In it, the researchers underscore that in modern evolutionary theory, organisms inherit their environments as much as they inherit their genes.
In fact, it is these environmental and evolutionary challenges that kick-started cognitive behaviors in animals, leading us humans deeper and deeper into more complex and even more recursive forms of cooperation, while leaving our ape cousins behind stuck with similar but less well-developed forms of cooperation and other forms of cognitive abilities.
For instance, whenever our chimpanzees and bonobos, forage, they do so in competition with their troop mates. And while it is well-known that non-human ape mothers share food with their offspring, generally, other apes will steal, hide and hog food from each other, lacking any awareness, or concept of food-sharing.
These not so subtle differences in our respective psychologies, created along similar developmental pathways, has led, on the one hand to a culture of coordinated cooperative motives. Which in humans has led to mutually intersubjective notions of trust, commitment, and morality, as well as to a separate transmissible developmental pathway where symbols, rituals and traditions, eventually lead to language.
While, on the other hand, for our ape cousins, neither intentional coordination nor transmission of shared-intentions have moved beyond rudimentary prosocial interactions.
Overall, the implication of the research is that if we wish to explain how psychology unique to humans was created, we must focus our attention on ontogeny (the developmental track of our biology) and especially on how great ape ontogeny in general has been transformed into human ontogeny in particular.
The theory of ontogeny that results, leaves little room for doubt that it has been our high degree of cooperative functioning that has led to our unique social organization and a newer niche on the developmental ladder.
Likewise, it is equally clear too that natural selection itself leads to cooperation being a necessary but not a sufficient precursor for survival-enhancing evolutionary development, both for our LCA, as for us humans.
But natural selection, being a passive process, by itself creates nothing. It is more or less "a sieve that sorts things into different baskets after the fact," eventually separating viable from non-viable species.
For sufficiency, evolutionary novelty must take place. And for this we need "inherited variation" generated from genetic mutations. Therefore, it is genetic mutations that promotes ontogenetic processes that lead to novel traits.
The most frequent source of these new traits is changes in the timing and manner in which genes are expressed by new mutations. So, in the large scheme of things, behavioral novelty begins at the epigenetic level of our biology as an epigenetic process.
Only through a complex and carefully timed chain of epigenetic events is human psychology realized as the final necessary and sufficient product of human development.
The author traces through children the aspect of development that leads from epigenetic processes along eight crucial pathways as they mature into full humans.
There are three developmental pathways that get the social psychological party started: First, at about eight months, children mature enough to gain the capacity for shared intentionality. "Mirroring" the phylogenetic sequence, this processes unfolds in two steps. First, joint intentionality emerges at around nine months; and second, collective intentionality starts around age three.
The second set of processes is children's experiences, especially their sociocultural experiences.
Uniquely human cognitive and social ontogeny depend crucially on transactions between the individual and the cultural environment, which is both necessary for normal human development and also responsible for many cultural and individual variations.
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