Darwin's Unfinished Symphony
How Culture Made the Human Mind
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23399338 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kevin N Laland (0000-0002-2457-0900, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Pages | 464 |
| Publication date | 2017-12-31 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Darwin's Unfinished Symphony (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Princeton University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1515/9781400884872 |
| OpenAlex | W4253128327 |
| Open Library | OL29338455M |
| ISBN | 9781400884872 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 127 |
How culture transformed human evolution Humans possess an extraordinary capacity for cultural production, from the arts and language to science and technology. How did the human mind—and the uniquely human ability to devise and transmit culture—evolve from its roots in animal behavior? Darwin's Unfinished Symphony presents a captivating new theory of human cognitive evolution. This compelling and accessible book reveals how culture is not just the magnificent end product of an evolutionary process that produced a species unlike all others—it is also the key driving force behind that process. Kevin Laland shows how the learned and socially transmitted activities of our ancestors shaped our intellects through accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback. The truly unique characteristics of our species—such as our intelligence, language, teaching, and cooperation—are not adaptive responses to predators, disease, or other external conditions. Rather, humans are creatures of their own making. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research, and bringing it to life with vivid natural history, Laland explains how animals imitate, innovate, and have remarkable traditions of their own. He traces our rise from scavenger apes in prehistory to modern humans able to design iPhones, dance the tango, and send astronauts into space. This book tells the story of the painstaking fieldwork, the key experiments, the false leads, and the stunning scientific breakthroughs that led to this new understanding of how culture transformed human evolution. It is the story of how Darwin's intellectual descendants picked up where he left off and took up the challenge of providing a scientific account of the evolution of the human mind.
Art · Art history · Darwin (ADL) · Software engineering · Symphony · Computer Science · Evolution and Science Education · History · Philosophy · Brain · Cognition and culture · Cognitive Psychology · Evolution · Evolutionary psychology · Human evolution · Popular Culture · Social evolution · Social learning
Atheism, evolution, and meaning
Durkheim, Indoctrinability and the Moral Ambivalence of Human Sociality
The evolution of the concepts of ‘primate culture’ in Western science
La educación se incrustó en el proceso evolutivo y florecieron los humanos
Distinctively Human? Meaning‐making and World Shaping as Core Processes of the Human Niche
Hvorfor, hvorfra (og hvornår) kom religion
Cognitive Foundations and Cultural Models
Is and Ought? Problems with Deriving “Natural” and Prescribing “Normal” via the Human Evolutionary Record
The African Springboard to Final Sapientation and Species Unity
Proximate–Ultimate Causation in Human Evolution? Implications from Archeology
Thinking as “Thinging”
Beyond Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic (Weird) Psychology
Dual Inheritance Theory
On the specific existence of animal culture
Effects of verbal instruction vs. modelling on imitation and overimitation
How cultural evolution can inform the science of science communication—and vice versa
Cumulative culture
Educational Technology
A Multidisciplinary Research Agenda for Artificial Intelligence, Education, Learning, and Instruction
Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence
Why Did Our Ancestors Need Syntax? Social Orders and Communication Concerns of (Proto)Sapiens
La pensée et les choses
Homines Emotionales and Religion as an Evolutionary Exaptation
Missing Cultural Lens in the Cognitive Science of Religion
Reinterpretando o fenômeno de desenvolvimento linguístico a partir de um diálogo entre a Teoria Sistêmico-Funcional e a Síntese Estendida da Evolução
How Weird is Cognitive Archaeology? Engaging with the Challenge of Cultural Variation and Sample Diversity
A Cultural Species and its Cognitive Phenotypes
Explaining the Cultural Evolution of large-scale Collaboration
The Theory of Constructed Emotion
Beyond Right and Wrong
Neuropragmatism, the cybernetic revolution, and feeling at home in the world
Keeping cognition kinky
Steps to an EnvironMental health
Uncertainty and the act of making a difficult choice
Culture, genes, selection, and learning
Cumulative culture and complex cultural traditions
Perceptions of science, religion and spirituality in high school students
Mapping the unseen in practice
A cultural turn in educational action and research
Social norms and the dynamics of practices
More on Clovis Learning
Settling down in Southwest Asia
Placing Culture in Nature
Creative Resilience
Formation of speech and consciousness in anthropogenesis
Evolving belief and being human
Human rights at the “end of nature”
Households and communities
Culture and Evolvability
What Kind of Asceticism and Evolution
Human-made fires and forest clearance as evidence for late Holocene landscape domestication in the Orinoco Llanos (Venezuela)
The evolution of musicality and cross-domain co-evolutionary interactions
Evolution and Ontogenesis
Pioneer Population Nodes in Southern Patagonian Lands
Learning Strategies and Population Dynamics During the Pleistocene Colonization of North America
Neanderthal Language
When Minds Converse
Monotheism and the Rise of Science
Formalising prestige bias
Isolating a culture of son preference among Armenian, Georgian and Azeri Parents in Soviet-era Russia
Machiavellian strategist or cultural learner? Mentalizing and learning over development in a resource-sharing game
Claude Lévi-Strauss as a humanist forerunner of cultural macroevolution studies
When to stop social learning from a predecessor in an information-foraging task
Cultural adaptation is maximised when intelligent individuals rarely think for themselves
Mind and material engagement
Mark Making and Human Becoming
Bringing Darwin into the social sciences and the humanities
Homo faber Revisited
Migration and Cooperative Infrastructures
Weird Indeed, but there is more to the story
Not just a virtue
Not by Selection Alone
Why evolutionary biology needs anthropology
Four misunderstandings about cultural attraction
Structural Power and Epistemologies in the Scientific Field
Cultural group selection and human cooperation
Communicating cooperative intentions drove the selection of collective ritual in hominins
Steps towards a more holistic, dynamic and integrative approach to the evolution of religious systems
The explanatory value of a metaphor. An appraisal of Jesper Sørensen's Why Cultures Persist. Toward a Cultural Immunology
Bridging the two cultures or re-rectifying incommensurability? A commentary on Ariel Gluklich’s The Joy of Religion
Cognitive bugs, alternative models, and new data
Reintroducing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to modern evolutionary science
Niche Construction Theory in Archaeology
Inferring cultural reproduction from lithic data
Intertextuality and the advance of mathematisation in young children’s inscriptions
Qué es cultura en la «economía de la cultura»? Definiendo la cultura para crear modelos mensurables en economía cultural
Social ontology in metaethics
Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia)
Investigating Niche Construction in Dynamic Human-Animal Landscapes
The evolutionary roots of war and peace
Kulturens rolle i evolusjonen
Enculturation and the historical origins of number words and concepts
Fidelity and the grain problem in cultural evolution
The Evolution of Human Sociality. Categorizations, Emotions, and Friendship
Simulations, institutional know-how and the evolution of practices of learning
Epoch‐Making Changes in the Cultural Evolution of Communication
Biological anthropology's critical engagement with genomics, evolution, race/racism, and ourselves
The emancipation of gestures
Animal cultures
Nature/culture après la controverse sociobiologique
| Unique citing works | 127 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 14,11 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2026 (10) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 121 |