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Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking Kindle Edition

by Cecilia Heyes (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 32 ratings

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“This is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences… Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts. Unlike other living animal species, we are born with complicated mechanisms for reasoning about causation, reading the minds of others, copying behaviors, and using language.

Cecilia Heyes agrees that adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.

As Cognitive Gadgets makes clear, from birth our malleable human minds can learn through culture not only what to think but how to think it.

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“Cecilia Heyes presents a new hypothesis to explain the one feature that distinguishes Homo sapiens from all other species: the mind. Through lucid, compelling writing, this masterly exegesis proposes that the key features of the human mind, termed ‘cognitive gadgets,’ are the products of cultural rather than genetic evolution. It will stimulate its readers to think deeply, as Heyes has done, about what it means to be human.”―Lord John Krebs, University of Oxford

“With this volume, [Heyes] stakes out a bold, authoritative position in the multidisciplinary literature on cultural evolution and human uniqueness…Highly recommended to anyone willing to have their assumptions challenged.”―Carl Brusse, Quarterly Review of Biology

“Cognitive Gadgets is a terrific book. Heyes makes a very surprising claim, arguing that human cognitive capacities―language, technical and causal intelligence, and the capacity to understand others―are not built by natural selection, but are instead cultural adaptations, installed by social learning. It is a richly informed, beautifully clear, and lucidly argued case.”―Kim Sterelny, Australian National University

“Fascinating.”―Choice

“Evolutionary psychology has been plagued by theories that are interesting but not testable, and theories that are testable but not interesting. In her exposition of cognitive gadgets, Heyes escapes from this trap. By emphasizing specific mechanisms, she makes precise predictions about what makes human cognition unique, and demonstrates that human culture is not just about accumulating knowledge―it also enables each of us to learn how to think.”―Chris Frith, University College London

“This is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences… Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.”―Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

“Cognitive Gadgets is a book written with a strong conviction, boldly taking on deeply entrenched views on topics such as the genetic basis of language and imitation. It will be a very positive contribution to long-held debates about the nature of being human.”―Steven Mithen, author of The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body

“Human minds are strange and powerful, but how did they become that way? Cecilia Heyes argues that culture is the prime mover, upgrading the mind by installing a cascade of ‘gadgets’―non-genetic innovations that enable imitation, mind-reading, episodic memory, and more. Cognitive Gadgets is an elegant, compelling, and groundbreaking work that should be read by anyone interested in what we are and how we came to be.”―Andy Clark, University of Edinburgh

“An essential addition to the literature on human uniqueness…Brilliantly challenges many of the core assumptions of contemporary evolutionary psychology in a way that is insightful, cohesive, detailed, and carefully written. This is perhaps one of the best and most comprehensive views of human cognitive evolution advanced in the recent years.”―Ivan Gonzalez‐Cabrera, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

“How much of what is distinctively human depends on our biological (genetic) evolution and how much is culturally influenced or learned? This book will make you think about this old question anew and wonder if you have drawn the lines between these two kinds of inheritance in the right places.”―Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

About the Author

Cecilia Heyes is Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences and Professor of Psychology at All Souls College, University of Oxford.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07BTL33XT
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belknap Press; Illustrated edition (April 16, 2018)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 16, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3661 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 293 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0674980158

Best Sellers Rank: #685,774 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #262 in Evolutionary Psychology (Books)
- #481 in Popular Developmental Psychology
- #506 in Evolution (Kindle Store)

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Virginia A. Campbell

Compelling and Rigorous

Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2020

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In a recent interview* Professor Cecilia Heyes told me that the goal of her book "Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking" is to ask why human lives are “so strange, relative to those of other animals.” She particularly wants to understand why our minds seem to be so different from that of other animals. Heyes has spent her career as a cognitive psychologist studying phenomena such as learning, so-called “mind reading,” and imitation because many scientists have assumed that humans have inherited innate abilities in these areas.

Professor Heyes challenges long-held assumptions about these abilities by describing the evidence that these skills are actually acquired gradually by learning from the culture around us. Thus she proposes a distinction between a cognitive gadget, which is a cognitive skill acquired via cultural learning and the better known cognitive instinct, which is assumed to be innate.

The most obvious example of a cognitive gadget is reading since written language clearly appeared too recently (about 5,000 years ago) to have become part of our genetic make up. In contrast, “mind-reading,” imitation, and language are often assumed to be cognitive instincts.

This book is academic and evidence focused. Heyes takes the reader through quite a few technical details before embarking on a detailed discussion of the evidence that these skills are in fact cognitive gadgets, acquired via learning from the culture around us. Her discussion of language is particularly compelling because she came to language as a neutral outsider and actually expected it to stand up as an example of a cognitive instinct. If you still think language is an instinct this is a good introduction to the evidence that it is actually a cognitive gadget.

The implication that many of our most distinctive cognitive skills are culturally acquired has several important implications. First, it means that there are actually three important factors to consider when studying our cognitive abilities: nature, nurture, and culture. We are not stuck with “Stone Age” minds as evolutionary psychologists often claim, but our cognitives skills may be more fragile than is generally imagined.

Cognitive Gadgets is not aimed at the general reader, but its ideas are clearly presented and thought-provoking. It should be read by everyone who is interested in cognitive psychology.

*You can find my Brain Science interview with Professor Heyes at brainsciencepodcast.com.

11 people found this helpful

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Andres Gomez-Lievano

Elegant theory and parsimonious theory of cultural evolution

Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2019

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The theory takes the "not by genes alone" idea to its ultimate form. I hope the formal details of the theory will be worked out soon.

3 people found this helpful

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Leonard Oestreicher

How much does social learning play in making our species who we are? More then is commonly thought.

Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2020

This book addresses the core problem of why humans are such a remarkable species with capabilities and accomplishments that greatly exceed our nearest genetic relations.

The author uses the skill of reading as model for cognitive gadgets . Our species acquired reading and writing only some 6,000 years ago much too recently for it to be a genetic instinct. But just think of the ways reading has changed human capabilities.
Learning to read requires sustained effort by the child of six years old or so and their teachers. What about imitation? What about mind reading (understanding thought states of other people)? What about spoken language? Are these abilities ,initially acquired long before reading, cognitive gadgets, like reading, with just a general genetic underpinning or are they genetic instincts?
The author makes a compelling case pulling together cutting edge research from diverse fields to address this fundamental question and to show that human cognitive abilities such as imitation, mind reading, and spoken language are likely formed in the crucible of social culture. Social culture then becomes the vessel to carry human evolution forward.
Towards the end of book, the author discusses the implications of this new understanding which are breath taking really.
Perhaps our emotions are not so much a product of our cave man history as much as an 'emotional gadget' formed by the same social connections that allows us to learn how to read.

Allow me to speculate that perhaps ASD is not so much determined by our genes, but is an early failure of the acquisition of our social culture that then impairs the ability of these infants from acquiring the gadgets they need to thrive, be they cognitive, emotional, or social.

2 people found this helpful

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David Creelman

A fresh view of the nature of human intelligence

Reviewed in Canada on May 7, 2024

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The book covers a rather technical topic, the mechanics of intelligence, but Heyes makes a point of writing clearly and explaining ideas carefully.

Dr. Glockenspiel

A strong, careful and far-reaching thesis

Reviewed in Canada on February 22, 2019

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Oxford professor of psychology Cecilia Heyes makes the case for cultural evolutionary psychology as a research program and framework, which she forcefully posits on many key points as continuous or divergent with evolutionary psychology and with cultural evolutionism of the californian school (Boyd, Richerson, Henrich) or of the Paris school (Sperber, Boyer, Morin).

Heyes's main point is (in Augustine's terms) that evolution through variation, selection and inheritance not only accounts for grists (behaviors, technology and beliefs), but also for mills (cognitive mechanism).

The selectionist view of culture comprises a teleosemantic conception of information, which reinstate the relevance of the much debated distinction between nature and nurture (which Heyes righfully enlarge into a biological / environmental and socially derived / cultural informations (chapter 2)).

The (i) temperamental factors - greater social tolerance and motivation -, the (ii) attentional biases favoring (mere) faces and voices , and the (iii) enhanced executive function (comprising inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility), are viewed as evolutionary novelties that underlie the enhanced productivity of associative-predictive learning in our species compared to those of others. Instead of seeing shared attention like Michael Tomasello (as a primitive building block), Heyes argues that it rises from associative learning bolstered by social motivation and tolerance, and biased toward faces and direction of gaze (shared attention rises from reliably predicting the presence of interesting object or event from eye contact followed by attention to object or event; and from reliably predicting that pointing to object or event will attract other's attention to it).

The concept of cultural learning has been around for some time, and was taken to refer to specialized mechanisms distinct from social and asocial learning, but Heyes sharpen the perspective by bringing into view some key proposals as to what learning amounts to in the first place, and as to what learned, specific learning mechanism acquired through explicit instructions or through conversational type of interaction can add to the high-fidelity inheritance of enhanced traits (chapter 4).

The capacity of old, core cognitive processes (such as those underlying predictive, associative learning, and enforcement by response-contingent stimulus) to build complex cognitive mechanisms is demonstrated for selective (biased) social learning (learning through explicit metacognitive rules that define "who knows" and who should be taken as model, chapter 5), imitation (understood as matching vertical associations between motor and sensory sequences, chapter 6), mindreading (chapter 7) and language (which she approach as an outsider, but quite an informed one, chapter 8).

Cultural group selection (chapter 9) where groups with x variant of learned cognitive mechanisms out-populate those with y variant through demographic growth and migrant attraction, is defined as one evolutionary force (distinct from intelligent / intended designs, and from genetic evolution) likely to be coherent with a (yet to be written) narrative evolutionary theory.

Heyes shows a high sensitivity to distinctions, like those between ability and motivation, between submentalizing and mindreading, between implication (of a brain area in a particular process) and explanation, and between process (cognitive ones on an infra-personal level) and outputs. She also displays the art of clear writing, of putting whole chapters in a nutshell, and she masters a considerable body of literature in experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental and comparative psychology.

All in all, Cognitive Gadgets convincingly proves how little, but crucial cognitive changes can bring huge differences, without these changes having been selected for definite problems in given contexts. The impossibility, for core, general cognitive processes structured through social intercourse, to give rise to complex learning seems to be a premature and unwarranted belief. As Heyes testifies, predictive learning has been considerably refined and experimentally re-grounded since the fall of behaviorism. Through a measured and precise targeting of evolutionary psychologists' and cultural evolutionists' weaknesses, subterfuge and short-cuts, Heyes shatters their over-reliance on genetic evolution and on pretended instinctive information-processing and learning mechanisms. Genetic inheritance can't be taken as a by default mode of explanation by any scientific standard. Readers will find firm grounds to depart from ill-guided stances and to design sophisticated researches, which will hopefully come in many.

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