuality and togetherness in joint improvised motion.” PLoS ONE. 9. e87213.


“IBH [Interactive Brain Hypothesis] assumes that interactive experience and interactive skills play an enabling role for the development and function of social brain functions in an analogous manner as, e.g., electricity has an enabling role in boiling water in a kettle. If IBH would turn out to be true, we would need to revise many current ideas about the brain basis of human social interaction... Stated boldly, the assumptions of IBH would form the big picture of interactive behavior, decorated by all the details of perception and action, and not vice versa.” Hari, Ritta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. 88. October 7. P. 190.


“A variety of studies have investigated the cognitive consequences of attending to the same object and found that sharing an attentional focus with other individuals causes more elaborate processing of the jointly attended object, increased memory of that object, and increased relevance attribution of that object.” Wolf, Wouter, J. Launay & R. Dunbar. 2016. “Joint attention, shared goals, and social bonding.” British Journal of Psychology. 107: 322-337. P. 324.


“This experiment demonstrates that sharing an attentional focus during an irrelevant cognitive task can increase subsequent perceptions of social bondedness with an interaction partner. The manipulation of joint goals used in the current experiment did not have any influence on social bonding, however. These results imply that relatively low-level constituent parts of coordinated social behaviours can have consequences for bonding experienced between people.” Wolf, Wouter, J. Launay & R. Dunbar. 2016. “Joint attention, shared goals, and social bonding.” British Journal of Psychology. 107: 322-337. P. 332.


“Cognitively, it seems likely that sharing success with another person (i.e., experiencing positive feedback together) would have important implications for social relationships because it would encourage seeking out that positive reinforcement in future.” Wolf, Wouter, J. Launay & R. Dunbar. 2016. “Joint attention, shared goals, and social bonding.” British Journal of Psychology. 107: 322-337. P. 334.


“Without claiming to be exhaustive, it seems that historically most scenarios invoked to account for the emergence of the kinds of symbiotic ecological relationships that qualify as domestication tend to fall into one of two broad categories. In one category, humans purposefully set out to accomplish domestication as an objective, in order to gain maximum benefit from the association. In the other category, domestication was a natural outgrowth of an ecological association between people and animals, in this case wolves, and transpired regardless of how those people may have viewed their association with those animals.” Morey, Darcy & R. Jeger. 2015. “Paleolithic dogs: Why sustained domestication then?” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 3: 420-428. P. 421.


“It seems reasonable that a given wolf lineage may have been predisposed to contact with a human group, whether for dietary possibilities, from coping with stressful conditions sucessfully, not being too fearful of people, or perhaps a combination of those factors.” Morey, Darcy & R. Jeger. 2015. “Paleolithic dogs: Why sustained domestication then?” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 3: 420-428. P. 426.


“The domestic relationship between people and today’s dogs was primarily the outcome of a group of wolves, perhaps more than one group, undertaking an ecological strategy, encouraged by people, that allowed them to cope successfully with the ecological uncertainties of Late Pleistocene times. That strategy was in effect to modify their existing ecological niche substantially, such that human society became the key feature of a new niche. People likely facilitated this niche change by incorporating some young wolves into their fold, and accepting them as members of their group.” Morey, Darcy & R. Jeger. 2015. “Paleolithic dogs: Why sustained domestication then?” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 3: 420-428. P. 427.


“Extensive allomaternal care is by far the best predictor of interspecific variation in proactive prosociality. Proactive prosocial motivations therefore systematically arise whenever selection favours the evolution of cooperative breeding. Because the human data fit this general primate pattern, the adoption of cooperative breeding by our hominin ancestors also provides the most parsimonious explanation for the origin of human hyper-cooperation.” Burkart, J.M., O. Allon, F. Amici, C. Fichtel, C. Finkenwirth, A. Heschl, J. Huber, K. Isler, Z. Kosonen, E. Martins, E. Meulman, R. Richiger, K. Rueth, B. Spillmann, S. Wiesendanger & C. van Schaik. 2014. “The evolutionary origin of human hyper-cooperation.” Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms5747. P. 1.


“Social evolution involves increasing control over people’s actions. This is a consequence of the progressive development of social structures that constrain choices.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 3.


“Let us first identify what a society is not.

• “A society is not an ethnic group. Ethnic identity may or may not mark social boundaries.
• “A society does not necessarily have a homogeneous culture.
• “While a society cannot exist without people, a society is not the sum of the individuals who constitute it. A society cannot be reduced to individual characteristics; rather, it plays a major role in constituting individuals.
• “Like ‘society,’ ‘culture’ is a methodological construct rather than a given.
• “Unlike ‘society,’ ‘culture’ is not an effective conceptual tool because it lacks a workable definition.”
Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pp. 12-13.


“... the river-based grouping, a social network defined by partially correlated forms of interaction (marriages, commerce, political alliances). A river-based grouping contains different language groups and socio-technological adaptations (swiddeners and hunter-gatherers). Throughout Borneo, river-based groupings tended to avoid headhunting among themselves. A river-based grouping was not automatically a political unit, but strong leaders often emerged to control it.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 14.


“Human life is neither a fortuitous assemblage of independent traits nor a set of hyper-coherent structures imposing themselves on individuals but something in between.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 16.


“A ‘society’ is an object constructed by observers in order to approximate real events through a process of abstraction.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 16.


“Therefore, a society is not an object available to scrutiny at the beginning of the analysis but, rather, a construct of the analysis.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 17.


“However, cultures, unlike languages, are not systems but, rather, assemblages of practices associated with specific populations – or parts thereof – in given situations. Within what we call culture, there are systems, (e.g., the economy, language, animal taxonomies, technological specializations, ritual and belief systems). However, these systems are not related to each other in a necessary way:....” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 18.


“In an immediate return economy, the principle is essentially: ‘From everyone according to their ability to everyone according to their needs.’ In delayed-return economies, the principle is: ‘From some people according to their willingness to provide a commodity and/or labour to some other people according to their ability to provide some commodity and/or labour in return, so that the exchanges are deemed to be equivalent.’ These two economic models may co-exist in a given society, but they form distinct sectors that are insulated from each other.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 19.


“Middle-range societies are often treated as mere stepping-stones in an evolutionary path between hunter-gatherers and preindustrial states, but they display many social features that disappear or take on a new significance with state formation.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 21.


“For both hunter-gatherers and states, constraints reduce the range of social variability. Middle-range societies show great social variability, while hunter-gatherers are limited by technology and demography. With states, the concentration of political and economic power limits variety. Middle-range societies have more complex technology and larger group size than do foragers, without having the same levels of political and economic control as states. The balance of constraints and possibilities in this phase allows for great variability and experimentation.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 21.


“The systems model tends to favour a deterministic approach to social evolution in which the system tends towards coherence. This needs to be substantiated rather than assumed;...” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 34.


“Individual autonomy is the crucial factor in understanding social life among hunter-gatherers. People are not dependent on specific others. Individual autonomy is tempered by the human need for sociality, the desire to form pair bonds, and children’s long-term dependence on adults. While foragers may not be dependent on specific others, provisioning strategies favour social living; individuals try to benefit from the work of others. This is called demand sharing. The tensions arising out of the egocentric aspects of demand sharing can be tempered by cloaking it with an ideology of generosity and responsibility. Ethically based demand sharing is called generalized reciprocity. Demand sharing and generalized reciprocity are at the core of immediate-return economies.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 42.


“Autonomy is not necessarily asocial or solitary: it often manifests itself in social contexts. For instance, when children say to their parents, ‘Let me do it!’ they are affirming their autonomy by imitating other people. Also, autonomy is not always individual. Even among simple hunter-gatherers, individuals cooperate. Even if they are free to associate with different people, they cannot persistently live alone. In all human societies, many activities are carried out in concert with others. Individual autonomy is not a recipe for chaos because it is constrained by human sociality and dependence on others – emotionally and practically.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 43.


“... demand sharing is a form of foraging, where the desired object is obtained from a person rather than from nature.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 46.


“Demand sharing and generalized reciprocity are at the core of immediate-return economies.... Contemporary simple hunter-gatherers exemplify the consequences of generalized reciprocity:

• “Social groups are flexible.
• “Individuals can choose with whom they associate. They can move about freely.’
• “People are not dependent upon specific others for their basic requirements.
• “Relationships between people stress sharing and mutuality, but there are no long-term commitments.
• “The young are autonomous; they work when they want rather than under the direction of their parents.
• “Access to territory is open to all.
• “Meat sharing is not reciprocity because sharing is obligatory and disconnected from the right to receive. Donors often persist in giving more than they receive.
• “Mechanisms limit the accumulation of personal possessions, even if these are small and portable.
• “Nomadism allows people to avoid conflict by moving away from obnoxious people.
• “Nomadism prevents the development of authority.”
Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pp. 47-8.


“The likelihood of demand sharing makes it an unproductive strategy to accumulate for future needs....” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 48.


“Accountable reciprocity is present when an account is kept of value given and value received. The equivalence of exchange values regulates exchanges, unlike in generalized reciprocity, where needs are a sufficient justification for reciprocity.

“Accountable reciprocity becomes the basis for a radically different societal model: it transforms the significance of the domestic unit, brings about new forms of cooperation, and calls for new ways to manage conflict. With accountable reciprocity, individuals become members of a single local group as opposed to being free to switch groups at will. Membership in groups becomes a central feature of social life, which brings about a significant reduction in individual autonomy.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 60.


“However, if I give you something with the expectation of an equivalent return, I need you to be there later to reciprocate. I must be able to count on you. This is far from certain in a society where groups are unstable and where the composition of hunting bands changes according to the whims of individuals. The solution to this problem is social exclusivity. Each social group becomes clearly distinguished from other groups. Individuals are now members of a single group and no longer can change their affiliation at the drop of a hat. Group membership radically transforms social interaction because it reduces the number of independent agents who interact with each other; it channels interaction through specific paths.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 63.


“... while foraging can operate both under generalized and accountable reciprocity, agriculture is predicated on the latter. In so far as a crop is the result of several months of labour, generalized reciprocity is unworkable.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 64.


“ Sustained labour over time – which is characteristic of agriculture – seems to be the variable establishing ownership, as hunting and gathering of wild foods do not establish ownership.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 66.


“Delayed-return systems ‘imply binding commitments and dependencies between people’ because they require long-term organization. In other words, they call for a social system. Producers require the support of others to secure the product of their labour. Cooperation is no longer a series of discrete events but, rather, a chain of exchanges. A consequence of cooperation is the development of established social groupings (permanent villages, kinship groups, clans, and established marital exchanges). Cooperation increases group stability because it is easier to cooperate with the same people over a long time.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 69. Subquote: Woodburn, James. 1982. “Egalitarian societies.” Man. n.s. 17:431v51. p. 433.


“Delayed-return economies enhance the significance of domestic units through accountable reciprocity; they become productive units.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 71.


“Households may strive to maintain or increase their status as homogeneous units; alternatively, they may become internally differentiated, with some individuals controlling others.... In any case, the household is the first grouping with a demarcation between decision makers and followers.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 72.


“A concomitant of delayed return systems is an increase in group size, density, and stability. delayed, accountable reciprocity requires cooperators to stay together in order to complete exchanges; it is no longer possible to move away whenever conflicts arise. New forms of conflict resolution are required. By the same token, the need for orderly governance brings about the development of norms in order to regulate behaviour in a consistent manner....

“A delayed return economy removes the structural problems compelling immediate return societies to be small. It also provides incentives for growth: a larger pool of potential cooperators allows for greater flexibility. Furthermore, ambitious individuals may benefit from an increase in group size. All these factors intensify each other. This is the reason why the movement from immediate to delayed-return systems is rapid and discontinuous: it is a rapid phase transition in which many elements of the old system are modified to operate within a delayed-return environment. All these changes increase the potential for conflict: sedentarization and stable groups make it difficult or impossible to resolve conflicts by moving away. Rules of accountable reciprocity, being less ambiguous than the principles of generalized reciprocity, make it easier to express complaints and resentment. Similarly, there is a greater potential for intercommunity clashes. These call for structures of leadership.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 74.


“Whatever their forms, delayed-return societies have mechanisms to regulate the way in which individuals are constructed and interact with each other. Various devices, such as initiations, serve to mould individuals into society members.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 76.


“Obviously, hunter-gatherers shape their environment, but this process is intensified in delayed-return economies. Agriculture not only transforms ecological adaptation and mobility but it also constructs a new world of fields, villages, and paths. Settlement patterns form the framework of social relationships.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 78.


“Kinship cannot become important before the parent-child relationship involves reciprocity so that children maintain an enduring bond with their parents when they are adults.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 78.


“Unlike simpler hunter-gatherers, Australian Aborigines have socio-centric structures: tribes, sections, and totemic clans. Sections serve a purpose similar to Inuit partnerships, namely, to reduce the number of people with whom one is obliged to share.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 80.


“Together, the following forms of complexification constitute a phase transition [from hunter-gatherers to accountable reciprocity]. They are not separate phenomena but, rather, different facets of a single transformation.

• “Norms regulate the appropriation of goods from others. This first appears as an elaboration of demand sharing into generalized reciprocity.
• “The categorization of people makes it possible to reduce the scope of demand sharing/ generalized reciprocity.
• “Groups are clearly defined: this allows a distinction between insiders and outsiders.
• “Delayed-return economies replace immediate-return economies.
• “Domestic units become units of production and managers of consumption.
• “Reduced social mobility means a reduced choice of people with whom to interact.
• “Increases in conflict, which are a consequence of reduced mobility and disagreements about reciprocity, call for the development of authoritative leadership.

“These changes entail each other, but they do not appear together all at once. The above list is roughly in order of logical appearance. The movement from opportunistic demand sharing to morally sanctioned generalized reciprocity is a first revolution, which transforms interaction from an egocentric to a socio-centric focus. After the appearance of morally justified generalized reciprocity, egocentric demand sharing continues to exist, but its scope and its potential for creating conflict are reduced.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 85.


“Delayed-return arrangements take a further step away from generalized reciprocity. Delayed-return economies are based on an apparently straightforward principle: ‘Workers should benefit from their own work.’ This principle runs against the fact that individuals cannot exist independently.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 86.


“... in so far as the domestic unit is a corporation, it becomes important to develop strategies to manage its membership. In so far as communities keep people together, it becomes imperative to manage conflict in order to prevent community fragmentation.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 89.


“Like the Senoi of Malaysia, lowland South American societies and Iroquoian groups display all the minimal features of middle-range societies: conceptual frameworks categorize people and their interaction; households are units of production and consumption; norms regulate generalized and accountable reciprocity; and there are limitations on social mobility linked to group membership. These societies share features with egalitarian foragers, in particular regarding the constraints they place on leadership.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 110.


“The limited authority of leaders in small-scale societies is so striking that anthropologists refer to these groupings as ‘acephalous’ societies. In reality, they are multicephalous, with leaders having limited authority because so many people are involved in decision making.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pp. 110-1.


“Whatever its justification, hereditary leadership forms a threshold in the process of complexification because it provides the means for enduring social differentiation.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 111.


“To put it another way, ceremonial exchange systems do play a role in reducing and managing violent conflicts between communities, but they also become tools for political aggrandizement and competition between leaders.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 123.


“Compared to hunting and gathering, agriculture is further from equilibrium because it is designed to modify the environment and requires continued, purposeful activity in order to persist. The extent to which an agricultural system can import and transform energy from the environment into increasingly complex structures depends on energy availability,....” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 130.


“While ecological and economic factors are often important in warfare, war is a purposive activity that calls for an evaluation of alternatives. It is perverse to try and explain it without reference to the actors’ motivations. While ambitious men and groups might benefit from subjugating weaker communities, this is hard to achieve in societies less complex than chiefdoms because the infrastructure necessary to enforce subjugation is absent.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 142.


“Power relationships are relevant for domestic units in all delayed-return societies. As domestic units are economic corporations, issues of membership and recruitment become important; this translates into control over marriages and postmarital residence.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pp. 144-5.


“The people of Tikopia have nowhere to go (other than migrating and never being seen again), so, for their part, they reduce violence by maintaining the chiefs’ high status while fostering restraint in the exercise of chiefly power. The chiefs’ patrilineal relatives are their advisors; they are intermediates between chiefs and followers and, thus, are able to resolve potential differences of interest. Second, all commoners of all four areas of Tikopia are subordinate to all four chiefs: if a chief abuses his power, then another chief can defuse the situation.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 170.


“The enormous variability of middle-range societies exists within boundaries. Some of these limiting factors are already present in simple foraging economies: human cognitive abilities, sociability, the slow maturation of children, and pair-bonding. The exercise of self-interest within these boundaries generates accountable reciprocity, from which emerge strong domestic units, stable local groups, and some form of local leadership. From these, other social structures may become salient in middle-range (and complex) societies: kinship, hereditary stratification, surplus appropriation, and classes....

“Delayed-return economies make it possible for kinship to be an important principle of social organization. Kinship can be a useful social tool in that it establishes different degrees of social proximity between people....

“The nature of leadership is crucial to the presence or absence of stratification. If it becomes accepted that a leader’s relatives are better suited to occupy the position, this entails a conception of human nature in which different categories of human beings inherit different social characteristics. This ideological kernel is a necessary but not sufficient condition for stratification....

“Surplus appropriation occurs in all societies in the form of demand sharing. In delayed-return economies, it takes on a new significance because it can be linked to systematic imbalances. This can occur within the domestic intensification strategies. Surplus appropriation can also occur beyond the domestic unit on the basis of power imbalances.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pp. 188-9.


“Kinship systems and residence rules are not directly apprehended ethnographically; rather, they are abstract constructs of habitual practices. Kinship has the same status as grammar.”


“In less stratified Polynesian societies, first-fruit offerings and other contributions were redistributed, but the purpose of redistribution was more political and ideological than economic: it served to mark the chief’s position. In other words, chiefship is the cause of ritual exchange rather than the consequence of economic need; surplus appropriation by aristocrats in some stratified Polynesian societies is a later development... The role of leaders does not derive from the economy; rather, it precedes – and fosters – economic intensification.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pp. 195-6.


“The uncertainty as to whether looking after one’s children and parents is an exercise in self-interest is not simply a methodological issue but also an ideological one. In so far as people feel that they are looking after their own interests when they share with people close to them, this facilitates altruism.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 211.


“If gender relations are inegalitarian, men’s interests become paramount and they capitalize on women’s labour. If women are an important element of men’s strategies, men control their daughters in order to extend their influence over the young men who want to marry them.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 241.


“The way in which a society constructs social persons provides different frameworks for computing self-interest. In particular, when people are enculturated to think of themselves essentially as members of groups (domestic units, lineages, communities, sodalities, and age-sets), self-interest becomes trans-individual. Altruism is self-interest at the trans-individual level.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 244.


“This diversity [among middle-range societies] does not mean that middle-range societies are disorganized but, rather, that they face more alternatives than do immediate-return societies, which lack the means to be complex. At the other end of the continuum, this variability is curtailed with the growth of states because, in order to control more people and more territory, leaders need to reduce diversity.” Rousseau, Jerome. 2006. Rethinking Social Evolution: The Perspective from Middle-Range Societies. McGill-Queen’s University Press. P. 245.


“Controlled laboratory studies have shown that mimicry and synchronization of behavior leads to prosocial behavior, increased cooperation, increased affiliation and rapport.” Monster, Dan, D. Hakonsson, J. Eskildsen & S. Wallot. 2016. “Physiological evidence of interpersonal dynamics in a cooperative production task.” Physiology & Behavior. 156: 24-34.


“By taking into consideration intra- and inter-species variability and by focusing on the mother-infant dyad, our results showed that all observed dyads across groups frequently engaged in turn-taking sequences to negotiate joint travel. They established participation frameworks via gaze, body orientation and the adjustment of initiation distance, and they used adjacency pair-like sequences characterized by gesture-response pairs and response waiting.” Froehlich, Marlen, P. Kuchenbuch, G. Mueller, B. Fruth, T. Furuichi, R. Wittig & S. Pika. 2016. “Unpeeling the layers of language: Bonobos and chimpanzees engage in cooperative turn-taking sequences.” Scientific Reports. 6:25887. DOI:10.1038/srep25887. P. 8.


“Overall, our findings strengthen a recent proposal by Levinson and Holler emphasizing the role of turn-taking behaviour for evolutionary scenarios of human language. They suggest that human language, despite its tight integration of speech and gesture, is a system composed of layers of abilities of different types and different antiquity.” Froehlich, Marlen, P. Kuchenbuch, G. Mueller, B. Fruth, T. Furuichi, R. Wittig & S. Pika. 2016. “Unpeeling the layers of language: Bonobos and chimpanzees engage in cooperative turn-taking sequences.” Scientific Reports. 6:25887. DOI:10.1038/srep25887. P. 8.


“In sum, sequentially organized, cooperative social interactions are not simply by-products of individuals living in human enculturated environments, but play a crucial role in communicative exchanges of mother-infant dyads of bonobos and chimpanzees living under active selection pressures. These results challenge the human-ape divide, which suggests that human cooperative communication evolved as part of larger adaptation of humans’ species-unique forms of cooperation ratcheted via existing and simpler components of primate cognition, such as group action and manipulative communication.” Froehlich, Marlen, P. Kuchenbuch, G. Mueller, B. Fruth, T. Furuichi, R. Wittig & S. Pika. 2016. “Unpeeling the layers of language: Bonobos and chimpanzees engage in cooperative turn-taking sequences.” Scientific Reports. 6:25887. DOI:10.1038/srep25887. P. 9.


“Behavioural evidence very strongly suggests that during joint tasks people may enter into states of ‘togetherness’, characterized by two-person flow in which neither of them is consciously leading or following. Similarly, the smooth turn-taking occurring during conversation strongly speaks for an autonomous and self-organizing interactive state,...” Hari, Riitta, M. Sams & L. Nummenmaa. 2016. “Attending to and neglecting people: bridging neuroscience, psychology and sociology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 351: 20150365. P. 5.


“That is, for Locke, the term ‘person’ functions to allow us to praise, to assign blame, and to hold individuals accountable for what they have done in the past.” Wilson, Robert A. & B. Lenart. 2015. “Extended Mind and Identity.” From: Clausen, J & N. Levy (Eds). Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer. Pp. 423-439. P. 424.


“The substantial reconceptualization of MPD [multiple personality disorder] as ‘dissociative identity disorder’ in DSM-IV (1994) as requiring ‘the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states’ that alternately control the individual’s behavior, and that manifest relatively cohesive narrative memories that are isolated from one another, in effect suggests that disintegration of the self, rather than its multiplication, is at the heart of the condition. Perhaps ‘multiples’ have less than, rather than more than, one self.” Wilson, Robert A. & B. Lenart. 2015. “Extended Mind and Identity.” From: Clausen, J & N. Levy (Eds). Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer. Pp. 423-439. Pp. 427-8.


“While there are many ways in which memory has been conceptualized – short term vs long term, episodic vs semantic, procedural vs declarative, and iconic vs linguistic – as we have seen it is narrative or autobiographical memory that is most directly relevant to discussions of personal identity.” Wilson, Robert A. & B. Lenart. 2015. “Extended Mind and Identity.” From: Clausen, J & N. Levy (Eds). Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer. Pp. 423-439. Pp. 430-1.


“Even though narrative memory has typically been conceptualized individualistically, as with other forms of extended memory, it can come to integratively rely on aspects of familiar environments, as in Dennett’s example of cognitive offloading. But extended narrative memory also departs from individualism in another way; it can be shared and co-constructed by two or more individuals.

“This second dimension to extended narrative memory might be thought to call into question a putatively clear-cut distinction between autobiographical and collective memory.... Collective memory is often commemorative of significant past events, ritualistic, and political in nature.” Wilson, Robert A. & B. Lenart. 2015. “Extended Mind and Identity.” From: Clausen, J & N. Levy (Eds). Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer. Pp. 423-439. P. 431.


“Likewise, when one’s narrative memories involve a co-participant, it is still one’s self who remembers, even if the activity of remembering is socially extended, being distributed between the individual and her co-rememberer.” Wilson, Robert A. & B. Lenart. 2015. “Extended Mind and Identity.” From: Clausen, J & N. Levy (Eds). Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer. Pp. 423-439. P. 432.


“The social manifestation thesis – ‘the idea that individuals engage in some forms of cognition only insofar as they constitute part of a social group’ – can be applied to memory and viewed as offering both a challenge to proponents of group minds and potentially, at least, an expanded role for the extended mind thesis.” Wilson, Robert A. & B. Lenart. 2015. “Extended Mind and Identity.” From: Clausen, J & N. Levy (Eds). Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer. Pp. 423-439. P. 432. Subquote: Wilson, Robert. A. 2005. “Collective memory, group minds, and the extended mind thesis.” Cognitive Processing. 6: 227-236. P. 229.


“The narrative tools we employ to make sense of our identities arise in cultural, historical, and institutional settings. When we take memory seriously in the context of personal identity, it becomes clear that individual identities, just like individual memories, are realized within the context of collective narratives. Individual memories may well serve as the vehicles for individual identities. But such memories are influenced by collective narratives, thus making individual identities heavily reliant on the collective or social contexts within which individuals exist. An appreciation of this relationship between individual rememberers and the collective narratives in which they are immersed should not only compel us to rethink our understanding of memory, but should also inform our conception of personhood.” Wilson, Robert A. & B. Lenart. 2015. “Extended Mind and Identity.” From: Clausen, J & N. Levy (Eds). Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer. Pp. 423-439. Pp. 432-3.


“The extended mind thesis makes the claim that minds extend beyond the skull. Analogously, the externalist account of personhood might be taken to make the claim that persons themselves are extended in just this way. Although some proponents of the extended mind thesis may indeed be taken to advocate or welcome such a claim, we have sketched a somewhat less radical view. On our view, what is extended or widely realized is the identity of persons while persons themselves, as the subjects of identity over time, are not extended or wide. An individual’s personal identity is, to be sure, an important property of that individual, and it is not determined solely by properties or capacities intrinsic to the body of that individual. But like other properties that individuals have that require external resources to be realized, this extended property is still a property of a spatiotemporally bounded and located individual.” Wilson, Robert A. & B. Lenart. 2015. “Extended Mind and Identity.” From: Clausen, J & N. Levy (Eds). Handbook of Neuroethics. Springer. Pp. 423-439. P. 434.


“... enaction proposes that an autonomous system differentiates itself from the environment, forming an operational closure. In interactional sociology, the environment from which the interaction order differentiates itself has been understood as consisting of two other organizations: (I) large-scale social institutions, and (ii) individual actors....

“The large scale social institutions from which the interaction order differentiates itself include durable social structures such as legal or economic orders, family relations or, more generally, cultural orientations and expectations. The face-to-face social interaction order, albeit linked to these socio-cultural structures, has its own properties that are not defined by them.” De Jaegher, Hanne, A. Perakyla & M. Stevanovic. 2016. “The co-creation of meaningful action: bridging enaction and interactional sociology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371: 20150378. P. 2.


“Both interactional sociology and enaction view the autonomy of social interaction as arising from the coordination of behaviours. A basic difference between the two fields is that interactional sociology approaches the coordination of behaviours in a more structural way–speaking of structures and practices as normative principles that are there, as social facts, prior to any situated social interaction, while enaction views coordination more in terms of emergent processes.” De Jaegher, Hanne, A. Perakyla & M. Stevanovic. 2016. “The co-creation of meaningful action: bridging enaction and interactional sociology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371: 20150378. P. 3.


“Goffman defined social interaction as what happens in co-presence:...

“Co-presence brings along both strong normative orientations, i.e. what ought and ought not to be done in the others’ presence, and a special experiential state, i.e. awareness of the others’ presence.” De Jaegher, Hanne, A. Perakyla & M. Stevanovic. 2016. “The co-creation of meaningful action: bridging enaction and interactional sociology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371: 20150378. P. 3.


“There are two basic forms of co-presence that Goffman distinguished throughout his career: gathering and encounter. A gathering involves ‘mere’ co-presence, attendance to the cultural rules briefly discussed above. An encounter, then again, involves a new layer of engagement: Goffman characterized the encounter by saying that its participants ‘jointly ratify one another as authorized co-sustainers of a single, albeit moving, focus of visual and cognitive attention.’” De Jaegher, Hanne, A. Perakyla & M. Stevanovic. 2016. “The co-creation of meaningful action: bridging enaction and interactional sociology.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 371: 20150378. P. 3. Subquote: Goffman, E. 1964. “The neglected situation.” Am. Anthropol. 66:133-136. P. 134.


“Consistent with this enactive or integrative approach, but also taking things in an even more extensive direction, the concept of a socially extended mind suggests that our cognitive processes are extended not simply by the various tools and technologies we use, but by other minds in our intersubjective interactions, and more systematically when we couple with institutions that, like tools and technologies, help to constitute our cognitive processes.” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. P. 34.


“...’cognitive institutions’, consist of those practices, rules and structures that have been instituted for cognitive purposes (such as making judgments, making decisions and solving problems) in previous activities that are both cognitive and social.” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. P. 34.


“... science itself is a good example of an established cognitive institution that, through various practices and rules, shapes our cognitive activity so as to constitute a certain type of knowledge, packaged with relevant skills and techniques.” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. P. 35.


“Cognitive institutions are institutions that help us to accomplish certain cognitive tasks, and they do so in a way that contributes to the constitution of the cognitive process. Indeed, without them, specific classes of cognitive processes would simply not exist. Examples include things like legal systems, educational systems, cultural institutions like museums, and even the institution of science itself.” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. P. 35.


“The legal system is a good example of a cognitive institution.... For example, a contract is an expression (in this case a legal agreement) of several minds, establishing in external memory an agreed-upon decision, adding to a system of rights and laws that transcend the particularities of any individual’s mind. Contracts are cognitive products that, in turn, contribute to and shape our cognitive processes in further thinking or problem solving....

“The legal system is constructed in part in these cognitive processes, and the uses of the legal system in the administration of justice, or the application of law to particular cases, are cognitive processes.” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. P. 36.


“More generally, any such institution is created by means of our own (shared) mental processes, or we inherit it as a product constituted in mental processes already accomplished by others.” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. P. 37.


“... the recently burgeoning social, cognitive and affective neurosciences – SCAN, in short.... The SCAN disciplines aspire to no less than becoming a leading scientific approach to human nature ....” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. Pp. 38-9.


“... critique is a kind of cognitive maintenance routine for complex institutions, required to provide reflexive insights into the many intersecting institutional structures that make up modern lifeworlds and that scaffold individual cognition and behavior. On the most global plane, critique is the form of self-reflexivity needed to guard against the tendency of institutions to take on lives of their own, running away from the interests and intentions of the people in whose service they have been set up.” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. P. 51.


“It is important to note that the task of a critical neuroscience is not to somehow show that the conception of the human subject put forward by SCAN is false. Indeed, even if we assumed it to be true, this would not mean that a critical neuroscience is impossible. This returns us to the beginning of our article. The whole point of the socially extended mind hypothesis can be put like this: almost regardless of what the ‘naked’ and isolated human individual, left to his on-board, brain-bound devices, is capable of – what counts in determining the cognitive capacities of the human subject is the intersubjective cognitive systems that result when the embodied individual is coupled to various cognition-enabling environmental structures. On the perspective taken here, it is not isolated brains, but fully embodied persons coupled to cognitive institutions that constitute humans’ full cognitive, rational capacities. To conceive of the mind as socially extended is to conceive of it as something that is irreducible to neuronal processes and, accordingly, in a way that critically challenges overly reductionistic tendencies of SCAN disciplines.” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. Pp. 52-3.


“The rational human subject is not an exclusively biological entity – it is an entity coupled to other biological individuals and various cognition-enabling institutions, tools, procedures and practices. This very institutional reality endows humans with the capacities needed to distance themselves from and critically question ongoing practice and engagement ....” Slaby, Jan & S. Gallagher. 2015. “Critical Neuroscience and Socially Extended Minds.” Theory, Culture & Society. 32(I): 33-59. P. 53.


“The main focus in this [enactive] approach is the living body, its autonomy as a self-organizing system, its precarious identity and its sense-making relation to the world. As such the approach is nourished by dynamical system concepts and by phenomenology, as well as ecologically plausible experiments and agent-based modeling work. For social cognition research, the central implications of this approach have been developed in the concept of participatory sense-making which breaks with several assumptions about social cognition, such as the spectatorial, individualistic view of the social cogniser or the hidden nature of intentions. In this perspective, interpersonal interaction dynamics play a central explanatory role in social understanding....” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 2.


“The enactive approach emphasizes the inherent relational nature of cognition and while it rejects neuro-centrism, it also sees the externalist position as wanting because merely pointing to external dependencies fails to articulate what makes a relation between agent and world meaningful or a process cognitive. Instead, enactivism conceives of cognitive agents as participants who enact a world, not as passive data collectors who model or represent the world. The key difference is in how the agent/world relation is explicitly or implicitly conceived.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 2.


“It [the interactive brain hypothesis or IBH] proposes that social interaction processes play enabling and constitutive roles in the development and in the ongoing operation of brain mechanisms involved in social cognition, whether the person is engaged in an interactive situation or not. Accordingly, when an individual interacts with others, the interaction processes would not function merely as perceptual input to ready-made mechanisms but they would also play a role in shaping those mechanisms. The IBH proposes that the neural mechanisms involved in social understanding acquire and sustain their current functionality thanks to past and present engagements in social interaction. In other words, the IBH states that the function of the neural mechanisms involved in social understanding is derivative of the functions of neural mechanisms used in skillful social interaction. It is derivative in the sense that the practice of interaction has forged social understanding mechanisms during development, allowing them to acquire functions that they would otherwise not have, and also in the sense that those mechanisms are in fact a specialization of brain mechanisms used during skillful interaction.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 2.


“We define social interaction as the autonomous engagement that can emerge between two or more autonomous agents who are mutually regulating their dynamical coupling. We here mean coupling in a dynamical systems sense: i.e., two systems are said to be coupled when parametrical and other structural descriptions of the laws of transformation of states in one of them have a functional dependence on the state variables of the other, which may be non-linear, piece-wise state-dependent, and time varying. Coupling can be unidirectional or mutual.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 4.


“... social interaction goes beyond the mere co-presence, or even the mere dynamical coupling between agents. It requires that the processes of co-regulation of such a coupling become self-sustaining. This definition allows us to make sense of everyday situations where interaction seems to ‘take a life of its own’ in spite of the individual intentions of the participants, and sometimes to their own frustration. This happens through synergistic effects at the level of individual actions and intentions involving relational bodily variables, such as relative positions and timing between movements, coordination between perceptual systems, and neuro-physiological variables. Such effects can be unintentional, for instance, in the narrow corridor situation when people walking in opposite directions become stuck trying to get past each other, arguments that cannot seem to be avoided, telephone conversations that linger on after having already said goodbye, escalations in intensity of utterances or antagonistic actions, and so on.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 4.


“In developing the enactive approach to intersubjectivity, we have argued that the processes that make up interactive dynamics can be described as processes of coordination, breakdown and recovery of coordination between the participants at various levels: physiological, bodily, affective, cognitive, etc.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 4.


“Interpersonal coordination can happen at the level of bodily movement, posture, physiological variables, such as heart rates and breathing patterns, autonomic responses, and EEG patterns.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 9.


“Simply putting participants in an interactive configuration is no guarantee that a social interaction will take place.

“How to recognize and understand the effects of engagement? One aspect of the self-organization of social interaction is the presence of synergistic effects. These effects result from the relational configuration of attitudes, intentions, and actions of the participants and may be promoted by the situation and past history of interactions. Their dynamical signature is often a reduction of dimensionality in the system and increased mutual predictability between inter-personal variables.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 10.


“Examples of synergistic effects involve situations of escalation (often found in arguments that recur to everyone’s frustration).” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 10.


“The self-organization of interaction has two sides depending on whether we focus on the collective pattern or on an individual participant. From the latter’s point of view, synergistic effects are often experienced as demands for specific forms of participation and the (not always intended) taking-up of specific roles.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 10.


“... a readiness to interact. We characterize this as a disposition to engage or participate in socially meaningful situations, which range from perceiving a stimulus that presents another person (e.g., a portrait, a film, a voice on the radio), to full blown interactions.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 11.


“As a disposition elicited by a socially meaningful situation, readiness to interact can play roles in social understanding analogous to the role played by the mastery of the law of sensorimotor contingencies in the sensorimotor theory of (non-social) perceptual experience. Accordingly, the possibilities for action afforded by an object and our bodies is sedimented in dispositions that depend on how bodily movement and sensation co-vary when the object is skillfully engaged with.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 11.


“We have indicated some of the empirical directions that derive from taking the IBH seriously. They include investigating transitions in coordination, the autonomy and synergies of interaction patterns, the emergence of and transitions between different modes of participation and the role of social dispositions, skills and readiness to interact.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 13.


“Recognition is manifested in interactions, as are neglect, admiration, desire, pity, love, and hatred. These affective phenomena are not ‘carried’ over the interaction channels, but are themselves modes of the interactive experience of connectedness, as well as ways in which interaction dynamics vary.” Di Paolo, Ezequiel & H. De Jaegher. 2012. “The interactive brain hypothesis.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. June. V. 6. Art. 163. P. 13.


“Confucius insisted that we live in a moral world. Morality is part of the very fabric of the universe; for Confucius, there is something ultimate and transcendent about ethical conduct. He once remarked: ‘Heaven is author of the virtue that is in me.’” Stevenson, Leslie, D. Haberman & P. M. Wright. 2013. Twelve Theories of Human Nature. Sixth Edition. Oxford UP. P. 19. Subquote: Lau, D. Confucius: The Analects. Penguin. 1979. VII.23.


“One’s place in life [for Confucius], social success, wealth, and longevity are all due to Destiny. No amount of struggle will make any difference in their outcome; these things are simply determined by one’s fate. Whereas the Decree of Heaven can be understood–although with great difficulty–Destiny is beyond comprehension. The distinction between the Decree of Heaven (to which humans can conform or not) and Destiny (which is beyond human agency) is fundamental for Confucius, for if one understands that the material comforts of life are due to Destiny, one will recognize the futility of pursuing them and will devote all one’s effort to the pursuit of Heaven’s morality.” Stevenson, Leslie, D. Haberman & P. M. Wright. 2013. Twelve Theories of Human Nature. Sixth Edition. Oxford UP. P. 20.


“Confucius’s remark that ‘Heaven is author of the virtue that is in me’ demonstrates his conviction that human beings have access to the ultimate reality of Heaven’s morality. For Confucius, every person is potentially a sage, defined as one who acts with extreme benevolence. That is, all human beings have the capacity to cultivate virtue and bring themselves into harmony with the Decree of Heaven. Confucius indicates that the result of following the Way of Heaven is the subjective experience of joy.... The truth is, Confucius went on to attest, that a sage is a very rare being. He declared: ‘I have no hopes of meeting a sage’. Although all human beings are potential sages, in reality this is an uncommon occurrence.” Stevenson, Leslie, D. Haberman & P. M. Wright. 2013. Twelve Theories of Human Nature. Sixth Edition. Oxford UP. Pp. 20-1.


“The term brahman is derived from a Sanskrit root that means to ‘grow,’ ‘expand,’ or ‘increase.’ Although in early usage it was associated with sacred utterances, over the course of time it came to be identified with the very force that sustains the world. During the time of the Upanishads, it settled into its principal meaning of ‘ultimate reality,’ the primary cause of existence, or the absolute ground of being.” Stevenson, Leslie, D. Haberman & P. M. Wright. 2013. Twelve Theories of Human Nature. Sixth Edition. Oxford UP. P. 37.


... Homer, unlike the Greek philosophers, draws no binary distinction, in his descriptions of human behavior, between body and mind or between body and soul.” Long, A.A. 2015. Greek Models of Mind and Self. Harvard UP. P. 5.


“We could accurately describe the Greek ethical tradition from Socrates onward as a focus on care of the soul as distinct from care of the body. As we shall see in later chapters, models of self and personal identity in Greek philosophy take a distinction between soul and body to be basic to an understanding of human nature in general and also to an understanding of the mental and moral differences between people.” Long, A.A. 2015. Greek Models of Mind and Self. Harvard UP. P. 24.


“... Homer does not speak of a living body or a living soul when he uses the words soma and psyche. He confines his use of these terms to contexts of death rather than life, with soma referring, as I have said, to the corpse, and psyche to the breath of life that people lose when they die.” Long, A.A. 2015. Greek Models of Mind and Self. Harvard UP. P. 25.


“The point on which Homer and Plato differ most radically concerns the postmortem destiny of the psyche. For Homer, as we have seen, there is no afterlife or immortality; the psyche that Homer’s dying persons breathe forth is a mere ghost. For Plato, by radical contrast, the psyche is not only the essence of the living person, it is also something so distinct from the body that it can be judged, rewarded, punished, and reborn in a human or even a nonhuman body.” Long, A.A. 2015. Greek Models of Mind and Self. Harvard UP. Pp. 30-1.


“Homer does not oppose mental life to the life of the body, but takes them as an undifferentiated whole. There is no ‘ghost in the machine’: Homeric man does not have a mind, rather his thought and consciousness are as inseparable a part of his bodily life as are movement and metabolism.” Clarke, Michael. 1999. Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer. P. 115. Quoted in: Long, A.A. 2015. Greek Models of Mind and Self. Harvard UP. P. 38.


“Thus, as the scale of association increased, the gods of nature or polytheism became more important – for these were gods who could more easily be shared, gods less exclusively domestic than ancestors, gods associated with the forces of nature rather than with divine ancestors....

“Particularism was the rule. Even after a city was founded, it was inconceivable for the city not to respect the divine ancestors, the sacred rites and magistracies of the different groups that had attended its foundation.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 21.


“Originally, the magistrates of the city were also its priests; the two functions were not distinguished.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 23.


“The priests jealously guarded the laws of the city, for the laws were understood to be the work of the gods. Indeed, they probably took the form of prayers before they came to be written down, and at first they may have been sung.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 23.


“... whenever a new city was about to be founded, the first public rite involved its members digging a trench to receive soil carried from their previous city, representing the soil in which their ancestors had been buried. Citizens could then still say this was the land of their ancestors, terra patria.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 24.


“Religion, family and territory were inseparable, a combination which turned ancient patriotism into an overwhelming passion.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 25.


“Citizens were constantly on display – like actors performing before their public, a public consisting, however, of their inferiors, of younger sons, clients, women and slaves.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 28.


“The citizen was a kind of superman. Public life, founded on religious observances, gave citizens the opportunity to express both their piety and patriotism. For citizens, it was assumed, joined a sense of the proper ordering of things to their taste for glory. What we would call their ‘status’ was understood rather as natural endowment.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 33-4.


“By identifying rationality with social superiority – by taking for granted the deference of inferiors, of a domestic sphere – the ancient world had less need for a doctrine of the will. It had less need to posit a separate event or faculty preceding action in every person. The notion of human agency was shaped by the structure of society. Some were simply born to command and others to obey. Hence there was no ontological gap between thought and action. The status of the person who reasoned guaranteed the availability of action if required.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 35-6.


“In the first century BC, however, this aristocratic model came under threat....

“In terms of political life, Rome had become the centre and the rest of the Mediterranean world the periphery. Rome was like a giant theatre or stage, with the citizens of subjugated and dependent cities reduced to mere spectators sitting on its benches....

“Just as the ancient citizen class was stricken by a mortal illness, because of centralization, so the familiar civic gods were fading into mere ghosts. In their place was a fierce, remote and often unfathomable power: Rome....

“It is hardly surprising that a period of religious ferment coincided with these institutional changes. Mithras, Osiris, and other exotic deities attracted followers. The growth of mystery cults, the search for personal ‘salvation’ and a new openness to foreign beliefs reflected the displacement of ancient citizenship.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 52.


“Conforming to an external will was becoming the dominant social experience. And the voice of Judaism spoke to that experience, as no other did. The message of the Jewish scriptures was radical. Virtue consisted in obedience to God’s will. His will was not something that could be fathomed by reason. It could not be deduced from first principles. Nor could it be read in the book of nature. Scripture alone mattered, because it was the record of God’s commands and promises. Historical events – the medium of God’s will – were privileged over deductive reasoning. The Jewish God refused to be pinned down: ‘I will be who I will be.’” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 54.


“Instead of acting out parts written by their prescribed ‘natures’, people had little choice but to identify themselves in another way. An act of submission now seemed to be the precondition of knowledge. So it began to appear that obedience led to understanding, rather than the reverse. It was a remarkable turnabout. For making obedience precede understanding, rather than follow from it, amounted to an intellectual revolution. It was a revolution that overturned the basis of the claim to superiority of the citizen class.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 55-6.


“It is hardly too much to say that Paul invented Christianity as a religion.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 58.


“In Paul’s eyes, the Christ reveals God acting through human agency and redeeming it. The Christ reveals a God who is potentially present in every believer.... Through an act of faith in the Christ, human agency can become the medium for God’s love – what Paul sometimes calls ‘faith acting through love’. The faith accepting that love amounted to an inner crucifixion, from which could emerge a transformed will, embodied in the person of Jesus. For Paul, it was a personal transaction, the creation of another, better self. ‘I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’

“In effect, Paul’s vision of a mystical union with Christ introduces a revised notion of rationality – what he sometimes describes as the ‘foolishness’ of God. It is a foundation for a rationality reshaped through faith.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 59. Subquote: Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. 2:19-20.


“Rationality loses its aristocratic connotations. It is associated not with status and pride but with a humility which liberates.

“Paul’s conception of the Christ overturns the assumption on which ancient thinking had hitherto rested, the assumption of natural inequality. Instead, Paul wagers on human equality. It is a wager that turns on transparency, that we can and should see ourselves in others, and others in ourselves.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 60.


“Despite constant setbacks and eventual martyrdom, Paul may be said to have prevailed. For his understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection introduced to the world a new picture of reality. It provided an ontological foundation for ‘the individual’, through the promise that humans have access to the deepest reality as individuals rather than merely as members of a group.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 63.


“The Christ provides a foundation in the nature of things for a pre-social or individual will. Individual agency acquires roots in divine agency. The Christ stands for the presence of God in the world, the ultimate support for individual identity....

“But if thought depends upon language, and language is a social institution, how can rational agency have a pre-social foundation? That is the dilemma Paul’s argument comes up against.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 64-5.


“For if faith in the Christ can free humans from the bondage of sin, then each must have a potential for freedom, a free will.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 69.


“Critics of Christianity like Celsus late in the second century were disturbed by such attitudes. Celsus argued that Christianity separated man too sharply from the rest of nature and demeaned nature by reducing it to a mere instrument for human purposes. ‘They say that God made all things for man,’ he complained. ‘He forsakes the whole universe and the course of the heavenly spheres to dwell with us alone.’ Celsus had a serious point. But he failed to see the importance of clarifying the sphere of human freedom for identifying individual moral responsibility.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 70-1. Subquote: Quoted in Frend, W.H.C. 2003. The Early Church. London. P. 63.


“The important thing is that the cult of the martyrs began to redefine heroism as previously understood.... ... the ancient hero was typically male, strong, wily and successful. His conversion into a demigod reflected the nature of ancient polytheism. Fame was the medium of heroism. Family and civic piety preserved the hero’s reputation. He was an eminently social being.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 79.


“... Roman authorities described martyrs as ‘enemies of the human race’ because of their insistence on standing alone.

“But were they really alone? The martyrs claimed to be acting in the name of a more important relationship, a relationship that underpinned their wills. Apparently they had found something within themselves more precious than social conventions or conformity. But that was not all. The interior conviction that marked them out was something that disregarded gender, class and status. Martyrdom illustrated the exercise of an individual will, founded on conscience. It made that will visible.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 80.


“The idea of the individual – of an underlying moral status shared equally by all – may first have entered the minds of many non-Christians reflecting on scenes or tales of martyrdom.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 80.


“For it was as individuals that both the rich and the poor, including those who had previously existed outside the bounds of the citizen class, approached the sacraments of the church. They were baptized and received the Eucharist as individuals seeking salvation, rather than as members of a group.

“Christian churches thus began to dissolve the corporate character of an aristocratic society.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 83-4.


“The era of martyrs had come to an end. But in many Christians the need to demonstrate the depth of motivation released by their new beliefs had not....

“The monks sought to gain control over their bodies – to create wills properly so-called – through study of the scriptures, meditation and prayer.... The withdrawal into the self was at the same time a reach for moral universality.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 84.


“The equality of souls in search of salvation was at the heart of Christian beliefs.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 88.


“In place of the ancient temple, with its splendid columns and decorations on the exterior, the Christian basilica was simple, unadorned brick on the outside, with columns and decorations reserved for the interior. The change was symptomatic. Where paganism had concerned itself primarily with external conformity of behaviour, Christianity now concerned itself especially with inner conviction.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 89.


“The transition from solitary hermits to communal monasticism confirmed a new form of sociability, a sociability founded on the role of individual conscience, on accepting the claims of a universal moral law....

“But that was not all. The way of life associated with the monks also had another important, if unintended, consequence. It rehabilitated ‘work’ – separating work from its association with a servile status, from the stain of ancient slavery.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 95.


“For, despite its many failings and compromises, monasticism associated the ideas of law and of obedience not with unthinking custom or external force, but with individual consent and the role of conscience.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 99.


“And nothing is more factual, in Augustine’s eyes, than the shackles we forge for ourselves. Therein lies the human predicament – the corruption of the will. Through the faculty of memory, humans become subjugated to their acquired tastes and sensibilities.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 104.


“The dominant ancient view portraying the will oversimply as ‘an act of desire’ gave way to a ‘concept of the will as a power of the soul distinct from the intellect and from appetitie.’” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 108-9. Subquote: Brown, P. 2003. The Rise of Western Christendom. Oxford. P. 441.


“The urgent need for the church to create a tolerably educated clerical class contributed to an important difference between Western Europe and the Eastern empire. In the latter, the imperial administration remained in place.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 136.


“The ‘certainties’ of a priori argument came up against the limitations imposed by Christian belief in a God who expressed himself though time rather than in syllogisms. When logical studies re-emerged in the eleventh century, it is no accident that the status of general terms or categories became a central issue. A sense of the limits of deductive argument – its fallibility in the face of the experience of things not under human control – then contributed to a clearer distinction between ‘reasons’ for human action and the ‘causes’ of external events.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 146.


“At the time of the Germanic invasions monastic life had made a deep impression on Gallo-Roman minds. But it was as the refuge from a disintegrating world that monasteries had then chiefly impressed. By the year 1000 monasteries were becoming models rather than refuges....

“Reformed monasticism offered to people at large a glimpse of equality.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 188-9.


“The process of turning the church into a unified legal system did not take place overnight. Its complete development awaited the thirteenth century. Yet its implications would prove to be revolutionary. For although it was the popes who first claimed a ‘sovereign’ authority within their sphere, it was not long before secular rulers came to understand their authority in the same way. The example of the church as a unified legal system founded on the equal subjection of individuals thus gave birth to the idea of the modern state.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 207.


“By identifying natural law with biblical revelation and Christian morality, Gratian gave it an egalitarian bias – and a subversive potential – utterly foreign to the ancient world’s understanding of natural law as ‘everything i[n] its place’.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 216.


“Of course, the canonists did not foresee all the implications of this reversal of moral assumptions. They were not social revolutionaries. But the fact remains that they laid the foundation for a move away from an aristocratic society to a ‘democratic’ society. Such a reversal of assumptions not only foreshadowed a fundamental change in the structure of society. It also freed the human mind, giving a far wider scope and a more critical edge to the role of analysis. It made possible what might be called the ‘take off’ of the Western mind.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 218.


“... the assumption of moral equality in canon law created a new habit of generalization. Canonists habitually considered how any rule of law or practice would affect ‘all souls’. Their concern, unknown to antiquity, was with the experience of ‘all equally’. In that way, belief in a human agency prior to established social roles – the distinction between individuals and the social roles they occupy – cut through a compartmentalized view of the world.... And by distancing human agency from particular social roles, it made possible a sharper distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ – statements of observable facts and moral prescriptions.

“This change gave a tremendous impetus to logical speculation. For it immediately called into question the status of terms which had sustained a corporate conception of society. Instead of terms designating classes of phenomena being deemed to have a substance or reality in their own right, terms began to be seen as mental constructions, as what we now call concepts. From Abelard in the twelfth century to Ockham in the fourteenth, that contributed to a debate between ‘realists’, who defended the objective, extra-mental reality of general terms or concepts, and ‘nominalists’ who insisted that ‘a universal thing does not exist, except in individual things and through individual things’. This latter view rapidly gained ground.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 218-9.


“The papal claim of sovereignty initiated the translation of a moral status into an organizing social role. As we have seen, this required the definition of a primary or meta-role (‘the individual’) shared equally by all persons. Other social roles became secondary in relation to that primary role. To that primary role, an indefinite number of other roles might be added as the attributes of a subject. But they no longer exhausted the subject’s identity. Being a ‘seigneur’, ‘serf’ or ‘burgher’ might be added to or subtracted from an individual’s identity, but the individual or ‘soul’ remained. That had not been the case in ancient societies.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 219-20.


“On the one hand, kings ceased to be regarded, as in the tenth century, as the ‘vicars of Christ’ – almost as high priests. Their thrones were still surrounded by religious symbolism. But they were no longer the direct agents of spiritual government. The dualist tradition had triumphed over royal theocracy.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 220.


“The example of the church as a unified legal system, founded on the subjection of individuals, gave birth to the project of creating states. And this development doomed feudalism.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 221.


“Canon law helped to give a new direction to the European mind. Its systematic character and the procedures required for administering it stimulated an analytical frame of mind, leading, inexorably, to the emergence of philosophy as a discipline distinct from theology.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 229.


“Logical studies developed with astonishing rapidity during the twelfth century. The egalitarian foundation of canon law immediately raised the question of how general terms are related to the experience of individuals, and it engendered a debate which raged for two or three centuries, the debate between ‘realists’ and ‘nominalists’. Did general terms correspond to something with an independent existence or were they merely convenient ways of bringing together individual experiences, giving them a linguistic unity? Increasingly, general terms ceased to be understood on the model of Platonic ideas, as having a reality superior to that of mundane experience. The underpinnings of a corporate society were being removed.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 229.


“What ultimately superseded feudalism was a new social role shared by all equally, the individual.

“Promoted by papal reforms, the translation of a moral status (the ‘soul’) into a social role recast the basis of thought and action in Europe. As that translation spread from the church into the secular sphere – with the first steps that would lead to the creation of nation states – it changed the relations of Europeans with themselves. It gave thought and action a character that they did not and could not possess in traditional societies. Translating a moral status into a social role created a new image of society as an association of individuals rather than of families, tribes or castes. The claim of papal ‘sovereignty’ made the translation possible. For the claim of equal subjection to a sovereign authority has a remarkable implication. No subject of a sovereign has an intrinsic obligation to obey any other person as such.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 238.


“The substitution of moral equality for natural inequality paved the way for new forms of comparison, comparisons that Christian thought had hitherto confined to the afterlife, to the ultimate fate of souls. As we have seen in the advice given to judges, this substitution encouraged people to understand themselves through others and others through themselves. Once legitimated, the process of comparison became an almost irresistible source of social change, breeding both hope and resentment, ambition and insecurity.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 238-9.


“‘Reason’ (understood as a faculty commanding reality and very unequally distributed in society) was giving way to ‘reason’ (understood as an attribute of individuals who are equally moral agents). In the twelfth century, reason began to lose the ontologically privileged position it had been accorded by an aristocratic society.... reason ceased to be something that used people, and became something people used.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 243.


“Arguments about the meaning of natural law developed rapidly among Gratian’s commentators, for they noticed the confusion resulting from different uses of the term. They soon moved away from the Stoic sense of an objective, external order. But they also became dissatisfied with Gratian’s definition of natural law as a set of moral precepts, founded on scripture but discernible by reason. They were anxious to anchor natural law, unequivocally, in individual agency. So they began to use the term to refer to a subjective force or power intrinsic to man, and to a corresponding sphere of freedom, where action is neither commanded nor forbidden by ‘nature’.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 245.


“If we compare these refugees [from the feudal countryside to towns] with the founders of ancient cities, we notice one difference above all. For these refugees, the religious question was already settled....

“So the affairs of the rapidly growing urban settlements could – within limits imposed by Christian beliefs – be left to their inhabitants. And so it was. They began to govern themselves. These towns or boroughs became the first secular governments – governments that, freed from quasi-religious ideas of lordship and paterfamilias, acknowledged an underlying equality in their inhabitants and the freedom this implied....

“Thus the church was both present and absent at the birth of a new form of society, something that has confused discussions of the nature of secularism ever since.... The medieval borough developed as an association of individuals rather than as an association of families. The family was no longer itself a religious cult and form of worship. And, unlike ancient cities, the governments of towns or boroughs did not claim religious authority. They did not perform religious rites or administer religious rules.

“The contrast with ancient cities could hardly be greater.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 267-9.


“Duns Scotus disentangles two things from Paul’s vision. He identifies freedom as a necessary condition of moral conduct. But he does not believe that it is a sufficient condition. He does not idetify it wholly with morality. Freedom may result in ‘blameworthy’ as well as ‘praiseworthy’ choices. For the latter to be the case, human choices must conform to justice, what Duns Scotus calls ‘right reason’: ‘To attribute moral goodness is to attribute conformity to right reason.’” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 294.


“Ockham cannot accept what might be called the schizophrenia of the Carolingians, oscillation between egalitarian emphasis on the ‘care of souls’ and a universal oath of allegiance to the ruler on the one hand; and on the other hand, reliance on dominium or lordship as the means of preserving social order....

“While not understanding it in our terms, the Fransicans Duns Scotus and Ockham put into place the basic building blocks of modern secularism. In refining the idea of Christian liberty – separating the idea of freedom from that of justice and making both conditions of morality as well as distinguishing rights of ownership from a right to rule – they prepared a revolution in the understanding of the ‘proper’ ground of all authority. They moved from an aristocratic towards a democratic idea of authority.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 295-6.


“For one of the striking things about the early history of universities is their success in generating a competition of favours from church and state. Both popes and princes went out of their way to encourage and protect the fledgling universities. Both sought to benefit from the new institution. But neither succeeded in mastering it.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 297.


“The Franciscan tradition harboured serious doubts about whole-sale borrowing from Aristotle’s theory of knowledge and his metaphysics of ‘nature’. Ancient rationalism seemed to re-emerge in Aquinas’ view that ‘the root of freedom has the will as its subject, but reason as its cause’. The Franciscans detected in such borrowings a residue of the ancient assumption that reason could ‘command’ reality, and that, out of its own resources, reason could demonstrate the deepest metaphysical and moral truths. In Franciscan eyes, that assumption was arrogant. It elevated human fiat above the facts of moral experience, the complexity of human motivation and dependence of the will on ‘grace’. Franciscans found such arrogance lurking in Aristotle’s teleological model of nature. For its hierarchical framework – postulating ‘essences’ and ‘final causes’ – threatened the humility required by the truth revealed in the Christ. It threatened the assumption of moral equality.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 299-300.


“In contrast to Dominican emphasis on rationality and ‘correct’ doctrine, Franciscan emphasis on human agency involved a revised view of the role of reason. Reason became the companion of the will rather than its arrogant master. For the mere use of reason could not guarantee what mattered most, an upright will. Left entirely to its own resources, reason could not take us to the heart of the matter. Such access required the union of individual wills with a higher will, through the practice of humility, prayer and the gift of grace.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 300.


“The will acquired a privileged status as the threshold of divinity, the precondition for entering what Augustine called the city of God.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 301.


“Despite the papal censure, which led to his excommunication, Ockham’s influence spread rapidly. In the church at large, his nominalism became associated with the ‘Spiritual Franciscans’, who embraced a moral radicalism distrusted by the papacy.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 307.


“William of Ockham sought, above all, to assert God’s freedom, believing that the world we experience and the moral duties we acknowledge are the results of his choices as creator. They are not the result of ideas or ‘essences’ which can be known a priori and which constrain even God’s actions. For Ockham, God’s creation cannot be ‘second-guessed’. We have not created ourselves, but we have been created with free will. Is that not the clue given to us about the nature of things? Ockham’s nominalism celebrated contingency rather than rational necessity.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 307.


“Aquinas could hardly deny that Aristotle had assumed the eternity of the world, a permanent structure to which superior minds had access. Did that not compromise Christian belief in a God who acts freely in time rather than being constrained by pre-established rational forms? And did not such forms imply an overly unified structure of rationality which ran contrary to the idea of individual human souls endowed with a free will? In Aristotle’s system, immortality belonged to essences or ideas rather than to individual souls. For Ockham, such conclusions subverted the vision of a God who acts in history and has a direct relationship with souls, a vision turning on freedom.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 308.


“In Ockham’s eyes, the doctrine of necessary or a priori knowledge misleads the human mind by privileging its capacity for definition over the contingent facts of experience. The assumption that universal categories such as ‘man’ are more real than the experiences of ‘men’ jeopardizes belief in God’s direct relation to individuals. Such philosophical ‘realism’ fosters the illusion of a corporate human mind. Thus belief in universals or concepts as eternal ‘things in themselves’ does not only put God’s freedom at risk. But the doctrine is also a threat to individual freedom, to the belief in equal moral agency.

“By emphasizing the role of the will, Ockham associated reason with individual experience and choice rather than with ‘legislating’ about a timeless ‘nature’ of things. But he does not present the will as unconstrained. Rather, the self, which is a gift of God, is obligated by the principles of equality and reciprocity, by ‘right reason’. That, indeed, is fundamental to understanding ourselves as creatures of God. So while accepting that human reason can be distinguished from the will for certain purposes, Ockham, like Augustine, denies that intellect and will are entirely distinct faculties. Rather, they are companions. Human agency is a unity. Acts spring from the whole self or soul.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 309-10.


“Taking the moral autonomy of individuals as their weapon, the nominalists broke through a set of assumptions which had confined the structure of society and the pursuit of knowledge within an hierarchical or corporate framework. Ockham replaced those assumptions with the assertion of individual rights (justifying a private sphere of choice) and the verification principle (which made knowledge of the external world always subject to disproof by further experience). In drawing a sharper contrast between the terms in which we understand our own actions and our knowledge of external, physical processes, the nominalists, in effect, began to separate ‘culture’ from ‘nature’ – emphasizing the central role of reasons and intentions in the former, while driving explanations in terms of purpose from the latter.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 313.


“Freedom was central to Ockham’s understanding of rational agency. He defined it as the power ‘by which I can indifferently and contingently produce an effect in such a way that I can cause or not cause that effect, without any difference in that power having been made’. Knowledge of freedom comes not from a priori reasoning but from experience of ourselves as agents.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 314.


“By linking freedom to a regenerated will, the idea of “Christian liberty’ undermined the ancient meaning of freedom, freedom understood as a form of privilege, a social status or rank.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 314.


“In order to protect the sphere of conscience, Ockham argues that allowance must be made for well-intentioned conduct, even if it conflicts with a dictate of ‘right reason’ or justice.... So Ockham defends what might be called ‘conscientious mistakes’ of judgement.

“‘Right reason’ – the canonists’ golden rule – continued to provide the standard of justice for Ockham. But he argues that the sphere of conscience, with the freedoms required to sustain that sphere, should be defended against interpretations of ‘right reason’ which jeopardize liberty.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 315.


“As in his defence of conscientious mistakes, Ockham again lays radical emphasis on personal autonomy, subordinating even one natural right to its preservation. This emphasis gives Ockham’s nominalism its historical importance. For it is the moment when we can observe the egalitarian moral intuitions generated by Christianity being turned against doctrines and institutions that do not acknowledge the difference between acting from conviction and mere conformity of behaviour – even if they are doctrines and institutions of the church. It is, in effect, the birth of liberal secularism.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 316.


“Ockham’s attack on the habit of projecting terms drawn from human action (especially ‘goals’ or ‘purposes’) into our understanding of the non-human world accounts for his second step into modernity. As we have seen, he drew attention to the difference between ‘reasons’ for human actions and the ‘causes’ of external events. The two ideas, ‘reasons’ and ‘causes’, should not be confused. For the human mind operates in different ways when shaping action and when investigating the non-human world.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 318.


“While he did not use the term himself, Ockham presents knowledge of the relations between things as ‘hypothetical’, always subject to revision in the light of further experience. That is why ‘demonstrative knowledge’ – certitude which springs necessarily from the very meaning of the words used – differs in its nature from ‘probable knowledge’, or what we now call ‘empirical’ knowledge. For Ockham, therefore, it is a category mistake to postulate necessary truths about the world of sense experience. It confuses the claims of inductive and deductive reasoning.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 319.


“There is no simple connection between Ockham’s nominalism and his account of natural rights. Yet his insistence on the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning served the same purpose as his defence of human autonomy. Both served to establish that God’s activity in the world is a work of freedom in which humans can and should participate. Just as Ockham’s insistence on the reality of freedom had led him to limit the claims of ‘right reason’ or justice, so it shaped his account of the limits of deductive reasoning. Acknowledging the right to make conscientious mistakes and insisting on the merely probable nature of empirical knowledge were both rooted in his belief in the reality of God’s freedom and the fact of human fallibility.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 319.


“The canonists appealed to the ideal of a church in which reason and freedom are dispersed against the assumption of unlimited authority by any human agency. This vision, in turn, provided the ‘deep’ moral foundation for constitutionalism in the church, for a formal dispersal of authority and power.

“By the fourteenth century an increasing number of voices were calling for something like representative government in the church. Calls for reform focused on the role of general councils.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 327-8.


“... in its basic assumptions, liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity. It emerged as the moral intuitions generated by Christianity were turned against an authoritarian model of the church.

“The roots of liberalism were firmly established in the arguments of philosophers and canon lawyers by the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: belief in a fundamental equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system; belief that enforcing moral conduct is a contradiction in terms; a defence of individual liberty, through the assertion of fundamental or ‘natural’ rights; and, finally, the conclusion that only a representative form of government is appropriate for a society resting on the assumption of moral equality.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 332.


“... Renaissance painters turned the idealized types found in surviving ancient statuary into beautiful individuals. Take the treatment of male nudity. Italian painters transformed what had been a celebration of social superiority – of citizens’ muscular fitness to dominate their inferiors – into the graceful and touching figures we find, for example, in Botticelli. Botticelli’s figures look as if they might have a conscience!” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 336-7.


“But what I am maintaining is that as an historiographical concept the Renaissance has been grossly inflated. It has been used to create a gap between early modern Europe and the preceding centuries – to introduce a discontinuity which is misleading.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 337.


“Celebration of the Renaissance has confused the emergence of what is better called the pursuit of ‘individuality’ – an aesthetic notion – with the invention of the individual – a moral notion.... The humanists did introduce a new emphasis on cultivating the self, on the refinement of taste and self-expression. This was an emphasis that shaped what might be called the cult of individuality, depicting the individual as the ‘victim’ of social pressures and heroism as resistance to such pressures. Social institutions were presented as a threat to the self.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 337.


“For Aquinas, natural law consisted of rational principles that governed God’s will as well as the human will. For Duns Scotus and Ockham, however, that position both threatened divine omnipotence and misunderstood [the] role of reason. They saw God’s will as limited only by his free nature. And it was God’s will, revealed in the Christian faith, that humans should be equal and free agents. Thus, freedom became the bond between God and man. God, not any ‘necessary’ dictates of reason, created our world. Reason is a part of creation. But reason by itself is not the creator.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 342.


“Like other cultures, Western culture is founded on shared beliefs. But, in contrast to most others, Western beliefs privilege the idea of equality. And it is the privileging of equality – of a premiss that excludes permanent inequalities of status and ascriptions of authoritative opinion to any person or group – which underpins the secular state and the idea of fundamental or ‘natural’ rights. Thus, the only birthright recognized by the liberal tradition is individual freedom.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 349.


“Through its emphasis on human equality, the New Testament stands out against the primary thrust of the ancient world, with its dominant assumption of ‘natural’ inequality. Indeed, the atmosphere of the New Testament is one of exhilarating detachment from the unthinking constraints of inherited social roles.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 353.


“This is Europe’s undeclared ‘civil war’ [secularism vs religious beliefs]. And it is as tragic as it is unnecessary. It is tragic because, by identifying secularism with non-belief, with indifference and materialism, it deprives Europe of moral authority, playing into the hands of those who are only too anxious to portray Europe as decadent and without conviction. It is unnecessary because it rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of secularism.... Secularism is Christianity’s gift to the world, ideas and practices which have often been turned against ‘excesses’ of the Christian church itself.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. P. 360.


“It is a strange and disturbing moment in Western history. Europeans – out of touch with the roots of their tradition – often seem to lack conviction, while Americans may be succumbing to a dangerously simplistic version of their faith. On neither side of the Atlantic is there an adequate understanding of the relationship between liberal secularism and Christianity.

“Failure to understand that relationship makes it easier to underestimate the moral content of liberal secularism. In the Western world today, it contributes to two temptations, to what might be called two ‘liberal heresies’. The first is the temptation to reduce liberalism to the endorsement of market economics, the satisfaction of current wants or preferences without worrying much about the formation of those wants or preferences. In doing so, it narrows the claims of justice. This temptation reduces liberalism to a crude form of utilitarianism. The second temptation is best described as ‘individualism’, the retreat into a private sphere of family and friends at the expense of civic spirit and political participation. This weakens the habit of association and eventually endangers the self-reliance which the claims of citizenship require. Both of these heresies focus on the second word of the core liberal value – ‘equal liberty’ – at the expense of the first word. They sacrifice the emphasis on reciprocity – on seeing ourselves in others and others in ourselves – which we have seen to be fundamental to inventing the individual and which gives liberalism its lasting moral value.” Siedentop, Larry. 2014. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard UP. Pp. 362-3.


“In technology settings, it [exaptation] similarly ‘refers to cases in which an entity was selected for one trait but eventually ended up carrying out a related but different function’.” Andriani, Pierpaolo & J. Cohen. 2013. “From Exaptation to Radical Niche Construction in Biological and Technological Complex Systems.” Complexity. V. 18. No. 5. Pp. 7-14. P. 8. Subquote: Mokyr, J. 1998. Science, Technology, and Knowledge: What Historians Can Learn from an Evolutionary Approach. Max Planck Inst. for Research into Economic Systems.


“At the heart of the innovative potential of exaptation is an indefinite–and rarely explicit–range of potential functions of existing modules.” Andriani, Pierpaolo & J. Cohen. 2013. “From Exaptation to Radical Niche Construction in Biological and Technological Complex Systems.” Complexity. V. 18. No. 5. Pp. 7-14. P. 8.


“Perhaps there are driving contexts that encourage the contiguity of form and function, which promotes exaptation.... These driving contexts may take the form of a meso-environment that exists during the construction of a niche, before its traits have had time to become fixed in various new inheritance systems through adaptations/exaptations of the organisms.

“As an example, consider the process of diffusion-limited accretion in a coral reef: Accidents or irregularities may become amplified as the forming gradients generate spatial concentrations of nutrients. These nutrients then provide scaffolding for polyp growth, which reinforces the gradients and increases the nutrients’ spatial dis-homogeneity. More species are attracted, and the process becomes autocatalytic, continuing until a new niche in the ecosystem emerges, and a dense network of relationships stabilizes. These driving contexts may be activated by processes such as relocational or perturbational niche construction activities.” Andriani, Pierpaolo & J. Cohen. 2013. “From Exaptation to Radical Niche Construction in Biological and Technological Complex Systems.” Complexity. V. 18. No. 5. Pp. 7-14. P. 10.


“Niche construction (like the creation of new industrial niche/sectors) starts with an exaptation, such as soil, oxygen excretion into the atmosphere, or magnetrons creating microwave ovens, then evolves into a locked dance between the two pairs: exaptations/adaptation and organism/environment (or goods/market; e.g., automobiles/gas stations, mobile phones/towers). This locked dance resolves the paradox of gradualism and punctuation, for both biology and technological change, and helps resolve the issue of agency for the emergence of new technological capabilities, which has considerably blurred the use of evolutionary frameworks in technological studies.” Andriani, Pierpaolo & J. Cohen. 2013. “From Exaptation to Radical Niche Construction in Biological and Technological Complex Systems.” Complexity. V. 18. No. 5. Pp. 7-14. P. 10.


“... a very crowded region instead likely fosters high competition, low ‘rents,’ and unacceptable costs for the initial exaptation stages, before it progresses into an adaptational trajectory. Early African lakes, with few fishes, offered few opportunities, similar to early audio technology. When the ecosystem had matured to encompass hundreds of specialized niches, there was no rom to experiment, and exaptation driven by population pressures produce unlikely habits, such as eating other fishes’ eyes or babies.

“The potential of an exaptation to activate a cascade that leads to the emergence of a new niche thus depends on the features of the form-function phase space, and especially its diversity and connectivity.” Andriani, Pierpaolo & J. Cohen. 2013. “From Exaptation to Radical Niche Construction in Biological and Technological Complex Systems.” Complexity. V. 18. No. 5. Pp. 7-14. P. 11.


“... a question about the structure of search spaces for evolutionary dynamics. Of the competing views–one that defines a search space abstractly as the sum of all possible combinations at a particular level of the biological hierarchy, such as a sequence space for RNA or DNA molecules of a particular length or sum of all possible metabolic interactions within a particular pathway; the other that argues that in the case of complex systems the search space of future possibilities is actively constructed by the actions and properties of currently existing systems–we clearly argue for the latter.” Laubichler, Manfred & J. Renn. 2015. “Extended Evolution: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Regulatory Networks and Niche Construction.” Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. 324B:565-577. P. 566.


“... a regulatory conception of homology was proposed that explains the stability of phenotypic characters through time as a consequence of conserved structures in regulatory developmental systems or networks.

“In the context of this developmental view, conserved elements of regulatory networks (referred to in the literature either as kernels or character identity networks) establish the identity or sameness of specific characters or structures while other (more downstream) parts of the network allow for the adaption of these characters to specific functions. These variants of recognizable characters are called character states....

“This regulatory conception of homology provides an explanation for observed patterns of stability (sameness) across complex systems as well as for more specific features of complex networks, such as their modular and hierarchical architecture and the path-dependent or canalized nature of change.” Laubichler, Manfred & J. Renn. 2015. “Extended Evolution: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Regulatory Networks and Niche Construction.” Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. 324B:565-577. P. 567.


“We, as others before, have identified the integration of regulatory network and niche construction perspectives as one challenge for extending evolutionary theory and suggest that this requires a model that brings together regulatory and niche elements within one network of interacting causal factors.” Laubichler, Manfred & J. Renn. 2015. “Extended Evolution: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Regulatory Networks and Niche Construction.” Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. 324B:565-577. P. 568.


“We begin by defining an internal system as a network of agents capable of persisting through time and reproducing its structure....

“An extended network includes the environment as part of the network structure. All aspects of the environment that causally affect these interactions form the structured niche of the internal system. Together, system and structured niche constitute the extended regulatory network. The structured niche has itself a network structure induced by the primary network constituted by the internal system. Its nodes are those aspects of the environment that condition, mediate or become the target of actions, in short the environmental resources of the internal system.” Laubichler, Manfred & J. Renn. 2015. “Extended Evolution: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Regulatory Networks and Niche Construction.” Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. 324B:565-577. P. 568.


“When actions are performed they change the environment in ways that are characteristic for the system and may thus be considered as an ‘externalization’ of the system’s internal structures. But actions also do not leave the system itself indifferent and constantly change its internal structure. Therefore also the converse process takes place, an ‘internalization’ of the environment.” Laubichler, Manfred & J. Renn. 2015. “Extended Evolution: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Regulatory Networks and Niche Construction.” Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. 324B:565-577. P. 568.


“The externalization of parts of the regulatory network into the constructed social or environmental niche enables not only the further exploration of phenotypic states, it also stabilizes emerging new characters throughout transitionary phases, as constructed niches can serve as scaffoldings providing stable patterns of heredity. It is important to note here that constructed niches are not only distant structures in the external environment, but that these also include developmental and social contexts that can be as close to the genome as the cytoplasm or maternal behavior.” Laubichler, Manfred & J. Renn. 2015. “Extended Evolution: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Regulatory Networks and Niche Construction.” Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. 324B:565-577. P. 573.


“But selection and random variation alone do not provide a sufficient explanation for these transitions; the specific structures of regulatory networks and their constructed niches, as well as the dynamics of their transformation through externalization and internalization, are an essential part of the explanation of evolutionary novelties, as we have seen in our discussion of the evolution of eusociality.” Laubichler, Manfred & J. Renn. 2015. “Extended Evolution: A Conceptual Framework for Integrating Regulatory Networks and Niche Construction.” Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. 324B:565-577. P. 573.


“The different research fields on action semantics are characterized by similar discussions regarding (1) the automaticity of object affordances, (2) the processing of goals and means and (3) the functional and neural organization of action semantic representations.” Van Elk, Michiel, H. van Schie & H. Bekkering. 2014. “Action semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of multimodal and modality-specific object knowledge.” Physics of Life Reviews. 11: 220-250. P. 234.


“These studies [objects as affordances eliciting responses] indicate that the motor programs associated with grasping objects are automatically activated when perceiving objects.

“However, other studies have shown that the activation of motor-related information is strongly dependent on the context, the intentions of the actor and the type of objects involved.... These studies challenge the view that object affordances are automatically perceived. Accordingly, a central question in the field is how these two views can be reconciled.” Van Elk, Michiel, H. van Schie & H. Bekkering. 2014. “Action semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of multimodal and modality-specific object knowledge.” Physics of Life Reviews. 11: 220-250. P. 235.


“Developmental, behavioral and neuroimaging studies have provided (indirect) support for the hierarchical view of action and motor control. For instance, it has been found that infants selectively attend to goal compared to means-related information during action observation and imitation. In adults, a similar dominance of goal- over grip-related information has been observed, both in action planning and action observation. Furthermore, neuroimaging studies indicate that the brain has specialized neural circuits for processing action goals and means....

“However, the hierarchical view of action control has been challenged on both conceptual and theoretical grounds. An important conceptual challenge for hierarchical views of action concerns the definition of action goals and means, which can be defined at multiple levels of complexity (i.e. high vs. low-level goals) and at different timescales (i.e. proximate vs. distal goals)... However, in addition to these concrete movement-related goals, everyday action planning involves higher-level conceptual goals as well, such as intending to have a drink, to go to the movies etc. A challenge for future research is to elucidate how the hierarchical view of the motor system can account for these high-level action goals.” Van Elk, Michiel, H. van Schie & H. Bekkering. 2014. “Action semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of multimodal and modality-specific object knowledge.” Physics of Life Reviews. 11: 220-250. P. 235.


“In the last years, a more nuanced view [re ties from language to motor stimulation] has been proposed according to which modality-specific activation in language and action observation actually has a functional role, by supporting a ‘deep understanding’ of the actions involved. That is, motor activation during action observation allows the observer to understand the action from his own perspective and motor activation during language processing may ground the meaning of words in one’s own action experience.” Van Elk, Michiel, H. van Schie & H. Bekkering. 2014. “Action semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of multimodal and modality-specific object knowledge.” Physics of Life Reviews. 11: 220-250. P. 240.


“Furthermore, we argue that these alternative theoretical models overlook the central importance of action intentions and action context for the planning of actions. That is, one can still maintain a hierarchical view of action planning, while allowing flexibility in the coupling between action means and action goals, driven by the context in which the action takes place and driven by the intentions of the actor. Recent findings support the idea that high-level action intentions modulate the coupling between goals and means and that action intentions can overrule the default goal-associations of objects.” Van Elk, Michiel, H. van Schie & H. Bekkering. 2014. “Action semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of multimodal and modality-specific object knowledge.” Physics of Life Reviews. 11: 220-250. P. 240.


“We have proposed a conceptual framework of action semantics, according to which (1) action semantics involves both multimodal object representations and different modality-specific sub-systems (i.e. manipulation knowledge, functional knowledge, representation of proprioceptive consequences and representation of sensory consequences), (2) action semantics and motor representations supporting object use are hierarchically organized, (3) action semantics are selected and modality-specific information is activated based on top-down influences related to action intentions and action context.” Van Elk, Michiel, H. van Schie & H. Bekkering. 2014. “Action semantics: A unifying conceptual framework for the selective use of multimodal and modality-specific object knowledge.” Physics of Life Reviews. 11: 220-250. P. 241.


“Human interactional ethology, despite the presence of precursor elements in other primate species, as a whole ensemble is entirely distinctive. For example, the toleration or indeed expectation of mutual gaze is of paramount importance in humans but occurs less in other primates, and the white sclera of the human eye has almost certainly evolved to enhance gaze detection–remarkably, human infants are sensitive to the difference between direct and averted gaze from just 2-5 days after birth. The rapid turn-taking despite indefinitely varying contents of turns is again without parallel; the sustained multi-modal deployment of vocal and visual signals on hands, face and body and the sheer amount of time and effort invested in communication seem without parallel among the other primates. The capacities that lie behind this unique ethology have been called the interaction engine....” Levinson, Stephen & J. Holler. 2014. “The origin of human multi-modal communication.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 369: 20130302. P. 2.


“... since Saussure’s insistence on the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, iconicity in language has been thought to lie largely at the borders of the linguistic system, for example in sound-symbolism. Some spoken languages nevertheless bundle considerable expressive power in a specific grammatical category, traditionally called expressives or ideophones (words conveying, for example, the quality of a sensory experience by exploiting not only consistent meaning-sound relationships but also structural analogy, as in reduplication)....

“Where iconicity comes into its own is in gesture. Iconic gestures are the gestures that mimic motion, depict size, trace shapes or sketch the spatial relations between things,... And whereas spoken language is, through its finite lexicon, invariably coarse on spatial relations, gesture affords accurate depictions of angle, orientation and shape: the two together offer the complementarity of ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ channels.” Levinson, Stephen & J. Holler. 2014. “The origin of human multi-modal communication.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 369: 20130302. P. 3.


“Our hypothesis is that, given its language independence, the interaction engine is phylogenetically older than language, and perhaps characterized the communication of early Homo before complex speech evolved.” Levinson, Stephen & J. Holler. 2014. “The origin of human multi-modal communication.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 369: 20130302. P. 4.


“... early human communication was highly visual and thus at least partially gestural, since it is otherwise hard to account for the white sclera and the unusual toleration and exploitation of mutual gaze.” Levinson, Stephen & J. Holler. 2014. “The origin of human multi-modal communication.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 369: 20130302. P. 4.


“And finally, as already indicated, it seems that complex vocal communication can be traced back somewhere before H. heidelbergensis, at over half a million years ago, when voluntary breathing was in place. A high degree of breath control is required for modern speech, since the depth of inhalation must correlate with the length of what is to be expressed, and the timing with every point of stress. This required, as mentioned, a rewiring of both the central and the peripheral nervous systems. There would be over 0.8 m years between H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis for the evolution of this system, and it was presumably acquired gradually in tandem with the increasing reliance on the vocal channel.” Levinson, Stephen & J. Holler. 2014. “The origin of human multi-modal communication.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B. 369: 20130302. P. 4.


“Insectivory (including the larvae and pupae of some species, with relatively common choices including ants, crickets, and grasshoppers) is still practiced in many traditional societies (while bees and silkworms remain the most important domesticated insects), and many snails are also eaten. But in aggregate, terrestrial invertebrates make only a marginal contribution to global nutrition, whereas marine invertebrates (cephalopods, mollusks, crustaceans) are an important source of dietary protein.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 29.


“Plant respiration [RA] reduces the flux of fixed carbon, but it cannot be seen as a loss because the reoxidation of fixed carbon energizes autotrophic growth and maintenance (that is, the synthesis of biopolymers from their monomers, the transport of photosynthates within plants, and the repair of diseased or damaged tissues).

“Autotrophic respiration thus forms an indispensable metabolic bridge between photosynthesis and plant structure and function. Its relative shares are commonly expressed as the quotient RA/GPP [gross primary productivity] and are usually lowest for some intensively cultivated crops. In primary production terms, agriculture can be defined as an endeavor aimed at maximizing GPP while minimizing RA;....” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. Pp. 31-2.


“Subtracting RA from GPP yields the net primary productivity (NPP; NPP = GPP – RA), the amount of phytomass that becomes available to heterotrophic organisms, be they bacteria, insects, or humans. The NPP of major biomes ranges from negligible amounts in extreme environments (hot or cold deserts) to nearly 1 kg C/m2 (20t/ha) in the richest tropical rain forests.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 33.


“The number of plants ever harvested by humans for food, fiber, medicinal and ornamental uses, and animal feed runs into the thousands, but only about 50 species have accounted for the bulk of all harvested phytomass during the millennia of preindustrial agriculture, and this number was reduced by large-scale intensive cultivation and modern dietary preferences to fewer than 20 dominant species. A similar simplification has affected wood harvests;...” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 42.


“Terrestrial trophic pyramids are invariably broadly based, with phytomass (primary producers) being commonly 20 times more abundant than the mass of herbivores (primary consumers), and the zoomass in the highest trophic level (this may be the third level in the simplest ecosystems, and only a few terrestrial communities go beyond the fifth level) may be equal to just 0.001% of the phytomass.... The situation is reversed in the ocean as phytoplankton’s short life span limits the total amount of standing autotrophic biomass and results in inverted trophic pyramids, with the aggregate heterotrophic biomass being commonly twice, and up to four times, as large as the biomass of primary producers and with some fish and marine mammals being fairly massive.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 51.


“Endothermy exacts its high metabolic cost, as only 1%–3% of ingested phytomass is converted to new zoomass by birds and mammals; in contrast, many ectotherms invest roughly an order of magnitude more of their energy intake (10%–25%) to produce new zoomass.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. Pp. 51-2.


“Chimpanzee hunts are sometime cooperative and meat is often shared, either to reinforce social bonds within a group or, more often, to attract females.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 77.


“New research tends to view late Pleistocene extinctions as a result of multiple causes, including both natural (above all climate and vegetation change) and anthropogenic (mainly selective hunting and fire) factors.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 84.


“Perhaps the only defensible conclusion is that the net impact of human actions on the Earth’s prehistoric biomass–contributing to the megafaunal extinction (hence reducing the global terrestrial zoomass stores) that led to the expansion of forests (hence increasing global phytomass stores) and to an increased frequency of fires (hence periodically reducing land phytomass)–could actually have been positive.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. Pp. 87-8.


“... gathering and hunting cannot support population densities higher than about one person per square kilometer, even in benign environments with abundant standing biomass.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 103.


“At the beginning of the twenty-first century pastures occupied about 34 million km2, or more than twice the area devoted to the cultivation of annual and perennial crops (15.3 million km2)–and Europe is now the only continent where less than 50% of all land used for food production is in pastures...” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. Pp. 114-5.


“The transition from foraging to cropping, from a mobile to a sedentary existence, increased the average population densities (eventually by as many as four orders of magnitude), but in doing so it had to transform typical diets. The most obvious component of this change was the consumption of meat: not all foraging societies were highly carnivorous, but without a doubt, the diet of megafaunal hunters of the late Paleolithic contained much more meat than the diet of the first Neolithic cultivators who planted legumes and cereals and supplemented their diet with regular hunting. In turn, those diets contained more meat than did the typical diets of peasants in medieval or early modern societies.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. Pp. 125-6.


“Biofuels contributed about 9% of the world’s total fuel supply in the year 2000. But as the overall conversion efficiency of fossil fuels is now about 40%, the combustion of 340 EJ of fossil fuels produced nearly 140 EJ of useful energy. Even if we assume a conversion efficiency of 20%, the world’s biofuels yielded less than 10 EJ of useful energy, or less than 6% of the useful energy contributed by fossil fuels.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 140.


“Three fundamental limitations make any large-scale, long-term accounting of human claims on the biosphere’s production challenging–and uncertain. First, these claims belong to three different categories that might simply be labeled extraction, management, and destruction, but a closer look shows that there are overlaps and blurred boundaries. Second, no single measure can adequately express the increasing extent and the overall magnitude of human claims on the biosphere. Third, although a combination of several revealing variables provides a better assessment of these claims, it does not bring a fully satisfactory appraisal because of the many uncertainties in quantifying the natural baselines and assessing the true extent of human interventions.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 153.


“The only area where agriculture accumulates more carbon than natural vegetation would have done in the same places is where irrigation boosts productivity in arid regions, such as Egypt or Pakistan and northern India: there the crops will store more than the short-grass communities they replaced.

“On a small scale, such gains are possible even in areas where the losses are dominant. Converting temperate grassland into a crop field producing an annual harvest of corn with alfalfa as a winter crop can result in an overall phytomass and productivity gain.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 154.


“The general sequence is undoubtedly correct: a reduced phytomass during the LGM [last glacial maximum], with a substantial gain during the Holocene (doubling does not seem excessive, as the total area of tropical rains forest had roughly tripled between 18,000 and 5,000 years before present and that of cool temperature forests expanded more than 30-fold, followed by millennia of gradual decline as a result of the extension of cropland and wood harvests, and then by accelerated deforestation losses since the mid-twentieth century.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 163.


“Indisputably, the current partial pressure of the atmospheric CO2 (at about 390 ppm, or nearly 0.04% by volume) is considerably below the concentration needed to saturate the photosynthesis of C3 plants, the dominant species in both natural and managed ecosystems:...” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 164.


“This land [permanent fields] claimed no less than 1,380 Gha in 2010, or nearly 11% of all continental surfaces. The addition of permanent plantations (growing fruits, tea, coffee, cacao, palms) extends the total of about 1.53 Gha of agricultural land, or about 12% of the earth’s ice-free surface...

“These totals refer to the existing stock of farmland, not to the area of all crops that are actually planted in a calendar- or a crop-year; in national terms that aggregate can be both a bit lower and substantially higher. This is because in many countries some arable land is always fallowed, while variable shares of farmland are planted to more than one crop a year. Consequently, multicropping ratios–expressing the number of crops harvested regionwide or nationwide per unit of arable land every calendar year–range from less than 1 (in Canada or on the U.S. northern Great Plans, where some fields are fallowed and the rest are planted only once a year) to about 1.2 (China’s current national average, reflecting northern single-cropping and southern multicropping) to more than 2 (in the most productive coastal and interior provinces of South China, where triple-cropping is not uncommon).” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. Pp. 165-6.


“According to the FAO, in the year 2000 the global area of permanent meadows and pastures was, at about 3.35 Gha, more than twice as large as the total area of agricultural land.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 166.


“... historical reconstructions of urban populations indicate that in 1600, only about 5% of people lived in cities, compared to about 4% in 1500 and about 2.5% in the year 1000....

“By 1900 urban residents made up 15% of the global population, and 100 years later the share had reached about 47%....

“...the 50% mark was surpassed in 2007...” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. Pp. 179-180.


“Hong Kong’s most densely populated district (Kwun Tong) had 50,000/km2, and Tokyo’s four central wards had a daytime density of about 55,000/km2, as high as the daytime population of Manhattan, where the Wall Street area packs in close to 250,000 people/km2 during working hours. Residential densities on the order of 50,000 people/km2 imply more than 2kg/m2 of anthropomass, the rate unmatched by any other vertebrate and three orders of magnitude higher than the peak zoomass recorded for large herbivorous ungulates in Africa’s richest grassland ecosystems. What is even more stunning is that such human densities surpass even those of all microbial biomass that normally dominates the weight of heterotrophs in natural ecosystems.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 180.


“... the NPP is a theoretical concept, not a variable that is subject to direct measurement or a physical entity that can be left alone or harvested...” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 190.


“In sum, human appropriation of the global NPP is not just a poorly defined measure whose quantification depends on an abstract modeled value and on a concatenation of variables that cannot be known without considerable error margins. More fundamentally, it is a concept whose consensual unambiguous formulation is hardly possible, whose practical applications are made questionable by a number of logical shortcomings, and whose application reduces many complex processes to a single figure.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. Pp. 196-7.


“My approximate reconstructions of past agricultural harvests (all in dry weight) show them rising from about 400 Mt in 1900 to 600 Mt in 1925, 800 Mt in 1950, 1.7 Gt in 1975, and 2.7 Gt in 2000, or a nearly sevenfold increase in 100 years, most of it due to increased crop yields.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 199.


“My reconstructions show that the total phytomass produced by American cropping tripled during the twentieth century, with more than 75% of the gain taking place after 1950 and more than 40% of it realized after 1975. The country’s phytomass output per hectare of cultivated land increased about 2.4 times, from 3.2 t/ha in 1900 to almost 7.8 t/ha in the year 2000....

“Similarly, China’s total crop phytomass expanded 3.2 fold during the twentieth century.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. Pp. 203-4.


“The most comprehensive review of by-catch, based on some 800 studies, showed its worldwide mean to be about 35%, with specific rates ranging from less than 10% for cephalopods, more than 60% for redfish and basses, 75% for flounders and soles, more than 80% for eels, and nearly 250% for crabs to more than 500% for shrimp.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 210.


“... there is no doubt that most of the traditionally targeted species and most of the major fishing areas now belong to three unwelcome categories: those whose the stocks have already collapsed or are close to doing so, those that continue to be overfished, and those that are fished to their full capacity.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 213.


“... [for the world total human population] there has been a 350-fold increase in 5,000 years, more than a 20-fold gain during the last millennium, and roughly a quadrupling between 1900 and 2010.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 221.


“Human actions have thus reduced the biosphere’s phytomass by as much as 35%–40% from its preagricultural level. During the twentieth century the net reduction in global phytomass was about 110 Gt C, or about 15% of the 1900 total–but, concurrently, the phytomass of field crops increased fivefold.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 225.


“The uniform distribution of dry terrestrial phytomass over ice-free land would produce a layer about 1 cm thick; the same process in the ocean would add a mere 0.03 mm of phytoplankton (in both cases I am assuming the average biomass density to be equal to 1 g/cm3). I know of no better examples to illustrate the evanescent quality of life.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 229.


“A single paragraph list of such notable transformations [negative environmental changes] must include the following: changes of surface albedo and hence of soil and vegetation temperatures, evaporation, and evapotranspiration; altered CO2 fluxes due to photosynthesis and respiration and increased emissions of CO2 from biomass combustion; reduced or increased emissions of volatile hydrocarbons and numerous trace gases, including CH4, N2O, NOx and SOx; increased generation of terrigenic dust, lowered retention of soil moisture, enhanced soil erosion and sedimentation, and losses of organic soil nitrogen; and declines in abundance and biodiversity affecting species ranging from soil microfauna to the top predators, with perhaps the outright extinction of some invertebrates and many vertebrate animals.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 236.


“As for these audacious claims that humans are now supreme and natural systems are somehow subserviently embedded within human systems, their authors would do well to remember that the fundamental geophysical variables that make the biosphere possible, that make the Earth habitable, that are the primary governors of climate, that subject it to Milankovic cycles, and that are the pacemakers of the ice ages (ranging from the Sun’s electromagnetic flux and the planet’s tilt, orbital distance, path and its eccentricity to the Earth’s shape and rotation speed) are absolutely beyond any human influences.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 240.


“And when it is unclear whether the biosphere will respond as a source or a sink of carbon, then the only truly defensible conclusion regarding the long-term effects of global climate change on plant productivity, carbon sequestration, and associated changes in water supply, diseases, and pests is not a string of catastrophic predictions but an honest acknowledgment that our ignorance still trumps our knowledge.” Smil, Vaclav. 2013. Harvesting the Biosphere: What We Have Taken from Nature. MIT Press. P. 245.


“In the case of humans, one reasonable hypothesis involves extending the primate social intelligence hypothesis to reflect the fact that humans are not just social but ‘ultra-social’. That is, whereas primates in general have evolved sophisticated social-cognitive skills for competing and cooperating with conspecifics, humans have also evolved skills that enable them to actually create different cultural groups, each operating with a distinctive set of artifacts, symbols, and social practices and institutions. To function effectively in the cultural world into which they are born, human children simply must learn to use these artifacts and tools and to participate in these practices, which require some special social-cognitive skills of social learning, communication, and ‘theory of mind’.... In the end, human adults will have all kinds of cognitive skills not possessed by other primates, but this outcome will be due largely to children’s early emerging, specialized skills for absorbing the accumulated skillful practices and knowledge of their social group (so that a child growing up outside of any human culture would develop few distinctively human cognitive skills). Humans’ especially powerful skills of social-cultural cognition early in ontogeny thus serve as a kind of ‘bootstrap’ for the distinctively complex development of human cognition in general. We may call this the cultural intelligence hypothesis.” Herrmann, Esther, J. Call, M. Hernandez-Lloreda, B. Hare & M. Tomasello. 2007. “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis.” Science. 7 September. Vol. 317. Pp. 1360-1366. P. 1360.


“... the cultural intelligence hypothesis predicts that there should be an age in early human ontogeny (specifically, an age before children have been seriously influenced by written language, symbolic mathematics, and formal education) at which humans’ skills of physical cognition (concerning things such as space, quantities, and causality) are very similar to those of our nearest primate relatives but at which their skills of social-cultural cognition (specifically those most directly involved in cultural creation and learning, such as social learning, communication, and theory of mind) are already distinctively human. This is in stark contrast to the general intelligence hypothesis, which predicts that human cognition should differ from that of other primates uniformly, with no difference between physical and social cognition.” Herrmann, Esther, J. Call, M. Hernandez-Lloreda, B. Hare & M. Tomasello. 2007. “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis.” Science. 7 September. Vol. 317. Pp. 1360-1366. P. 1360.


“Statistically, the humans and chimpanzees did not differ from one another in the physical domain, but they were both more skillful than the orangutans. In the social domain, a very different pattern emerged.... Statistically, the humans were more skillful than either of the two ape species [bonobos and chimpanzees], which did not differ from one another.” Herrmann, Esther, J. Call, M. Hernandez-Lloreda, B. Hare & M. Tomasello. 2007. “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis.” Science. 7 September. Vol. 317. Pp. 1360-1366. P. 1362.


“The current results provide strong support for the cultural intelligence hypothesis that human beings have evolved some specialized social-cognitive skills (beyond those of primates in general) for living and exchanging knowledge in cultural groups: communicating with others, learning from others, and ‘reading the mind’ of others in especially complex ways.” Herrmann, Esther, J. Call, M. Hernandez-Lloreda, B. Hare & M. Tomasello. 2007. “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis.” Science. 7 September. Vol. 317. Pp. 1360-1366. P. 1365.


“It is perhaps relevant, in this regard, that domestic dogs (which in some sense, have been selected to live in human cultures) do not perform as well as chimpanzees on tasks of physical cognition but outperform them on tasks of social cognition.” Herrmann, Esther, J. Call, M. Hernandez-Lloreda, B. Hare & M. Tomasello. 2007. “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis.” Science. 7 September. Vol. 317. Pp. 1360-1366. P. 1365.


“Three sorts of cognition, all well documented in animals, have been offered as possible precursors of language; orientation and navigation; number; and social cognition. All involve discrete elements and rule-governed computations. In three respects, however, social cognition seems the most likely candidate as a precursor of language. First, only in social cognition do the discrete elements include living creatures, to which listeners can reasonably attribute motives and goals, and context-specific vocalizations that are also associated with a caller’s motivation to interact with another in specific ways. Only social cognition, therefore, deals with agents, actions, and patients.

“Second, only in social cognition are the discrete elements explicitly linked to vocalizations, so that the system of communication and the system of cognition on which it is based are tightly coupled. This merging of communication and cognition does not occur in animal orientation, navigation, or systems of number.

“Third, only in social cognition are the discrete elements linked–as in language–to the organization of items into concepts. Because the meaning of a baboon’s call is inseparable from the identity of the caller, her dominance rank, and her family membership, baboon communication relies on a form of concept formation based on socially defined categories.” Seyfarth, Robert & D. Cheney. 2014. “The evolution of language from social cognition.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology. 2:5-9. Pp. 7-8.


“... ‘still face’ experiments suggest that the baby has from early on communicative intentions and that she and the caretaker form an interactive system that is mutually regulated.” Hari, Riitta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. October 7. 88:181-93. P. 182.


“The primacy of interaction is also supported by findings that children learn best during interaction, and much less by observing the behaviors of others.” Hari, Riitta, L. Henriksson, S. Malinen & L. Parkkonen. 2015. “Centrality of Social Interaction in Human Brain Function.” Neuron. October 7. 88:181-93. P. 189.


“They [the authors of the succeeding book section] emphasize that cooperation has not merely evolved to reduce aggression or as a reaction to competition but serves a significant, perhaps a leading role, in the evolution of social behavior and social organization. To simply put it, cooperation is normal behavior.” Bekoff, Marc. 2011. “Cooperation and the Evolution of Social Living: Moving Beyond the Constraints and Implications of Misleading Dogma: Introduction Part II.” Pp. 111-119. From Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 111.


“Just as complex brains and cognition have evolved from simpler brains multiple times and independently, so perhaps have cooperative behaviors.” Bekoff, Marc. 2011. “Cooperation and the Evolution of Social Living: Moving Beyond the Constraints and Implications of Misleading Dogma: Introduction Part II.” Pp. 111-119. From Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 114.


“Although play is fun, it is also a serious business. When animals play, they are constantly working to understand and follow the rules and to communicate their intentions to play fairly. They fine-tune their behavior on the run, carefully monitoring the behavior of their play partners and paying close attention to infractions of the agreed-upon rules. Four basic aspects of fair play in animals are as follows: ask first, be honest, follow the rules, and admit you are wrong. When the rules of play are violated, and when fairness breaks down, so does play.” Bekoff, Marc. 2011. “Cooperation and the Evolution of Social Living: Moving Beyond the Constraints and Implications of Misleading Dogma: Introduction Part II.” Pp. 111-119. From Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 115.


“In canids an action called a ‘bow’ is used to ask others to play. When performing a bow, an animal crouches on his or her forelimbs. He or she will sometimes bark, wag the tail wildly, and have an eager look. So that the invitation to play is not confusing, bows are highly stereotyped and show little variation. Play bows are honest signals, a sign of trust. Research shows that animals who violate that trust are often ostracized, suggesting that violation of the rules of play is maladaptive and can disrupt the efficient functioning of the group. For example, among dogs, coyotes, and wolves, individuals who do not play fairly find that their invitations to play are ignored or that they are simply avoided by other group members. Long-term field research on coyotes living in the Grand Teton National Park, near Jackson, Wyoming, shows that coyotes who do not play fairly often leave their pack because they do not form strong social bonds. Such loners suffer higher mortality than those who remain with others.” Bekoff, Marc. 2011. “Cooperation and the Evolution of Social Living: Moving Beyond the Constraints and Implications of Misleading Dogma: Introduction Part II.” Pp. 111-119. From Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 115.


“Animals engage in two activities that help create an equal and fair playing field: self-handicapping and role-reversing.” Bekoff, Marc. 2011. “Cooperation and the Evolution of Social Living: Moving Beyond the Constraints and Implications of Misleading Dogma: Introduction Part II.” Pp. 111-119. From Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 115.


“... primatologists Robert Sussman and his colleagues came to the conclusion that the vast majority of social interactions are affiliative rather than agonistic or divisive. Grooming and bouts of play predominate the social scene, with only an occasional fight or threat of aggression. In prosimians, the most ancestral of existing primates, an average of 93.2% of social interactions are affiliative. In New World monkeys who live in the tropical forests of southern Mexico and Central and South America, 86.1% of interactions are affiliative, and likewise, for Old World monkeys who live in South and East Asia, the Middle east, Africa, and Gibraltar, 84.8% are affiliative. Unpublished data for gorillas show that 85.7% of their social interactions are affiliative.” Bekoff, Marc. 2011. “Cooperation and the Evolution of Social Living: Moving Beyond the Constraints and Implications of Misleading Dogma: Introduction Part II.” Pp. 111-119. From Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 118.


“... a recent meta-analysis compared exploitation rates exerted by humans on their prey species to those of other predators. It revealed that we exploit herbivores on land at a similar level to other predators. By contrast, terrestrial carnivores and top predators are exploited by human hunters at median rates 4-10 times higher than other species; while in the marine realm exploitation rates by humans are 11-15 times greater than the median rate for other species.” Worm, Boris & R. Paine. 2016. “Humans as a Hyperkeystone Species.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution. August. Vol. 31, No. 8. Pp. 600-607. P. 601.


“By targeting these species [carnivores that are already keystone species] at a substantially higher exploitation rate than others, we might deplete them to levels where their keystone role is compromised or lost. Their ecological role can remain vacant or sometimes be replaced by another species, and this could lead to novel interaction chains. In this way, humans are able to reorganize food webs by altering the position of traditional keystones. We propose that such a role makes humans a higher-order of ‘hyperkeystone’ species, a term we define akin to ‘hyperparasite’, as a species that affects multiple other keystone species across different habitats,...” Worm, Boris & R. Paine. 2016. “Humans as a Hyperkeystone Species.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution. August. Vol. 31, No. 8. Pp. 600-607. P. 601.


“...[O’Neill and Kahn] observed that ecologists treat humans as an externality while economists tend to treat ecosystems as an externality.” Worm, Boris & R. Paine. 2016. “Humans as a Hyperkeystone Species.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution. August. Vol. 31, No. 8. Pp. 600-607. P. 604. Reference: O’Neill, R. & J. Kahn. 2000. “Homo economus [sic] as a keystone species.” BioScience. 50, 333-7.


“Observations of animals benefitting from anthropogenic environments often lead to the conclusion that these animals are undergoing commensal-specific evolution.” Hulme-Beaman, Ardern, K. Dobney, T. Cucchi & J. Searle. 2016. “An Ecological and Evolutionary Framework for Commensalism in Anthropogenic Environments.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution. August. Vol. 31, No. 8. Pp. 633-45. P. 633.


“We propose a new term for organisms that might represent the typical commensal condition in an anthropogenic environment: ‘anthrodependent taxa’ or ‘anthrodependents’....

“Furthermore, as the relationship becomes more intense (one of dependence), these ‘commensal taxa’ rarely have a neutral impact on humans; for example, they consume crops, steal food, and/or harbour disease.” Hulme-Beaman, Ardern, K. Dobney, T. Cucchi & J. Searle. 2016. “An Ecological and Evolutionary Framework for Commensalism in Anthropogenic Environments.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution. August. Vol. 31, No. 8. Pp. 633-45. Pp. 634-5.


“Commensal taxa – Commensalism in its original and simplest form specifies a relationship, repersented as +/0, whereby one organism benefits (+) from another without causing deleterious effects to the other (0)....

“Synanthropic and synurban taxa – These terms are used in studies of species that continue to live in areas that are occupied and altered by humans. They can include both obligate-commensal species and also species not dependent on, or even particularly benefiting from, humans. These synanthropic species show a changed lifestyle associated with living in close proximity with humans (affecting breeding cycles, territorial behaviour, foraging behaviour, diet, etc.). Synanthropic is also used to describe proto-commensal species in archaeology.

“Anthopophilic taxa – Traditionally applied to ectoparasites, this term has increasingly been used in archaeology to indicate species attracted to human environments and activities. This can include not only commensal species, but also species opportunistically benefitting from humans, without dependence.

“Domestic taxa – Humans actively buffer these taxa from external selective pressures, enhancing survival, and breeding. Therefore, humans reduce and sometimes remove impacts of natural evolutionary processes on these taxa and, at more advanced stages of domestication, humans directly control the selective pressures.

“Anthrodependent taxa – We propose this term to refer to those taxa that might have had, and continue to have, a commensal relationship (+/0), but are defined by their dependence on anthopogenic resources, which in some cases can have a negative impact on their once commensal partner.” Hulme-Beaman, Ardern, K. Dobney, T. Cucchi & J. Searle. 2016. “An Ecological and Evolutionary Framework for Commensalism in Anthropogenic Environments.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution. August. Vol. 31, No. 8. Pp. 633-45. P. 634.


“Commensal species living in anthropogenic environments are analogous to invasive species colonising and occupying new locations.... Fluctuating and disrupted environments, with unexploited or superabundant resources, are particularly prone to invasion and such characteristics are also common to anthopogenic environments.” Hulme-Beaman, Ardern, K. Dobney, T. Cucchi & J. Searle. 2016. “An Ecological and Evolutionary Framework for Commensalism in Anthropogenic Environments.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution. August. Vol. 31, No. 8. Pp. 633-45. P. 640.


“Anthrodependent taxa generally conform with what are considered r-selected traits, with high levels of fecundity, rapid sexual maturity, and catastrophic mortality [e.g. house mice].” Hulme-Beaman, Ardern, K. Dobney, T. Cucchi & J. Searle. 2016. “An Ecological and Evolutionary Framework for Commensalism in Anthropogenic Environments.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution. August. Vol. 31, No. 8. Pp. 633-45. P. 641.


“The reciprocal altruism model states that unrelated organisms can enter into relationships that can be characterized as fitness value exchanges. Using a simplistic genetic system as a model, Trivers presents a mathematical equation for the relationship between an actor and recipient in a series of reciprocal exchanges using a prisoner’s dilemma style ‘payoff matrix.’ The core of the hypothesis revolves around the frequency and symmetry of potentially altruistic situations. There are three main conditions that are relevant in the potential selection for reciprocal altruism. First, that there be many opportunities for altruistic action during the lifetime of the actors. Second, that a given actor repeatedly interacts with the same small set of individuals. And third, that pairs of altruists are exposed ‘symmetrically’ to altruistic opportunities so that over time two such actors are able to render roughly equivalent benefits to each other while incurring roughly compatible costs. These three conditions set the stage for the selection of a reciprocal altruistic system. Some biological parameters that affect the form of the system include length of lifetime (chances of reciprocal altruism rise with longevity), dispersal pattern (low dispersal rate also favors reciprocal altruism), and degree of mutual independence (group-living animals are more reliant on one another more frequently than solitary ones).” MacKinnon, Katherine & A. Fuentes. 2011. “Primates, Niche Construction, and Social Complexity: The Roles of Social Cooperation and Altruism.” Pp. 121-43. From Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 123. Reference: Trivers, R. 1971. “The evolution of reciprocal altruism.” Q. Rev. Biol. 46(10), 35-57.


“De Waal and Brosnan suggest that we can envision primate reciprocity along a continuum that ranges from Triver’s strong reciprocal altruism at one end to a reciprocity reflecting simple social symmetries at the other. They lay out three specific types of reciprocity: symmetry based, attitudinal based, and calculated. In symmetrical reciprocity, there is no ‘score keeping,’ there is a strong mutuality of interactions, and a ‘strong aversion to major, lasting imbalances in incoming and outgoing benefits’. One could argue that indeed, given the loose and general assessment of symmetry in exchanges, this level of reciprocity may simply be altruism as a byproduct of a social complexity that maximizes close social bonding amongst individuals within a group (between non-kin). The second level of reciprocity, attitudinal based, reflects a mild tit-for-tat strategy wherein individuals who generally have positive and predictive relationships will invest in one another without close tabs on recouping investments. De Waal and Bosnan refer to this as the ‘if you are nice, I will be nice’ principle between individuals. The final level, calculated reciprocity, is a full-blown Triver’s style reciprocal altruism which involves relatively extensive individual ‘score keeping’ and the potential punishment of cheaters. If this continuum accurately reflects the range of reciprocity, then the possibility exists that reciprocity and altruism are behaviors that share a common origin and are differentiated by the types, contexts, and patterns of relationships between individuals. This, however, does not leave room for altruism occurring outside of familiar social partners in the nonhuman primates. Might this be distinct difference between humans and other primates?” MacKinnon, Katherine & A. Fuentes. 2011. “Primates, Niche Construction, and Social Complexity: The Roles of Social Cooperation and Altruism.” Pp. 121-43. From Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 125. Reference: De Waal, F. & S. Brosnan. 2006. “Simple and complex reciprocity in primates.” Pp. 85-105. From Kappeler, P. & C. van Schaik (Eds). Cooperation in primates and humans: Mechanism and Evolutions. Springer.


“As broad and complex social behavioral complexes (reliant on extensive cooperation) become commonplace in the hominins, true altruism (actions engaging in a cost for self with other’s benefit) arises as an emergent property of the system. Because of the extensive cooperation and the generally intensive reciprocity in hominins/humans, multiple instances of altruism can be experienced across the lifetimes of individuals without effectively negative fitness costs. No individuals are uniformly altruistic but altruistic acts can appear, even commonly, and not be selected against within the populations. Here altruistic action emerges as a by-product of the physiological and behavioral adaptations required to effectively negotiate high level and complex social networks where coalitions, multi-party social negotiations, and reciprocity are the primary avenues for social and reproductive success.” MacKinnon, Katherine & A. Fuentes. 2011. “Primates, Niche Construction, and Social Complexity: The Roles of Social Cooperation and Altruism.” Pp. 121-43. From Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. Pp. 127-8.


“Hrdy builds on Michael Tomasello and colleagues’ findings that shared intentionality distinguishes humans from other apes. The evolutionary benefit they identity for this capacity is the widespread cooperation that it enables, the Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis. But as Hrdy notes, those benefits do not explain why shared intentionality evolved in our lineage and not in other genera of the hominid radiation. In contrast, the selection pressures that accompanied the shift away from independent mothering to our distinctive childrearing might explain why shared intentionality evolved in our lineage in the first place.” Hawkes, Kristen. 2014. “Primate Sociality to Human Cooperation.” Human Nat. 25:28-48. P. 29.


“The Grandmother Hypothesis addresses the evolution of human rearing environments. It proposes that ancestral populations faced ecological changes in the Plio-Pleistocene that restricted the availability of the foods just-weaned juveniles could handle for themselves. Mothers who did not follow the retreating forests had to provision their weanlings, and this longer period of juvenile dependence presented a novel opportunity for any older females still surviving as their fertility was ending. They could enhance their own fitness by helping provision their dependent grandchildren and allowing daughters to have their next babies sooner without reductions in previous offspring survival. As a consequence, our lineage evolved greater longevity, later maturity, and earlier weaning from an ancestral life history that was like that of the other living great apes, all without altering the age at which female fertility ends.” Hawkes, Kristen. 2014. “Primate Sociality to Human Cooperation.” Human Nat. 25:28-48. P. 32.


“But initial critiques of the Grandmother Hypothesis cited female natal dispersal throughout our lineage that would have kept mothers and adult daughters apart. Now evidence is plentiful that hunter-gatherers do not show the presumed patrilocal bias.” Hawkes, Kristen. 2014. “Primate Sociality to Human Cooperation.” Human Nat. 25:28-48. P. 33.


“Human infants draw others into joining them in paying attention to things by pointing, behavior labeled shared or ‘joint attention,’ or ‘triadic engagement.’ One hypothesis about why children do this by 9 months or before whereas chimpanzee infants do not is that earlier locomotor competence allows chimpanzee infants to get what they want themselves, whereas human babies must use social means. Bard reports that ‘when chimpanzees are raised with warm relationships and industrially manufactured objects,’ mutual triadic engagements are common. Her appraisal is that, in captivity, ‘young chimpanzees compare favorably to humans as newborns through to 2.5 years olds’.” Hawkes, Kristen. 2014. “Primate Sociality to Human Cooperation.” Human Nat. 25:28-48. P. 37. Reference: Bard, K. A. 2012. “Emotional engagement: How chimpanzee minds develop.” Pp. 224-245. From De Waal, F.B. & P.F. Ferrari (Eds). The Primate Mind. Harvard University Press. P. 242.


“Based on behavioral experiments with young (Western) human children and older apes, Tomasello and colleagues continue to add evidence consistent with their argument that shared intentionality is distinctively human. Other comparativists contributing to behavioral experiments usually use adults of each species. Recent reviews of this growing field are numerous, identifying an array of features as the distinctive scaffolding of human prosociality. Some nominate escalated altruistic preferences or multiple differences in prosociality, tendency to punish, and concern for fairness. Others highlight punishment or disgust. Some identify proactive cooperation and reactivity, emotional reactivity and social tolerance, or recognition of benefit from mutualistic endeavors in a wide range of situations.” Hawkes, Kristen. 2014. “Primate Sociality to Human Cooperation.” Human Nat. 25:28-48. P. 39.


“According to Graziano’s ‘attention schema’ theory, our own consciousness is also a perceptual construct–a unique one that emerges when the brain applies the same perceptual attribution recursively to itself. We attribute consciousness to others as part of our perceptual model of what they are paying attention to (an inference particularly useful for predicting their behavior). This model describes the process of attention as a mysterious something extra in the brains of beings that are selectively processing information that guides their behavior. When the brain applies the model to itself, ‘I’ become endowed with this extra something as well...” Schurger, Aaron. 2014. “Consciousness perceived.” Science. July 11. Vol. 345. Issue 6193. P. 147. Reference: Graziano, Michael. 2013. Consciousness and the Social Brain. OUP.


“The main behavioural trait that unites domesticated species is a reduction in the expression of various forms of aggressive behaviour, including intraspecific, interspecific, offensive or defensive aggression.” Hare, Brian, V. Wobber & R. Wrangham. 2012. “The self-domestication hypothesis: evolution of bonobo psychology is due to selection against aggression.” Animal Behaviour. 83: 573-585. P. 574.


“In domesticated species, the characteristic down-regulation of aggressiveness and increased tolerance is accompanied by other differences, many of which serve no obvious function. Together with reduced aggression and increased tolerance these constitute the domestication syndrome. Traits in the domstication syndrome occur with varying degrees of consistency and fall into four major categories. First, physiological changes include those related to aggression, such as reduced reactivity of the hypothalamic-pituitary–adrenal axis, as well as others with no clear relation to aggression, such as more frequent reproductive cycles. Second, behavioural changes include reduced aggression and increased tolerance, and also increased pro-social behaviours, particularly play, non-conceptive sexual behaviour and grooming. Third are anatomical changes such as reduction in cranial capacity, shortening of the face, reduction in tooth size, depigmentation of parts of the body, floppy ears and reductions in sexual dimorphism of crania. Fourth, cognitive changes are suggested by evidence of differences in problem-solving abilities where domesticates and nondomesticates have been compared.” Hare, Brian, V. Wobber & R. Wrangham. 2012. “The self-domestication hypothesis: evolution of bonobo psychology is due to selection against aggression.” Animal Behaviour. 83: 573-585. P. 575.


“In addition to showing less severe forms of aggression compared to chimpanzees, bonobos show differences in phenotypic traits and developmental patterns that appear analogous to the domestication syndrome. First, morphological similarities between bonobos and domesticates include reduced cranial size, a reduction in facial projection and decreased mandible and tooth size.” Hare, Brian, V. Wobber & R. Wrangham. 2012. “The self-domestication hypothesis: evolution of bonobo psychology is due to selection against aggression.” Animal Behaviour. 83: 573-585. P. 577.


“Like humans, marmosets are among the few primates that pair-bond and engage in cooperative care of their young.... Marmosets also exhibit sophisticated forms of observational social learning and are one of the only non-ape species to demonstrate imitation.” Miller, Cory, W. Freiwald, D. Leopold, J. Mitchell, A. Silva & X. Wang. 2016. “Marmosets: A Neuroscientific Model of Human Social Behavior.” Neuron. 90. April 20. Pp. 219-33. P. 220.


“Social signaling in primates presents something of a paradox. Despite many examples of high social aptitude within the rules of their society, the repertoire of social signals (e.g., facial expressions, vocalizations, piloerectin, etc.) is notably limited. One might expect that the demonstrable complexity in social interaction might be matched by a broad ‘vocabulary’ for social communication. Yet, one of the lessons from primate ethology is that communication does not amount to a catalog of social signals but must instead be seen within the broader context of an existing social scene of interacting individuals, in which environment, social dominance, and recent history strongly influence [how?] signals are used and interpreted.” Miller, Cory, W. Freiwald, D. Leopold, J. Mitchell, A. Silva & X. Wang. 2016. “Marmosets: A Neuroscientific Model of Human Social Behavior.” Neuron. 90. April 20. Pp. 219-33. P. 223.


“The basic features of joint attention are found across primates...” Miller, Cory, W. Freiwald, D. Leopold, J. Mitchell, A. Silva & X. Wang. 2016. “Marmosets: A Neuroscientific Model of Human Social Behavior.” Neuron. 90. April 20. Pp. 219-33. P. 223.


“When marmosets are visually occluded from each other, they commonly engage in a conversational exchange known as antiphonal calling. Adult marmosets rarely interrupt each other during these conversations, but rather take turns alternating successive calls in bouts of vocal exchanges. The rhythm of these exchanges is governed by rules reflecting social relationships (e.g., cagemate, sibling, sex, age, etc).” Miller, Cory, W. Freiwald, D. Leopold, J. Mitchell, A. Silva & X. Wang. 2016. “Marmosets: A Neuroscientific Model of Human Social Behavior.” Neuron. 90. April 20. Pp. 219-33. P. 224.


“At the core of the phenomenon of culture, whether in humans or non-human animals are processes whereby entities including behaviour patterns, ideas and artifact designs spread between or within generations, maintaining some recognizable consistency of form. Such entities are often described as ‘traditions’, and the underlying social learning processes as ‘cultural diffusion’ or ‘cultural transmission’.” Whiten, Andrew, C. Caldwell & A. Mesoudi. 2016. “Cultural diffusion in humans and other animals.” Current Opinion in Psychology. 8:15-21. P. 15.


“Diffusion has also been inferred from inter-group transfers. A recent example among chimpanzees is the spread of a novel form of ant-fishing from one community to its neighbours. By contrast, female chimpanzees in the Tai Forest moving to a neighbouring community were shown to conform to local preferences in the selection of hammer materials for nut-cracking. A major question is thus what throws the switch between incomers conforming, and incomers’ behaviour instead being adopted by residents.” Whiten, Andrew, C. Caldwell & A. Mesoudi. 2016. “Cultural diffusion in humans and other animals.” Current Opinion in Psychology. 8:15-21. P. 15.


“A dramatic contrast to the conservatism suggested by many studies of animal culture also comes from the vocal domain. The songs of humpback whales are similar across large areas of ocean, yet may change and diffuse rapidly, constituting ‘cultural revolutions’. Recently such changes have been observed to diffuse across the Pacific Ocean like ‘cultural ripples’. Songs originating near Australia in 1998 and 2002 spread to French Polynesia by 2001 and 2004 respectively, being recorded at four intermediate locations in between.” Whiten, Andrew, C. Caldwell & A. Mesoudi. 2016. “Cultural diffusion in humans and other animals.” Current Opinion in Psychology. 8:15-21. Pp. 15-6.


“More generally, it must be remembered that there are two essential components of cultural evolution; innovation and dissemination. Experimental seeding of the kind we have reviewed is perfect for elucidating the latter but by its very nature excludes the innovation element. Advancing ecological validity by bringing innovation into a more comprehensive experimental science of culture is a needed but challenging prospect.” Whiten, Andrew, C. Caldwell & A. Mesoudi. 2016. “Cultural diffusion in humans and other animals.” Current Opinion in Psychology. 8:15-21. P. 19.


“Dimensional compression occurs in self-organization and features prominently in synergetics, a theory of self-organization that describes how systems of many non-linearly interacting, micro-scale components exhibit low-dimensional spatio-temporal patterns.” Riley, Michael, M. Richardson, K. Shockley & V. Ramenzoni. 2011. “Interpersonal synergies.” Frontiers of Psychology. March. V. 2. Art. 38. Pp. 1-7. P. 1.


“Dimensional compression is a necessary but insufficient condition for the existence of a synergy. The second and more critical characteristic of synergies, reciprocal compensation, refers to the ability of one component of a synergy to react to changes in others. A classic example occurs when one effector is perturbed during speech. When the lower jaw was tugged downward, it was quickly compensated by a reciprocal change (the lower lip extended upward) that enabled the speaker to complete pronunciation of the sound.” Riley, Michael, M. Richardson, K. Shockley & V. Ramenzoni. 2011. “Interpersonal synergies.” Frontiers of Psychology. March. V. 2. Art. 38. Pp. 1-7. P. 2.


“The evidence reviewed here is consistent with claims that movement system DF [degrees of freedom] residing in different actors are coupled to form low-dimensional, reciprocally compensating synergies.” Riley, Michael, M. Richardson, K. Shockley & V. Ramenzoni. 2011. “Interpersonal synergies.” Frontiers of Psychology. March. V. 2. Art. 38. Pp. 1-7. P. 5.


“One unusual aspect of cooperation, not reported in humans alone, is altruism, whereby individuals act in ways that appear to be contrary to their own interests while benefiting someone else. Ignoring the fact that human beings often act in self-destructive ways while benefiting nobody, advocates of the notion that natural selection is in the business of fine-tuning all aspects of behavior have sought to find direct evolutionary advantage in apparently altruistic behaviors, most commonly discovering such advantage in benefits that accrue to (genetically similar) kin.” Tattersall, Ian. 2011. “Cooperation, Altruism, and Human Evolution: Introduction Part I.” Pp. 11-18. From: Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 14.


“Not all individual human beings are equally altruistic–or even altruistic at all–and altruism is simply one potential expression of a much larger general capacity for cooperation. To the extent that it works, kin-selection theory only explains why natural selection has not eliminated the ‘altruistic’ extreme of the spectrum of cooperative behaviors.” Tattersall, Ian. 2011. “Cooperation, Altruism, and Human Evolution: Introduction Part I.” Pp. 11-18. From: Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 15.


“What is most interesting today is that, while adaptationist explanations are waning in general evolutionary biology because of their frustratingly limited explanatory power, they are still adopted, and publicized by the mass media, in a ubiquitous ‘pop evolutionary psychology’. The evolution of human sociality thus seems to be the last territory where a ‘stereotyped Darwinism’ reigns almost undisputed.” Pievani, Telmo. 2011. “Born to Cooperate? Altruism as Exaptation and the Evolution of Human Sociality.” Pp. 41-60. From: Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 54.


“We should then, explore the possibility that human cooperation and free altruism could have had ancient natural precursors in such characteristics as empathy, refusal of someone else’s suffering, reciprocity. They could then have been retained by various hominid precursors as predator-protection mechanisms, in tribes of gatherers, who were frequently victims of predators. Subsequently, this deeply rooted attitude was exapted in several different ways: firstly in the transition of later species of genus Homo to better articulated practices of organized hunting; then in the Palaeolithic transition to cognitively modern humans. Here we see the exaptation of altruism and human sociality from a defensive adaptation to a successful model of social organization with division of the work and new forms of exploitation of ecosystems (including big-game hunting). Though repeatedly exapted, these behaviours maintained their relationship with their natural precursors, which is why in various non-human animals we see echoes of them, and they appear to peep out as emotional and apparently instinctual attitudes in current cultural contexts that have nothing to do with its evolutionary history.” Pievani, Telmo. 2011. “Born to Cooperate? Altruism as Exaptation and the Evolution of Human Sociality.” Pp. 41-60. From: Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. P. 55.


“If we discover that, for the greater part of our evolutionary history, the defence of ourselves and of our families from predators, and not the contrary, has been the main driver of our survival; that sociality and cooperation have had a function connected to avoid predators, and not to the glorious aim of hunting and dominating environments, we will have to change the major paradigm that has dominated our views of our essential selves from the earliest days of paleoanthropology. This paradigm concerns not only the origins of humans as physical beings but also the origins of human mind, most especially in terms of atavistic fears and remaining instincts. This theoretical change has a pars destruens: It enables us to see the fallacy embedded in many of the adaptationist, competitive and gene-centred stereotypes of evolutionary psychology. But it has a much more important pars construens: Through its lens, we better understand human evolution, in terms of a plurality of levels and units of selection and in terms of adaptations and exaptations.

“Nevertheless, nature is not a norm, even if the norm is cooperation. If we state that we should cooperate because it is more natural to do so, then we are likely to undervalue the multilevel nature of the evolution of human behaviours.” Pievani, Telmo. 2011. “Born to Cooperate? Altruism as Exaptation and the Evolution of Human Sociality.” Pp. 41-60. From: Sussman, R.W. & C. Cloninger (Eds.). Origins of Altruism and Cooperation. Springer Verlag. Pp. 57-8.


“In earlier eras [before Plato] the integral unity of words and things was a matter of fact. A name was either a part of the referent or it substituted the designation.” Wrobel, Szymon. 2014. Grammar and Glamour of Cooperation: Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Language and Action. Peter Lang Edition. P. 11.


“The doctrine of the Incarnation presents yet different approach to the problem of language. Of course, the idea is not to be taken literally as a manifestation of Spirit or God Incarnate. In Christian thought, the doctrine of Incarnation works best in language context. Dogmatic theology reveals a truly linguistic problem: if the Word becomes flesh and embodies the Spirit, logos is left without its great spiritual potential. However, just as the Stoics discriminate between the internal and the external logos, so do theologians. For them, language correlates both in the same miraculous way as the Son does with God and Spirit, therefore, the integrity of the sign is just as mysterious as that of the Trinity. This marvel stunned men for centuries until Ferdinand de Saussure in the famous Cours de linguistique generale revealed that the linguistic sign is not the composite of the thing and the name but instead it combines concept and sound-image. Sound-image for Saussure is a mental reflection of sound, an image that human memory is able to store. From Augustine to de Saussure the miracle of language is in the fact that what it manifests and what is manifested in it is still contained in words. Perhaps due to the fact that logos translates to ratio and verbum the phenomenon of language is central to theological scholasticism while it is peripheral in Greek metaphysics.” Wrobel, Szymon. 2014. Grammar and Glamour of Cooperation: Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Language and Action. Peter Lang Edition. Pp. 11-2.


“Emile Benveniste posits that if the most outstanding a [sic] quality of language is to structure and to integrate, then not only the existence of another person but the existence of a society must be presupposed in language. On one hand, language is a practice through which human beings have acquired definite capacities and attributes for social existence as particular sorts of person. In other words, language is in the nature of man and it is in and through language that a man constitutes himself as a subject. On the other hand, just as human societies come after language and imitate its functioning, language comes after human societies and imitates their functioning.” Wrobel, Szymon. 2014. Grammar and Glamour of Cooperation: Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Language and Action. Peter Lang Edition. P. 16.


“There are three pathologies in language today: psychotics no longer seek recognition of the Other, hysterics go about the symptoms of their repressed desires, and scientists hush their true identity as cognitive subjects.” Wrobel, Szymon. 2014. Grammar and Glamour of Cooperation: Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Language and Action. Peter Lang Edition. P. 16.


“... he {Gaerdenfors] nevertheless proposes a strong hypothesis that the primary function of language and the real reason for its development is that it makes possible cooperation about future goals. This is the essential advantage that evolution has provided us with – language is, thus, a unique tool for survival.

“In order to substantiate his thesis Gaerdenfors first proves that people are actually the only animals that can plan for future goals. Should this claim be valid, language ability is beyond cognitive reach of other species and symbolic communication is necessary for advanced cooperation.” Wrobel, Szymon. 2014. Grammar and Glamour of Cooperation: Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Language and Action. Peter Lang Edition. P. 117.


“Gaerdenfors argues that in order to develop a theory of the evolution of communication we ought to assume that pragmatics precedes semantics and that semantics precedes syntax.” Wrobel, Szymon. 2014. Grammar and Glamour of Cooperation: Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Language and Action. Peter Lang Edition. P. 127.


“[S]tigmergy is an indirect, mediated mechanism of coordination between actions, in which the trace of an action left on a medium stimulates the performance of a subsequent action.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:4-13. P. 6.


“However, the concept of agent does not appear to be necessary for a definition of stigmergy: the mechanism applies perfectly well to the coordination of actions performed by a single, unspecified agent, in which case there is no need to identify different agents. Moreover, further extensions of the stigmergy concept can even do away with the notion of agent altogether and consider the coordination of ‘agentless’ actions that are merely events or physical processes–such as chemical reactions. This views [sic] fits in with the ontology of action, which sees action as the primitive element from which all other concepts are derived. The concept of agent remains useful, though, in cases where we wish to distinguish different agents able to perform different actions.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:4-13. P. 6.


“The medium is that part of the world that undergoes changes through the actions and whose states are sensed as conditions for further actions.... Neither the sea nor the sky is a stigmergic medium, but the beach is.

“Note that most authors use the term ‘environment’ for what I call ‘medium’. This term is much less accurate, though. First, as noted, the environment is not in general both perceivable and controllable. Second, the environment normally denotes everything outside the system or agent under consideration. However, stigmergy can also make use of an internal medium. For example, different physiological processes in the body communicate via the release of hormones in the bloodstream (medium). This communication is indirect: e.g. the liver does not directly send a message to the brain; both merely ‘read’ the hormonal messages deposited in the blood that irrigates both. More generally, many aspects of the agent’s own state, such as the agent’s position, speed and orientation, belong to the medium, since they are controllable and perceivable by self and others.

“Finally, if we conceive the environment as that part of the world that interacts with an agent, then different agents live in different environments or ‘Umwelts’; not all phenomena perceivable or controllable by one agent are similarly perceivable and controllable by another agent. When we consider stigmergic coordination between different agents, we need to define the medium as that part of the world that is controllable and perceivable by all of them.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:4-13. P. 7.


“In particular, in stigmergic collaboration there is no need for:

“planning or anticipation...

“memory ...

“communication ...

“mutual awareness ...

“simultaneous presence ...

“imposed sequence ...

“imposed division of labor ...

“commitment ...

“centralized control or supervision ....” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:4-13. P. 10.


“Thus, stigmergy can be seen as a fundamental mechanism of self-organization: it allows global, coordinated activity to emerge out of local, independent actions.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism I: Definition and components.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:4-13. P. 12.


“Although we may use individual humans as the core unit for modeling evolutionary processes, changes, and responses, actual people almost never engage with evolutionarily relevant challenges (be they nutritional, social, ecological, economic, political, etc.) by themselves, outside of a social (cultural) network, or even outside of spatial proximity, or without reference, to other humans. Human action is contingent on a variety of preexisting social relationships and a complex of shared knowledge directly connected [to] the dynamic of the larger social group. Approaches to modeling the evolution of our genus need to take these features as their starting point and central theme but often do not....

So, in thinking about human evolution, social and behavioral complexity and multifaceted interactions, not single trait or dyadic encounter foci, should be the baseline.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution.” American Anthropologist. V. 117. No. 2. Pp. 302-315. Pp. 303-4.


“In an evolutionary approach, we cannot fall back on a treatment of culture as primarily understandable and measurable via constituent ‘variants’ or other heritable particles characteristic of many gene-culture coevolution approaches. Such approaches see cultural evolution as fundamentally Darwinian in its basic structure, with genes and culture variants being the key targets of selection. While offering important options for modeling cultural change, such a perspective remains wed to a dual inheritance context in which genes and culture variants are ‘obligate mutualists’ and are seen as two side-by-side yet interfacing systems being driven by natural selection.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution.” American Anthropologist. V. 117. No. 2. Pp. 302-315. P. 306.


“Andrew Whiten and David Erdal (2012) argue for the recognition of a distinctive sociocognitive component to the human niche(s) that includes the dense conception and transmission of innovation and information alongside substantive neurological and behavioral plasticity. This human pattern of sociocognitive niche construction reflects a cognitive and behavioral configuration that is derived relative to the sociobehavioral contexts of previous hominins and all hominoids. Today this niche includes hypercooperation, shared intentionality, cultural transmission and innovation, teaching, and language. This modern human niche is characterized by a rapidly increasing rate and density of innovations and concomitant ratcheting shifts in the pace and content of cultural and behavioral change and complexity, resulting in new and more effective ways of engaging and changing local ecologies.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2015. “Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution.” American Anthropologist. V. 117. No. 2. Pp. 302-315. P. 308.


“What then, is culture? Does culture evolve? On the first score, we would say that culture is the name of a question, but it is not the answer. The question is: why does life, especially human life, take such manifold forms? To answer that these forms are due to culture is patently circular.... Their [those who work with culture within the neo-Darwinian paradigm] procedure is rather to re-describe complex and multi-faceted, ‘phenotypic’ outcomes in crudely one-dimensional terms by excluding all contextually specific or so-called ‘proximal’ aspects that could potentially contribute to an answer, such as intentions, sensibilities, the affordances of the environment, socio-historical conditions, and the dynamics of ontogenetic development. The idea is to come up with a model of observed behaviour, a ‘culture-type’ (strictly analogous to the ‘genotype’ of biology), that is entirely context-independent.” Ingold, Tim. 2013. “Prospect.” Pp. 1-21. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. Pp. 4-5.


“Yet in the real world there are no genotypes and no ‘culture-types’. They are models built up after the fact, constructs of retrospective analysis. It follows that neither biological nor cultural evolution – as understood within the neo-Darwinian paradigm – can occur in the world that organisms or persons actually inhabit. Such evolution can only occur in the space of abstract representations.” Ingold, Tim. 2013. “Prospect.” Pp. 1-21. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 6.


“Between species of organisms and the scientists who study them, between nature and reason, human cultures figure as a middle tier in the overall scheme of things, above the former and below the latter. The very concept of the human, then, is fundamentally duplicitous: the product of an ‘anthropological machine’ that relentlessly drives us apart, in our capacity for self-knowledge, from the continuum of organic life within which our existence is encompasssed, and leaving the majority stranded in an impasse.” Ingold, Tim. 2013. “Prospect.” Pp. 1-21. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. Pp. 7-8.


“Our claim is not that the biological and the social are complementary, or that they pertain respectively to the level of discrete individuals and to that of the wider groupings into which they are incorporated, but that there is no division between them. The domains of the social and the biological are one and the same.” Ingold, Tim. 2013. “Prospect.” Pp. 1-21. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 9.


“Indeed what we are accustomed to thinking of as an environment might better be understood as a zone of interpenetration. Within this zone, organisms grow to take on the forms they do, incorporating into themselves the lifelines of other organisms as they do so.” Ingold, Tim. 2013. “Prospect.” Pp. 1-21. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 11.


“As Gare argues, if the divide between nature and culture is to be bridged, ‘it will be necessary to develop a science which takes becoming as basic... and conceives ‘beings’ as islands of stability within the flux of becoming’.” Palsson, Gisli. 2013. “Ensembles of biosocial relations.” Pp. 22-41. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 24. Reference: Gare, A.E. 1995. Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis. Routledge. P. 107.


“While ethnographic interpretations do not always agree and there are significant differences between Inuit communities, the formation of an Inuk’s person largely takes place through the bestowal of personal names. Names imply certain traits that are passed from one person to another, recycled with each new generation. Relatives, friends and acquaintances give each other names both as children and later in life. The set of names for a given person, as a result, is repeatedly expanded and revised during the life course. For Inuit, naming is a powerful speech act that constructs the person. The ‘same’ individual can be different persons depending on context and moreover, several persons at the same time.” Palsson, Gisli. 2013. “Ensembles of biosocial relations.” Pp. 22-41. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 34.


“Despite this wide variation across primates, however, it is true that in humans there is a high incidence of pair bonding, of various kinds, across the lifespan.

“There are two main types of pair bond: the social and the sexual. The social pair bond is a strong biological and psychological relationship between two individuals that is measurably different in physiological and emotional terms from more general friendships or acquaintanceships. The sexual pair bond has a component of sexual attraction such that the paired individuals prefer mating with one another to other mating options. In all mammals pair bonds are developed by way of social interactions accompanied by the activity of neurotransmitters and a variety of hormones including oxytocin, vasopressin, dopamine and corticosterone. In non-human mammals for which the biology of pair bonds as been studied, social and sexual pair bonds frequently coincide. In humans, however, this is not necessarily the case. Humans have both social and sexual pair bonds, but the two are not always connected.

“Humans, probably more than any other species, engage in extensive social pair bonding across genders and age categories. We can form pair bonds with our relatives and our closest friends; they can be with individuals of the same or different sex or age.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2013. “Blurring the biological and social in human becomings.” Pp. 42-58. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. Pp. 55-6.


“Examining the data available for human evolution, modern human societies and human physiologies, we can see that niche construction, cooperation and conflict are intertwined in a complex system.” Fuentes, Agustin. 2013. “Blurring the biological and social in human becomings.” Pp. 42-58. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 57.


“If genomic expression and silencing depend on epigenetic processes, and if epigenesis is environmentally sensitive, then our anthropogenic environments and the experiences they may individually or collectively induce have to be taken into account. This phenomenon has been called environmental inheritance.” Ramirez-Goicoechea, Eugenia. 2013. “Life-in-the-making: epigenesis, biocultural environments and human becomings.” Pp. 59-83. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 69.


“Within animism, both humanity and life entail specific efforts and require perpetual maintenance.” Praet, Istvan. 2013. “Humanity and life as the perpetual maintenance of specific efforts: a reappraisal of animism.” Pp. 191-210. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 192.


“My central argument is that such ‘animistic’ conceptions are – or at least used to be – impressively uniform all over the world in so far that they are always conditional and (hence) restricted. Whether we are talking about humanity or life, nobody is ever included unconditionally. To be human and to be alive always requires the maintenance of a specific effort.” Praet, Istvan. 2013. “Humanity and life as the perpetual maintenance of specific efforts: a reappraisal of animism.” Pp. 191-210. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 193.


“Just as I have spoken of Humanity, one could speak of Life. To be precise, Life is an extension of Humanity. But contrary to the biological notion of life, where humans are just one species among millions of others, it is not a massive extension. By and large, Humans are the main component of Life. The range of living beings that are not Human is remarkably constrained. A brief look at Chachi animism will clarify this. As far as I could establish, Chachi people do not have a specific term for Life. The expression that comes closest is chachi, which means ‘the people’ as we have seen, but can also be translated as ‘the living ones’ or ‘those who are alive’. What is very clear, however, is that they quite stringently distinguish things that are alive from things that are dead.

“Pets are unequivocally alive, for example. Chachi hunters are in the habit of taking home infant animals that have been injured or orphaned during their trips in the forest. Baby peccaries, sloths, birds, monkeys and wildcats are frequently adopted into the household. They are nursed and fed with a great deal of care and affection; such companion animals are a tremendous source of pleasure for children and adults alike. Since they clearly partake in the everyday conviviality of the village they are included within the sphere of Life. This is not the case, however, for their untamed counterparts that live in the deep forest, which is conceived of as a domain of death.... A similar limitation exists with regard to plants: the sphere of Life is roughly restricted to the herbs and fruit trees around the house, and to cultivated crops such as beans and plantains. But the status of ‘being alive’ is also attributed to things that modern biologists would not consider alive at all; this if of course a classic feature of animism. Rivers are a telling example. Chachi people do not see the whole river as a living entity, but only certain fairly well-defined parts of it, namely the stretches where the current is unobstructed and the water flows straight. Significantly, it is precisely along these stretches that Chachi have always built their settlements. Stretches where there is turbulence or a counter-current are rigorously avoided, for they are associated with death. It is not by chance that Chachi graveyards tend to be located near whirlpools. Nor is it a coincidence that all sorts of monstrous creatures, all closely related to the world of the dead, abound at such ‘contrary’ spots.” Praet, Istvan. 2013. “Humanity and life as the perpetual maintenance of specific efforts: a reappraisal of animism.” Pp. 191-210. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. Pp. 202-3.


“The very idea of ‘foreigner’ and ‘wildlife’ were, and to some extent still are, conceptually impossible. Within animism, humans and living beings can only be subsumed under ‘us’ but never under ‘them’.” Praet, Istvan. 2013. “Humanity and life as the perpetual maintenance of specific efforts: a reappraisal of animism.” Pp. 191-210. From: Ingold, Tim & Gisli Palsson (Eds). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge UP. P. 208.


“Grassé’s original definition of stigmergy concerned stimulation by the performed work itself: in his observation, termites are stimulated to add mud by the mud heaps that are already there. Wilson, in his monumental ‘Sociobiology’, called such stimulation sematectonic. However, in many cases social insects appear to be stimulated by pheromone traces that are left expressly as a signal for others, not as a contribution to the work itself.... In principle, ants could be guided by the perceivable results of their activity–the way humans and large animals are guided by the trails of flattened vegetation and sand eroded by the movement of previously passing individuals. However, the effect of an ant’s movement on its surrounding is so small as to make it practically undetectable. Therefore, ants appear to have evolved a special type of chemical markers–pheromones–that make the traces of their activity much more salient. This type of indirect stimulation, not by the work itself but by a specially evolved ‘side-effect’, has been called marker-based stigmergy.

“The evolution of markers is an obvious method to make stigmergy more efficient, by more reliably focusing the agents’ attention on the most relevant aspects of the work that needs to be done.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism II: Varieties and evolution.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:50-59. P. 51. References: Grassé, P. 1959. “La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations interindividuelles chez Bellicositermes natalensis et Cubitermes sp. La theorie de la stigmergie: Essai d’interpretation du comportement des termites constructeurs.” Insectes sociaux. 6(1): 41-80. Wilson, E. 1975. Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Harvard UP.


“The simplest way to establish a property right is to put a fence around the territory that you consider to be your property. Like the urine trace, this provides a clearly perceivable signal to others that they should not trespass there, obviating the need for individual communication with each of those others.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism II: Varieties and evolution.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:50-59. P. 52.


“Persistent traces lead to what may be called asynchronous stigmergy: the different agents do not need to be present at the same time, since the trace remains to guide them at any later time. Asynchronous communication can be illustrated by media such as print, email, or websites. Its advantage is that information remains available, so that it can be processed at the most appropriate occasion, and can accumulate and mature over the longer term. Transient traces lead to synchronous stigmergy: the agents need to be simultaneously present for the coordination to succeed. Synchronous communication may be exemplified by media such as telephone and Internet ‘chat’. Its advantage is that interaction, and therefore feedback, is instantaneous, so that urgent problems can be tackled immediately.

“Synchronous action is rarely conceived as stigmergic, since it is typically used for direct communication, such as conversation or discussion. Yet, a warning cry or a chemical signal exemplify indirect communication: they are targeted at no one in particular, but merely ‘released’ in the medium. Examples of stigmergy in synchronous interaction are even clearer when the signal is sematectonic. For example, a bird spotting a danger (condition) will start to fly (action), and by this example (transient trace) set off the whole flock to fly away (subsequent action).” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism II: Varieties and evolution.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:50-59. P. 53.


“... stigmergy intrinsically does not distinguish between individual and collective activity: the trace left in the medium coordinates actions, while being indifferent as to the specific agent or agents initiating these actions. The only additional requirement for collective action is that the different agents should not work at cross-purposes, so that the one’s actions negate or obstruct the other one’s.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism II: Varieties and evolution.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:50-59. P. 56.


“In the stigmergic paradigm, the common good (e.g. Wikipedia, or a network of trails connecting common destinations) is gradually built up via the cooperation implicit in stigmergically-coordinated actions. Free riders may profit from this common good without putting in any effort in return. However, the benefit derived from a stimergic trace does not in general reduce the value of that trace. For example, an ant that follows a pheromone trace laid by others without adding pheromone of its own does not by that action make the pheromone trace less useful to the other ants. Similarly, a person who downloads a piece of open source software without contributing to the development of that software does not impose any burden on the software developers. Thus, in a situation of stigmergy, a free rider or ‘defector’ does not weaken the cooperators, in contrast to situations like the Prisoners’ dilemma or Tragedy of the Commons.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism II: Varieties and evolution.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:50-59. P. 56.


“Thanks to the user-friendly electronic medium, the material and human cost of publishing such traces is nearly zero. This combination of strong motivation, minimal cost, and effective stigmergic coordination turns the medium into a powerful system for mobilizing joint action. The result is a rapidly expanding ‘collaborative commons’–a virtual work-space for stigmergic (and more traditional) cooperation that encompasses the planet. This world-wide stigmergic medium is presently developing into the equivalent of a global brain able to efficiently tackle the collective challenges of society.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism II: Varieties and evolution.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:50-59. P. 57.


“Cooperation is a side effect of collective stigmergy. Stigmergic coordination arises spontaneously, without need for any cooperative intent from the individuals. Since coordination is beneficial to the agents involved, evolution is likely to strengthen the condition-action rules that make them interact synergetically, while suppressing the rules that produce conflict or friction. Stigmergy moreover bypasses a classic obstacle to the evolution of cooperation; the ‘tragedy of the commons’ where ‘free riders’–who profit from the fruits of cooperation without contributing to it–do better than the cooperators, thus eroding the cooperative arrangement. This problem is avoided because cooperators (1) do not lose any benefit, since the trace typically does not deteriorate through free rider exploitation; (2) get the additional benefit that the work they do not only helps themselves, but stimulates others to expand on it. Therefore, the free rider benefit of avoiding effort in building the trace does not seem large enough to allow them to outcompete the cooperators.” Heylighen, Francis. 2016. “Stigmergy as a universal coordination mechanism II: Varieties and evolution.” Cognitive Systems Research. 38:50-59. P. 58.


“A key question for language evolution research is to explain why language is the way it is, and how it got to be that way. The cultural evolution perspective suggests that the structure of language derives primarily from processes of cultural transmission involving repeated cycles of learning and use, constrained by the properties of the human brain. Thus, instead of asking, ‘Why is the brain so well suited for learning language?’, we need to turn the question upside-down and ask, ‘Why is language so well suited to being learned by the brain?’” Christiansen, Morten. 2013. “Language has evolved to depend on multiple-cue integration.” Pp. 42-61. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 43.


“Consequently, what has evolved is not a set of neural structures specific to language; rather, cultural evolution produces a system of linguistic constructions specific to a given speech community (i.e. a language). In formal linguistic terms, these constructions can be viewed within a construction grammar framework as conventionalized form-meaning mappings.” Christiansen, Morten. 2013. “Language has evolved to depend on multiple-cue integration.” Pp. 42-61. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 44.


“Another theoretical consequence of viewing language as a culturally evolved linguistic system is that language evolution is not conceptually different from language change.” Christiansen, Morten. 2013. “Language has evolved to depend on multiple-cue integration.” Pp. 42-61. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 45.


“Multiple-cue integration, as discussed here, may be a plausible candidate for a universal property common to all languages. Crucially, though, multiple-cue integration is not unique to language but also plays a key role in, for example, vision and sensorimotor control.” Christiansen, Morten. 2013. “Language has evolved to depend on multiple-cue integration.” Pp. 42-61. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 60.


“Sharing a language presupposes sharing the semantic domains of the language. The main thesis of this chapter is that the evolution of semantics can be described as a series of expansions of shared semantic domains.” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 139.


“For example, why is it easier to explain to a four-year-old the meaning of the colour terms ‘chartreuse’ and ‘mauve’ than to explain monetary terms like ‘inflation’ or ‘mortgage’? The difference is not a matter of word frequency; the monetary terms are more frequent. Rather, the four-year-old masters the semantic domain of colours and thereby knows the meaning of many colour words.” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 139.


“Grasping a new domain is a cognitively much more difficult step than adding new terms to an already established one. Once a domain is common to a group of potential communicators, various means (words, gestures, icons, etc.) of referring to different regions of the domain can be developed. Conversely, if a domain is not shared, communication is hampered.” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 140.


“Within traditional philosophy of language, a semantics is seen as a mapping between a language and the world. From an evolutionary perspective, this view is limited since it does not generate any explanation of the origins of the mapping and it does not involve the users of the language. In particular, it does not tell us anything about how an individual user learns to grasp the meanings determined by such a mapping.” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. Pp. 140-1.


“My position is that meaning acquisition involves learning how to coordinate behaviour with others.” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 141.


“A more advanced transformation of the physical space comes from the ability to represent allocentric space; that is, space as seen from the point of view of another. This requires a shift of perspective. A concrete example is the ability to direct someone whose vision is blocked.

“In a more precise model, the physical domain should be seen as a combination of an allocentric representation of space with the egocentric one provided by the visual system. This double aspect of physical space is indicated by the two frames of reference we have for referring to positions: egocentric ‘left’ and ‘right,’ and allocentric ‘west’ and ‘east.’” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 150.


“Coordination in the emotional and physical domains can be achieved without words. Meanwhile, coordination in category space is significantly enhanced by the use of words. The first fifty words acquired by children consist mainly of category words for concrete objects that can be identified perceptually: people, food, body parts, clothing, animals, vehicles, toys, and common household objects. They are often used in situations where the goal is joint attention between the child and an adult. The word complements pointing or gaze sharing and thus expands the available domains for shared meaning. The child’s and the adult’s minds meet in two ways: in the visual domain and in the category domain. Only later does the child learn words for abstract category domains, such as kinship relations and money.” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 151.


“For many forms of cooperation among other animals, it seems that sophisticated mental representations are not needed. If the common goal–for example a prey–is present in the immediate environment, the collaborators can focus on it directly before acting. If, on the other hand, the goal is distant in time or space, then a joint mental representation of it must be available before cooperative action can be taken.

“It is generally agreed that hominins evolved in open landscapes that favoured a long-ranging lifestyle. In this type of environment, it became increasingly important to jointly refer to objects that are not present on the scene. Language functions not just for directing attention but also for coordinating it. The possibility of achieving joint attention to absent entities opens up for new forms of cooperation–in particular toward future states, involving coordinated action towards a non-present, common goal. This introduces selective pressures towards a communicative system that makes it possible for members of a group to share mental representations of non-present entities.” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 156.


“Planning for future collaboration, essentially a task of coordinating goals, requires coordination in the physical domain (often outside the visual field), the category domain, the action domain, and the goal domain. Bickerton argues that scavenging for large fauna is the crucial form of cooperation in the evolution of the hominins. They needed ways to communicate what (e.g. a carcass) had been found, where it was located, and how their scavenging actions might be coordinated. Such planning depends on forming joint intentions, an advanced form of intersubjectivity presumably unique to humans. A joint plan can be described as a combination of forming a joint intention and coordinating actions.” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. Pp. 156-7. Reference: Bickerton, D. 2009. Adam’s tongue: how humans made language, how language made humans. Hill and Wang. / Farrar, Straus and Giroux.


“... Tylen et al. write: ‘analogous to the way that manual tool use has been shown to enlarge the peripersonal space by extending the bodily action potential of arm and hand in space..., linguistic symbols liberate human interactions from the temporal and spatial immediacy of face-to-face and bodily coordination and thus radically expand the interaction space.’” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 157. Reference: Tylen, K., E. Weed, M. Wallentin, A. Roepstoorf, & C. Frith. 2010. “Language is a tool for interacting minds.” Mind and Language. 25:3-29. P. 6.


“Fehr and Fischbacher write: ‘The human capacity to establish and enforce social norms is perhaps the decisive reason for the uniqueness of human cooperation.’ I do not quite agree, since, following my analysis, explicit social norms are advanced constructions dependent on more fundamental human cognitive capacities. In particular, I have argued that, without the ability to form joint intentions and joint beliefs, there will be no social norms. My counter proposal would rather be that intersubjectivity and the sharing of the corresponding semantic domains are, together, the decisive characteristics of human cooperation and the evolutionary background for increasing communicative capacities.” Gaerdenfors, Peter. 2013. “The evolution of semantics: sharing conceptual domains.” Pp. 139-59. From Botha, Rudolf & M. Everaert (Eds.) The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference. Oxford UP. P. 158.


“Central to the interactionist perspective are the following three premises laid out by Herbert Blumer, which set the boundaries for the symbolic interactionist perspective:

“1. Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings those things have for them.
“2. The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows.
“3. These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters.”
Sandstrom, Kent, K. Lively, D. Martin & G. Fine. 2014. Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology and Sociology. Oxford UP. P. 9.


“People become distinctively human through interaction.... Interactionists do not believe that we are born human. Instead, they argue that we develop into distinctively human beings only as we interact with others.... Sandstrom, Kent, K. Lively, D. Martin & G. Fine. 2014. Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology and Sociology. Oxford UP. P. 11.

“People are conscious, self-reflexive beings who shape their own behavior. The most important capacities that we develop through involvement in social interaction are the ‘mind’ and the ‘self.’ As Mead observed, we form minds and selves through the processes of communication and role taking.” Sandstrom, Kent, K. Lively, D. Martin & G. Fine. 2014. Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology and Sociology. Oxford UP. P. 11.


“Following Blumer, interactionists conceive of society as a fluid but structured process that consists of individuals interacting with one another....

“In general, when discussing the relationship between the individual and society, interactionists assert that these two phenomena cannot be meaningfully separated. Both are part of an ongoing process of interaction, and both are mutually constructed in and through this interaction.” Sandstrom, Kent, K. Lively, D. Martin & G. Fine. 2014. Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology and Sociology. Oxford UP. Pp. 12-3.


“The ‘social act’ should be the fundamental unit of social psychological analysis. Interactionists contend that the social act, or what Blumer referred to as ‘joint action,’ is the central concern of social psychology. A social act refers to behavior that in some way takes account of others and is guided by what they do; it is formulated so that it fits together with the behavior of another person, group, or social organization. It also depends on and emerges through communication and interpretation. This definition covers a diverse array of human action, ranging from a handshake, a kiss, a wink, and a dance, to a lecture, a party, a soccer game, and a religious revival. Whenever we orient ourselves to others and their actions, regardless of whether we are trying to hurt them, help them, convert them, or destroy them, we are engaging in a social act. We are aligning and fitting together our lines of behavior with theirs. In doing so we may be acting as individuals or as representatives of a group or organization, such as a church, university, corporation, or government.” Sandstrom, Kent, K. Lively, D. Martin & G. Fine. 2014. Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology and Sociology. Oxford UP. P. 14.


“In analyzing joint action, interactionists typically begin by emphasizing three of its key features. First, joint action is often routine and repetitive. In most situations, such as a classroom or a movie theater, people are guided by a firm understanding of how they ought to act and how others will act....

“A second key feature of joint action is that it is typically linked to a larger and complex network of actions. Take a seemingly simple act: You buy a bag of potato chips from a clerk at the local convenience store. This act is tied to and dependent on the diverse actions of a broad range of people and organizations, including the farmer who raised the potatoes, the trucking company that transported the potatoes to a factory, the factory workers who transformed the potatoes into chips,...

“A third feature of joint action is that it is connected to previous contexts and forms of conduct. In other words, the individuals or groups involved in developing a joint action, such as a college course, bring to that development the sets of meanings and interpretive schemes they have acquired through their prior social experiences.” Sandstrom, Kent, K. Lively, D. Martin & G. Fine. 2014. Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology and Sociology. Oxford UP. P. 17.


“This understanding of the nature of joint action offers a double vision: It recognizes that (1) we are all individuals and (2) we are all stand-ins, or representatives, of groups, classes, and other social categories.” Sandstrom, Kent, K. Lively, D. Martin & G. Fine. 2014. Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology and Sociology. Oxford UP. P. 19.


“In making these observations, [William] James emphasized two key points. First, our sense of self cannot be clearly or sharply distinguished from our bodies and other material objects. In fact, it is often strongly associated with material items, such as our clothing, cars, houses, relatives, land, or creative works....

“In related writings, James pointed out that another fluctuating aspect of the Me is the ‘social me,’ which consists of the recognition and respect we get from others. James noted that this ‘social me’ gets formed and transformed as we interact with others. Indeed, he asserted that we have ‘as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize [us] and carry an image of [us] in their minds’ and we generally show ‘a different side’ of ourselves to different groups of people.” Sandstrom, Kent, K. Lively, D. Martin & G. Fine. 2014. Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality: A Symbolic Interactionist Approach to Social Psychology and Sociology. Oxford UP. P. 126.