The Evolved Apprentice―How Evolution Made Humans Unique

Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from thoseof our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology,life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away fromother great apes. No other great ape lineage--including those of chimpanzees and gorillas--seems tohave undergone such a profound transformation. In The Evolved Apprentice, KimSterelny argues that the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich thelearning environment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and tocooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedbackloops that drove us further from other great apes. Sterelny develops a new theory of the evolutionof human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution of informationsharing practices across generations and how information sharing transformed human minds and sociallives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction with theirenvironment, cooperative foraging, which led to positive feedback linking ecological cooperation,cultural learning, and environmental change. The ability to cope with the immense variety of humanancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also onadapted developmental environments.

Kim Sterelny is Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. His books include Language and Reality (with Michael Devitt; second edition, MIT Press, 1999); Thought in a Hostile World; Dawkins vs. Gould: the Survival of the Fittest; and The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited (coedited with Brett Calcott; MIT Press, 2011).