COGNITION AND HISTORY: THE EVOLUTION OF INTELLIGENCE AND CULTURE

Henry Plotkin

ELSE working papers from ESRC Centre on Economics Learning and Social Evolution

Abstract: There is a wonderful complexity to the matter of human evolution, those qualities of the human mind that we call intelligence, and how each has influenced the other. Human intelligence has evolved, and human evolution has been influenced by human intelligence. A crucial, perhaps defining, feature of human intelligence is our unique capacity to enter into that thing we call culture. So we are concerned here also with the evolution of culture and the way in which culture has affected our evolution. These are profoundly important matters in our understanding of what it is to be human and how we came to be so. Central to the scientific understanding of these matters is the issue of history as cause, and so it is there that I begin.

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