Coevolution of cultural intelligence, extended life history, sociality, and brain size in primates

Street, Sally E.; Navarrete, Ana F.; Reader, Simon M.; Laland, Kevin N.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1620734114

Cited by 159 publications

(133 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…Great apes do not fit this pattern, showing high relative and absolute brain sizes although gorillas and orangutans do not live in large communities. However, because all appear to display relatively complex cultures, the cultural intelligence hypothesis suggests that this complexity has selected for encephalization, either in a culture-first or an entwined culture-gene-brain coevolution scenario (112)(113)(114)(115). One side of this proposition may be glossed as "culture makes you smart," as is self-evident in the human case (9), insofar as present-day humans are smarter than those a century earlier by virtue of the cumulative cultural achievements from which they benefit.…”

Section: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes

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2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Discoveries about the cultures and cultural capacities of the great apes have played a leading role in the recognition emerging in recent decades that cultural inheritance can be a significant factor in the lives not only of humans but also of nonhuman animals. This prominence derives in part from these primates being those with whom we share the most recent common ancestry, thus offering clues to the origins of our own thoroughgoing reliance on cumulative cultural achievements. In addition, the intense research focus on these species has spawned an unprecedented diversity of complementary methodological approaches, the results of which suggest that cultural phenomena pervade the lives of these apes, with potentially major implications for their broader evolutionary biology. Here I review what this extremely broad array of observational and experimental methodologies has taught us about the cultural lives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans and consider the ways in which this knowledge extends our wider understanding of primate biology and the processes of adaptation and evolution that shape it. I address these issues first by evaluating the extent to which the results of cultural inheritance echo a suite of core principles that underlie organic Darwinian evolution but also extend them in new ways and then by assessing the principal causal interactions between the primary, genetically based organic processes of evolution and the secondary system of cultural inheritance that is based on social learning from others.social learning | culture | evolutionary biology | chimpanzee | orangutan R ecent decades have revealed social learning (learning from others) to be pervasive across the animal kingdom, with important implications for evolutionary biology at large (1) and the subject of the Sackler Colloquium published here (2). This article focuses on great apes: chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), and orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus). Other primates are dealt with elsewhere in the issue (3, 4). Despite an early report (5), we still know little about cultural phenomena in chimpanzees' rarer sister species, the bonobo (Pan paniscus) so bonobos are omitted here. I also make only limited reference to human culture, although we are technically also great apes. Human culture is extensively treated in other papers in this issue.

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Section: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes

Whiten

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…However, across many different species, including birds and both placental and marsupial mammals, there is a very general (although not perfect) correlation between relative brain size, intelligence and a reliance on learning, and an extended period of immaturity (5)(6)(7). This correlation suggests a relation between our distinctive human life history and our equally distinctive large brains and reliance on learning, particularly cultural learning.…”

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confidence: 99%

Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood

Gopnik

O’Grady

Lucas

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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How was the evolution of our unique biological life history related to distinctive human developments in cognition and culture? We suggest that the extended human childhood and adolescence allows a balance between exploration and exploitation, between wider and narrower hypothesis search, and between innovation and imitation in cultural learning. In particular, different developmental periods may be associated with different learning strategies. This relation between biology and culture was probably coevolutionary and bidirectional: life-history changes allowed changes in learning, which in turn both allowed and rewarded extended life histories. In two studies, we test how easily people learn an unusual physical or social causal relation from a pattern of evidence. We track the development of this ability from early childhood through adolescence and adulthood. In the physical domain, preschoolers, counterintuitively, perform better than school-aged children, who in turn perform better than adolescents and adults. As they grow older learners are less flexible: they are less likely to adopt an initially unfamiliar hypothesis that is consistent with new evidence. Instead, learners prefer a familiar hypothesis that is less consistent with the evidence. In the social domain, both preschoolers and adolescents are actually the most flexible learners, adopting an unusual hypothesis more easily than either 6-y-olds or adults. There may be important developmental transitions in flexibility at the entry into middle childhood and in adolescence, which differ across domains.causal reasoning | social cognition | cognitive development | adolescence | life history O ne of the most distinctive biological features of human beings is our unusual life history. Compared with our closest primate relatives, we have a dramatically extended childhood, including an exceptionally long middle childhood and adolescence. Moreover, humans have shorter interbirth intervals than our closest primate relatives, producing an even greater number of less-capable children (1). There is evidence for other human adaptations that helped cope with this flood of needy young. In contrast to our closest primate relatives, human children enjoy the benefits of care from three sources in addition to biological mothers: pair-bonded fathers (2), alloparents (3), and postmenopausal women, in particular, grandmothers (4).It may seem evolutionarily paradoxical that humans would have developed a life history that includes such expensive and vulnerable young for such a long period. However, across many different species, including birds and both placental and marsupial mammals, there is a very general (although not perfect) correlation between relative brain size, intelligence and a reliance on learning, and an extended period of immaturity (5-7). This correlation suggests a relation between our distinctive human life history and our equally distinctive large brains and reliance on learning, particularly cultural learning. Such a relation between biology and culture ...

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“…This kind of feedback may have been in existence for a very long time. Following a comparative phylogenetic analysis of primate brain and behavior data, Street et al (95) conclude that cultural processes may have generated such selective feedback (see also ref. 31).…”

Section: How Culture Extends Biologymentioning

confidence: 99%