Darwin's Unfinished Symphony
How Culture Made the Human Mind
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23782575 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kevin N Laland (0000-0002-2457-0900, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Pages | 464 |
| Publication date | 2018-09-11 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Darwin's Unfinished Symphony (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Princeton University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.23943/princeton/9780691182810.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W2945002171 |
| Open Library | OL27372135M |
| ISBN | 9780691182810 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
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? This book presents a new theory of human cognitive evolution. It 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. The book 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. The book explains how animals imitate, innovate, and have remarkable traditions of their own. It 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.
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Cognitive science · Creatures · Dance · Darwin (ADL) · Darwinism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Human culture · Human evolution · Literature · Natural (archaeology) · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Symphony · The arts · Visual arts · Anthropology · Computer Science · Evolution and Science Education · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Brain · Cognition and culture · Cognitive Psychology · Evolution · Evolutionary psychology · Popular Culture · Social evolution · Social learning
Effects of verbal instruction vs. modelling on imitation and overimitation
God's mind on morality
Culture without copying or selection
The Evolution of Complementary Cognition
What the Baldwin Effect affects depends on the nature of plasticity
Human domestication and the roles of human agency in human evolution
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2022 (3) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |