EVOLUTIONARY EPISTEMOLOGY,

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

edited by
NATHALIE GONTIER
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
JEAN PAUL VAN BENDEGEM
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
and
DIEDERIK AERTS
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
2006 Springer

Table of Contents
Preface by the editors ix
Acknowledgements xix
Introduction to evolutionary epistemology, language and culture 1
Nathalie Gontier
PART 1. Evolutionary epistemology
Evolutionary epistemology: The non-adaptationist approach 33
Franz M. Wuketitse
Like cats and dogs: Radical constructivism and
evolutionary epistemology 47
Alexander Riegler
The biological boundary conditions for our classical physical
world view 67
Olaf Diettrich
Is the real world something more than the world of our experience?
Relations between Neo-Darwinism, transcendental philosophy and
cognitive sciences 95
Adrianna Wozniak
Universal Darwinism and process essentialism 109
Derek Turner
PART 2. Evolutionary epistemology and language
Darwinism, traditional linguistics and the new Palaeolithic
Continuity Theory of language evolution 121
Mario Alinei
The extended mind model of the origin of language and culture 149
Robert K. Logan
From changes in the world to changes in the words 169
Jean-Philippe Mague
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viii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Evolutionary epistemology and the origin and evolution of

language: Taking symbiogenesis seriously 195
Nathalie Gontier
The self-organization of dynamic systems:
modularity under scrutiny 227
Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf
PART 3. Evolutionary epistemology and culture
Against human nature 259
Tim Ingold
Cognition, evolution, and sociality 283
Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea
Cultural evolution, the Baldwin effect, and social norms 313
Jean Lachapelle, Luc Faucher and Pierre Poirier
Cultural creativity and evolutionary flexibility 335
Kathleen Coessens
Some ideas to study the evolution of mathematics 351
Hugo Mercier
PART 4. Evolutionary epistemology and modelling
Computer modelling as a tool for understanding language evolution 381

Bart de Boer
Simulating the syntax and semantics of linguistic
constructions about time 407
Joachim De Beule
Evolutionary game-theoretic semantics and its foundational status 429
Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
Towards a quantum evolutionary scheme: Violating Bells
inequalities in language 453
Diederik Aerts, Marek Czachor and Bart DHooghe
Author Index 479
Subject
Index

483

Cognition, Evolution, and Sociality 1

Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea
Dpt. Social Anthropology
Universidad Nacional de Educacin a Distancia, UNED.
eramirez@fsof.uned.es
Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea
Dpt. Social Anthropology. UNED
Senda del Rey 7
28040 Madrid. SPAIN
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to build up a theoretical framework for a more comprehensive understanding of human
cognition as an evolutionary and developmentally complex process constituted through social relations.
Sociality and cognition are part and parcel of becoming a human and a person. Thanks to Dynamic Systems
Theories, a non-linear, non-dualistic nor deterministic approach is taken for the understanding of the
heterochronic mutually specified processes encountered in evolutionary and developmentally systems. In light of
neurophysiological evidence, embodiment theory and situated cognition, Neodarwinist accounts of cognition are
discussed and reviewed. Special attention is given to dialogic relations and socialisation in ontogeny, by which
knowledge is re-created and embodied in new generations. Last but not least, some considerations are made with
respect to the externalisation and objectivisation of knowledge as recursive mediators/amplifiers for further
cognitive evolution that allows, in turn, for more social complexity.
Key words: Cognition, Evo-Devo, Sociality, Dynamic Systems Theories, Complexity

Research work was done during 1995-1997 and 2002-2004 in the Social and Political Sciences Dpt.,
Dpt. of Social Anthropology and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge (UK), thanks to financial
support from the Universidad Nacional de Educacin a Distancia (Madrid) and the Spanish Ministry of
Education (Direccin General de Investigacin Cientfica, PR95-390 and PR2003-0333) . I am especially
grateful to Prof. B. Bodernhorn, Prof. G. Hawthorn and Prof. C. Humphrey for their kindness and
continuous support during my stay in Cambridge. I am also grateful to Nathalie Gonthier (Centre for the
Logic and Philosophy of Science, Free University of Brussels, VUB) for organising a Conference on
Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture (Brussels, 2004) where I had the opportunity to get in
touch and exchange ideas with colleagues coming from other fields and disciplines.

1. Introduction
Neodarwinist theories do not allow for a comprehensive evolutionary theory of
cognition. Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psichology, Gene-Culture coevolution,
Population genetics or Memetics, all of them are limited by their underlying paradigms:
1. Cognitivism, as the precedence given to cognition over other mental activity: 2.
Identification of cognition with information and algorithmic computation; 3. Objectivist
realism; 4. Rationalism and methodological individualism; 5. Inability to reconcile
sociality and culture with cognition, and 6. Stress on genetic inheritance, in detriment od
epigenesis, ontogeny and development.
In this paper, I will try not only to question, some of Neodarwinism favourite
tennets, but also intend to contribute to the Evolutionary Epistemology debate regarding
the importance of the sociocultural as built and lived in human phylogeny and ontogeny
and its environments.
From an epistemological perspective, my work relies heavily on Dynamic
Systems Theories : Autopoiesis and self-organisation theories, complexity, criticality,
and chaos theory 2. These theories favour a non dualistic and non deterministic
epistemology, paying attention to the emergent properties of systems and the
irreversibility of some processes.
I have found these approaches particularly relevant when trying to understand
mutually constituted processes as those we encounter when studying evolution and
cognition. Many evolutionary (as well as developmental) processes are structurally
coupled, sharing a co-ontogeny, a history of mutual influences and interactions, in
which the-many-to-many relations among them (Shweder & Bourne, 1984) allow for
variability in attractors (Prigogine, 1980: 29) in the evolutionary dynamics (i.e.
piggybacking3) within different rythms and time (heterochrony, cf.Gould 1977)4. Nonlinearity means that cause-effect links cannot be traced nor predicted (Thelen 1989)
because of the dynamicity of the system and the multiple trajectories of its parts among
different attractors. Variables may be dependent or independent in respect to scale and
level of complexity (Goodwin 1994). Sensitivity to original conditions ([Lorenz 1963)
may be necessary but not sufficient: many evolutionary phenomena can be considered
as emergencies of self-organised systems that, at some critical point, reorganise
themselves towards viability and sustainability (Gnti 2003) in relation to selfdetermined environments.
My approach is both evolutionary and developmental. As P. Griffiths puts it
(2004), development affects evolution, while changing over the course of evolutionary
forces. In this I adhere to the Evo-Devo programme for Congnitive Psychology.
As it will be clear, I claim the importance of sociocultural factors in cognition.
Not that the other way round is not true (cf. infra), but cognitivist Cognitive Studies
2

My main references on autopoiesis are Maturana & Varela, 1980; Morin, 1977; Bateson, 1972; Luhman
(1995). For Dynamic Systems theories, I rely on Prigogine (1980); Nicolis & Prigogine, 1989), Lewin
(1992), Madore & Freedman (1987); Bak (1996), Kauffman (1993, 1995), Gellman (1995) and Cramer
(1993).
3
Piggybacking happens when an evolutionary process takes advantage of the force, drive and speed of
another that somehow opens the way for the other to follow or just helps make the way quicker and
easier.
4
Carneiro ([Carneiro, 1973), when discussing Stewards and Whites multi-linear approach to cultural
evolution, used the metaphor of culture as a bicycle with its set of gears, some short, some long, some
quick, some slow. The set moves as a whole but its parts have different rhythms: some processes may
speed up others by means of catalysis, or the opposite, slow them down. It is clear that, the stratigraphic
model of time (the geological level under the biological-organic one, then the psychological, then the
sociocultural) does help understanding complexity in hominid evolution (cf. Sinha 1996; Shore, 1996).

tend to forget the first. I talk about the sociocultural, as a qualifying feature. This is
because I do not want to reify culture: what it is important is the dynamics, the
relational. Besides, there is no way for humans to be social without being cultural and
viceversa. I understand this concept as the complex, non-linear process by which
human beings create, reorganise, describe and redescribe, personally and collectively,
their conditions of existence (including meaning). This process emerges from the
dynamics of an evolutionary history of embodied and relational and engagional
capacities brought forth in the life cycle by a sociocultural environment.
Another milestone in this paper is a non-monadic conception of the individual. The
individual does not pre-exist his/her conditions of existence, as a dis-embodied abstraction.
Society is not an aggregate of individuals; it is a globality that emerges from the complex
relations and dynamics within its parts).
That is why we support the concept of person as a conscious intentional agent that
incorporates a lige process in continuous development, in a local and historical context 5
Human beings as persons can be thought of as co-ontogenetic creatures that organise their
lives and are mutually constituted with and by other persons with whom they relate in
multiple ways and roles. The individual is already socialised and share membership with
categorial and interactional groups, even at the demographic level.
2. Modularity, Domain Specificity, Cross-modality
For Neodarwinist accounts, i.e. Evolutionary Psychology (EP), hominid
cognition evolved to adapt to the living conditions of Plio-Pleistocene hunter-gatherers
(Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992; Mithen 1996) 6. These adaptations consisted of
genetically incorporated cognitive devices, modules, an unpredicted consequence of
Fodors modularity of peripheral perceptual devices. (cf. Fodor 1983; also Chomsky
1957). No general intelligence as in Piagets psychology 7. Each module is domainspecific in that its encapsulates a particular domain in the world, in the way of Kantian
synthetic apriories, giving structure to the information that comes from different sensory
devices by means ofspecific algorithmic computations 8. These modules evolved in their
specificity as fine-tuned capacities for adapting to specific challenges of the
environment. Relying on the Western mecano/lego paradigm (Shore 1996:116-135),
modules are pieces of an articulated structure with no centrality and no neighbouring
interdependence of elements: the whole is the sum of its parts.
Evolutionary psicologists believe that all humans share a universal intuitive
psychology that would be evoked (Boyer 1994) under particular conditions 9. There is
not problem accepting that some cognitive abilities may be universal in homo/femina
sapiens sapiens. But, as for all other universals, they can only exist in their local and
historical incarnations. Misunderstanding what may be universal with genes, cannot

Cf. Ingold 1990 and 1991; Carrithers 1985; Shweder 1984; Toren 1998; Goldschmidt 1993; Robertson
1996.
6
How to maintain the continuity of this Psychology in sociocultural and ecological contexts as different
as in the Neolithic and hierarchical systems is another matter. Cf. Boyd and Richerson 1983; Boyd 2001.
7
It is not clear why general capacities should to be less functional than specific ones. Cf. KarmiloffSmith, 1992.
8
Modules or domain-specific mental capacities have been renamed as scope-regulated abilities (cf.
Cosmides, and Tooby 2000).
9
Accepting some kind of universal cognitive devices for particular sets of phenomena is not a problem.
This does not entail ignoring the cultural diversity in the boundaries, semantics, practices and values
attributed to these by which they are built up ecologically and cognitively. Cf. Descola and Palsson 1996;
Hviding 1996.

stand up to inspection anymore. Fuertermore, diversity and generality can be found at

any empirical level: it depends on scale, perspective and scope10.
Nobody denies that, at some level of system complexity, specificity can be
aknowledged 11. But instead of an innate given, specificity can be thought as the result
of specialisation, the outcome of either punctual or dynamic (cycle) attractors that, for
some tasks/experiences, under certain chronotopic conditions, become devices for
centrality, coherence, (disordered) order and directiveness.
P. Griffiths (2004) distinguishes between different kinds of mules:developmental,
functional ad virtual. All of them mean different for Evolutionary Psychologists and
Neuropsychoogists. Mental modules do not have to correspond necesarilly with
neurofunctional modules. What may appear as a specific module may be only an aspect
of the performance of a functional neural system. Besides, it is possible that different
parts of the brain may belong to the same functional module that, notwithstanding, is
the outcome of different developmental modules. Modules can be semi-decompossed as
subsystems within a hierarchical superior system with which it relates as it does with
other subsystems, being that their inner dynamics is the principal motor of development.
Brain dynamics in terms of distribution is very complex. Some cortex areas may
be poly-modal, elaborating information from various or different sensory-perceptual
devices. Cognitive activity may depend also on multisensoriality as in holistic
experiences (as in flow, cf. Csikszentmihalyi 1975) and conflation (Johnson, C. 1997)
12
. In evolution, as in development and in brain reorganisation after neurological
damage, some parts increase their connectivity for multiple tasks. The superior coliculus
and parietal cortex show poly-modality. In congenitally deaf children, parietal and
temporal areas normally engaged in speech elaboration and comprehension are invaded
during development by visual nerves responsive to peripheral vision (Neville 1991).
Blind people, dolphins and bats process sound and eco-location in the same brain area
where seeing people elaborate spatial information, with depths, distances and shapes,
almost like in 3D. Kinesic and haptic experience in blind people as in Braille reading are also mainly processed in the visual cortex area (Maturana and Varela 1992).
Two processes that are lived experientially together may share some common
neural paths. Short-sighted people hear better with their glasses on and people hear
better when they can see peoples faces (Kuhl and Meltzoff 1984; Khul, 1985) or their
lips moving (not because they know lip reading!), in what has been called the McGurk
effect (McGurk and MacDonald 1976).
Cross-modality is another kind of mental property. It could be thought in terms of
the non vertical relations between domains in which attractors in one domain capacity
become the same for another one. Crossmodality has to do with knowledge that is
applied from one module to another, because a kind of link has been established
between domains, as in metaphor and conceptual blending.
10

In cognition, universals have to do also with design and taskonomy (Dougherty and Keller 1982), as
the limited possible ways of knowledgeable practice due to evolved/developed/learned capacities,
technologies, cultural affordances and physical constraints. Cf. also Dennet 1998: Bates and Ellman 1993;
Quinn 1991. J. Piaget (1970) used to say that what is inevitable should not necessarily be innate.
Technological convergence in cultural evolution is about this. Taskonomy may have to do also with
exaptations.
11
To give an example, referential open words (names, verbs, adjectives) are processed by different neural
systems than closed ones (connectives, pronouns, determinants, adverbs) (Neville, 1991), independently
of further recursiveness and/or co-ontogeny
12
R. Llins (2001), studying consciousness, speaks of mental states in which waves of the same
frequency crisscross many parts of the brain, integrating different neurological structures. The integration
of different brain parts through connectivity of neural systems is an outcome of evolutionary process (cf.
Ramirez-Goicoechea 2004).

The role of metaphor has always been dear to social anthropologists. Vico already
mentioned that our capacity for specialisation is limited (Fernandez 1991) but we have
enormous possibilities for combining old things in new contexts. Cross-modality is one
of the main sources of creativity and innovation. In fact, cross-modality is at the base of
symbolisation and implies an increase in the connectivity of neural systems and systems
of systems. In evolutionary terms, it may have meant a step further in human
sapientization13. A SLD or sequential learning device (Bruner 1981) evolved for motor
control in bipedalism and manipulation may have been exaptated for communication
(Lieberman 2002; Greenfield 1991) because of structural design adequacy with the new
capacities. Social intelligence (Jolly 1972; Humphrey 1976; Whiten and Byrne 1988)
may have been exaptated for language (Aiello and Dunbar 1993) in that the neural
connectivity it entails may be viable enough for language requirements. Cross-modality
is not automatic and depends on types and possibilities of experience, including cultural
experience. Cultural models may give preference to some metaphors over others in
accordance with sensorioperceptual experience, institutionalised meanings (Bruner
1996; Quinn 1991) and eco-ideographic relations of societies14 .
Evolutionary stages may be seen as different moments of functional specialisation
of some neural structures together with the openness that cross-modality offers for
creativity and innovation. Many evolutionary outcomes depend on the local and
historical reorganisation of capacities, where culture is symbiotically embedded with
biology in the direction in which cognitive abilities and action lead. Hence, it seems
better to talk of a soft mental architecture of the brain where there is specificity within
flexibility as well as crossmodality.
3. Structure In-the-Making: the brain as a self-organised dynamic system
Our brain, and especially our neocortex, is a complex self-organised autopoietic
system (Changeux 1986; Erdi 1988; Laughlin et al. 1990).
Although neural structures vary in flexibility for re-organisation 15, constraints are
not rules and cortical neural reorganisation continues in different degrees during lifetime
(Edelman 1992; Dreyfus 1979; Kostovic 1990). The phenotype depends on the complex
relationship between evolutionary and developmental systems and the local and
historical reorganizations of capacities. The difficulty when studying the brain is
precisely that its essence relies on its dynamics. We cannot deduce behaviour from the
map (Stewart and Cohen 1997: 151). The brain is the outcome of a phyletic history of a
potential made actual.The human brain cortex is the thickest of all animal cortex
(Dunbar 1992). Cortical neurons start to develop from the 10th week of gestation. They
are all that there will be around the 18th week. At that point, epigenesis starts. Neurons
emigrate to different places following structural and regulatory genes in relation with
chemical exchanges of attraction and repulsion with neighbouring cells (Edelman
1988). Around the third month and once neurons have located, dendrites and axons start
to grow and spread in the foetus brain (Scheibel 1991). Synapto-genesis, neural
connectiveness in synapses, already starts before birth, as shown by EEG experiments.
Nevertheless, most of synapsis as well as neural death because of inactivity happen after
13

S. Mithen (1996) argues that only when evolved capacities are exaptated for other domains, such as the
technical domain, do we see the rapid emergence of our full cognitive abilities.
14
Totemism and animism may be explained as a specific case of crossmodality in the classificatory
system; the first attracting social categories under the gravitational force of natural categories, the second
being the other way round.
15
Neural connections cannot be any kind of thing: the design, what neurons are involved, how they fire
together, what networks become a network are all implicated (Pinker 2002:83). Cf. Recanzone 2000, cit.
in Pinker 2002:93; Lawrence & Nohria 2002.

birth (Kelman & Arterberry 1998:27). Mental development is cross-cultural in the

human species (Konner 1991; Rogoff and Morelli,1989). Many of Piagets
developmental stages have correspondence in myelinisation and neurological change
(Gibson 1996).
Between 2 and 6 months of age, synapto-genesis multiplies by ten thanks to the
profusion of dendrites. At this time, the number of sinapsis doubles that of an adult.
Around 12 months of age, dendrites and connections that have not been stimulated and
reinforced start to disappear and there is even neural death (Huttenlocher 1994 ). Studies
in visual and motor experience confirm this (Kellman and Arterberry 1998; Wiesel and
Huberl 1963, cit. in Neville 1991).
The frontal lobe is the area that has grown most in hominid evolution, representing
25% of the human brain instead of the 3% it represents in cats. Frontal and prefrontal
cortex and their subcortical and limbic connections are the areas most related to
executive, decision and motivated actions. Its maturation in terms of synapto-genesis,
neural death, myelinisation and the presence of dopamine is later than other brain areas
and coincides with the cognitive and behavioural development of infants between 6 and
12 months. The myelinization of secondary cortical areas is contemporaneous with
cross-modal capacities and the elaboration of multi-sensory stimuli and the ability to
elaborate more complex totalities. Further myelinization of associative cortical areas,
such as in the frontal lobe, corresponds with the ability to manipulate various concepts
at the same time and to organize them hierarchically and synthetically. Conceptual
blending, integration of space and time, action and consequence, coincide with the
neurological development of this area and have been ethnographically contrasted in
different cultural settings (Werner1982; Dasen and Heron 1981). Another big
neurological change takes place around the age of 7 (Super 1991), precisely when most
societies start treating the child as a moral agent with responsibility for his/her doings
around this age. Neural dynamics continue throughout life, although main structural
network building in the brain connectivity and structuring of cortex - finishes in
adolescence when the myelinisation of all nerve fibres is completed (Fuster 1989;
Gibson 1991), and it coincides with sexual maturity16.
Modularity and domain specificity believe in an inherited functional geography of
mental processes. Communication abilities seem to be lateralised in birds and mammals,
including primates (Hewes 1996; Corballis 2002); the same for facial recognition
(Nicholls et al. 1999) with even evolutionary implications (Vallortigara 1999).
Left hemisphere is bigger than the right hemisphere in primates, although both
show neurological redundancy at birth. Severe impairment may even concentrate mental
abilities in only one hemisphere (cf. Battro 2000).
The mind/emotion dualism has relied on a brain geometry as well: left brain
hemisphere for cognition and language, right brain side for emotion (Cacioppo and
Petty 1981; Tucker 1981). It is true that there is some kind of locality for the expression
and awareness of emotions that may be evolutionarily more ancient than other mental
localisations. Nevertheless, left hemispheric specialisation for language starts around
the first year (Scheibel 1991); so does emotional cortex structuring in the right
hemisphere (Davidson 1984).
In fact, both hemispheres are embedded in multiple mental processes (Ross and
Mesulam 1979). Most abilities are complex enough to be distributed in both sides. Sight
alone implies the intervention of more than 30 different brain areas (Kellman &
Artenberry 1998: 205,209). Brain areas may also be shared at some point for different
16

Most societies ritualise this stage by means of different forms of symbolic practices that, nevertheless
adopt the form of the well-known rites de passage.

mental activities (Calvin 1997). There is evidence of the left hemisphere modulating
neurological right side activity as well as organising some social manifestations of the
emotional sphere. Reafferent neurological connections of perceptual areas in the cortex
are connected both to the prefrontal evaluative cortex and to the limbic system (LeDoux
1998; Pansksepp 1992), which is a trait of sapientization (Reyna 2002). Many cognitive
structures in the cortex are triggered by the limbic system, which, in turn, is
fundamental for memory, mental processing (cf. Laird et al. 1982) and decision-making
(Damasio 1994).
4. A neurosocial mind
The social and the knowing are part and parcel in human evolution, a heterocronic
co-ontogeny, with differing rythmes and mutual attractivity: one can pull the other at
one time, in some aspects, the other way around the next time or for other matters.They
may also be non homologically interchangeable in terms of system/environment
relations (Ramrez-Goicoechea 2005).
Concerning evolution, we should pay attention to the social and ecological
structures that promote the motivation for employing certain cognitive abilities that may
reshape themselves and acquire new potentials in new contexts (Lock & Colombo
1996). Stages of cognitive evolution in hominids should be envisaged together with the
relations that support and instigate them (Lock & Symes 1996). Most scholars agree
that links between the evolution of brain and cognition and social behaviour are tight.
Cooperation for migrating out of Africa may have been possible thanks to evolved
cognitive and communicational capacities in Homo erectus but, obviously, this must
have been possible thanks to a certain degree of social complexity, in terms of
reciprocal practices, formalised relationships, and social organisation.
Nevertheless, I will not address here their evolutionary history during hominization,
nor recreate possible scenarios for cognition in respect to grupality and social
organisation. I will concentrate only on some particular phyletic and ontogenetic issues
that apply to the family homo, and especially to homo/femina sapiens sapiens.
4.1. Encephalisation: Becoming Homo
Bipedalism led to the mechanical restructuring of hominid (australopithecus) anatomy.
Apart from changes in thigh, torso and arm muscles, what is especially relevant here is
the narrowing of the hominid birth passage due to pelvic restructuring for bipedal
locomotion (Tatersall 1999; Domnguez 1997). Birth became more difficult because
bigger heads holding bigger brains do not come out that easily.
There is an increase in brain size along hominid evolution from australopithecines
(400-500cc), habilis (750cc), erectus (1100cc), Neanderthal (1400cc) and Sapiens
sapiens (1350cc) (Holloway 1996). Encefalisation entails not only brain/body size ratio
but also differential area growths (especially the prefrontal lobe) as well as increase in
potential neural connectivity. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives in terms of extant
species similarities share with us 98% of genes. Those that are different correspond
mainly to the expression of genes involved in neural connectivity for humans and smell
and hearing in chimps (Clark 2003; Enard et al. 2002; )
Hominids and especially homo sapiens (including Neanderthal) have to be
born before the brain is fully grown. A chimpanzees brain already weighs at
birth 45% of the adult one; in humans it is only 25%. In the first year, the human
head grows more than 60% of its size at birth. This is only around 30% in one of our
closest relatives, the chimp(pan troglodytes, pan paniscus) (Passingham 1982).
The brain finishes growing in size and connectivity thanks to experience during
ontogeny, the generative field of biological-organic, psychological, sociocultural and

10

historical-political relationships of the individual in his/her life cycle 17. The capacities
of organisms result from the emergent properties of developmental systems (Oyama
1985; 1992) when engaging in on-going processes with the environment, a scenario
that, for humans, is always social18.
4.2. Socialisation: Becoming Human
This experience is shaped in a particular/universal sociocultural milieu to which
the child is engaged. Human ontogeny can be thought of as socialised biology, captured
by a cultural process (Sinha 1996); it is the locus and tempo where biology and culture
meet each other in the individual (Goody 1995; Greenfield 2002). In our species, there
is not a human nature prior to a sociocultural condition; sapiens sapiens is not a given:
there is not a natural man/woman on top of which culture is placed like a hat. We
should see homo sapiens sapiens and humanity as the result of a sociobiological process
instead of viewing cultural evolution as starting from a terminal point of biological
evolution.
Human ontogeny shows some particularities. Animals with high encefalisation also
have a long childhood and youth, during which synapsis structure comes to be thanks to
social interaction and play. All primates show an elongated ontogeny (in terms of sexual
and cognitive maturity as specified by myelinisation). Parental investment in terms of
nurture, care and socialisation is also big. This situation corresponds to long-life
species, with big brains, few offspring and less frequent infant mortality. Primates have
a long ontogeny, period increased continuously throughout hominid evolution (Foley
1996).
Humanity is the result of socialisation, the teaching/observing/learning process to
become a proper recognisable member of a social group. Socialisation takes place along
ontogeny, especially during infancy, childhood and youth. During ontogeny, everything
starts anew: all individuals have a long and winding road to go before becoming human.
D.Premack (1980) talked about an upgraded context for primate cognition in the
lab context. We can speak of the same for the evolved context of humans: one that
includes the knowing and doing of many generations as in extended and externalised
knowledge, where the history of the group is re-presented and re-incorporated in
artefacts, practices, communicational systems, rituals and symbols. These are called
cultural affordances (Sinha 1996; Shore 1996), objects and ways of learning (Rogoff
and Morelli 1989), procedures (Gentner and Stevens, 1983) and embodied know-how
(i.e. Bourdieus habitus), including collective canonical use (normative, evaluative,
aesthetic)19.
What J. Bruner (1983) called the scaffolded world we live in, full of reifications
and social artefacts, constitutes the scenario for children to build up their own way into
a selected environment, the frameworks they will explore for meaning (Bruner 1996)
17

Cf. Magnusson & Cairns 1996; Cairns, Costello and Elder, Jr, 1996; Robertson 1996; Toren 1990,
1993. In Neo-Darwinism, ontogeny has no place. Ontogeny and phylogeny are mutually constituted and
specified within the organism itslef (Gould 1977). Ontogeny provides continuity within the species and
discontinuity with respect to the rest. Evolution also depends on ontogenetic processes that are good
enough for the viability of the organism, life and reproduction, as discussed in the evo-devo debate
(Gerhardt 1997).
18
For humans, all ecological relations should include those perceptions, ideas and values through which
they try to make sense of their own actions. Cf. Descola & Plsson, 1996; Horigan 1988. For the
ethnography of appropriation, transformation and representation of nature, cf. Ellen 1996
19
Knowledge goes well beyond the limits of our own skin and capacities.Cognition is also social in that it
is embodied and stored in artefacts (Donald 1991), practices and rituals, relationships (Strathern 1999),
procedures, schemas, systems of truth and power (Foucault 1978). Cognition is socially distributed along
other structural alignments.

11

and (more or less) coherence, in a never-ending process of reworking the legacy of their
elders20 and the choices within constraints - of their generation-mates.
Caregivers bring forth and structure childrens abilities thanks to: (1) the dialogy of
care-giver/child context (Schaffer 1992; Butterworth 1996)21; (2) body language and
indirect communication (Schiefflein 1990; Hendry and Watson 2001), and emotional
saliency (Fernald and Mazzie 1991); (3) infant direct speech (IDS,babytalk, motherese)
(Fernald et all. 1989) 22, exploratory talk (Mercer 2000), proper speech styles (Miller
and Garvey 1984), and appropriate commentaries to the situation (Bruner 1975); (4)
alternate participation as in turn-taking (Hobson 2002; Mead 1967); (5) guided,
educated attention (Butterworth and Jarrett, 1991; Palsson 1994); (6) anticipatory
cognitive and emotional stimulation as in inter-mental developmental zone where
children learn to become inter-thinkers (Mercer 2000:14).
Caregivers socialise providing the focus, the clues, the saliency 23, the format and
dynamic repetitive and standarised structures from which the child will creatively build
a shared world of his/her own. The education of attention founds shared rules (Mercer
2000:40) about ways, contexts and relevance, of what goes without saying, of what we
trust our world to be about and of which we have intuitive, self-evident knowledge,
without concious trace of its origins. It is by means of guided discovery and
observation/imitation (DAndrade 1981) of routines and embodied practices that
children are taught dexterities (Palsson 1994), as shown in workmanship learning
(Bloch 1991; Rogoff 1990; Dougherty and Keller 1982). What you learn is to adopt a
perspective, where and how to look, listen, etc., how to build up new knowledge, how to
creatively rework old pre-existing resources, according to a sociocultural and historical
environment. Symbolic play is the laboratory where children put in practice and re-work
the manipulatory, linguistic and social skills learnt in infancy (Bretherton 1984).
N. Chomsky was right: all children learn to speak around the same age. But not
because we have genes for speaking (Kupiec & Stojanovik 2002). Rather, language is
the emergence of many micro-dynamics in systems within systems, that depend on: 1.
evolved/developed specialised/amodal/cross-modal capacities, including neurological
and anatomical features; 2. an autopoietic brain open to the world and the experiences it
may provide, and 3. a sociocultural landscape that provides a structuring context for our
body to develop.
For humans, and somehow for some other primates, we sould talk of a socially
engaging/engaged intelligence.
4.3. Childrens evolved/developed capacities
20

In social evolution, the extension of the lifespan in hominids contributed to older adults become living
devices for the accumulation and teaching of knowledge.
21
Dialogy does not mean total shareability or complete acquiescence, but interpretation, multivoicedness
and contrast (Matusov, 1996; Bakhtin, 1990), not to mention a good dose of trust. Neodarwinist
anthropological (primatological) pessimism even sees cooperation as an interested behaviour because, as
game theorist say, it pays off to be smart.
22
Linguistic and cultural contexts vary (Ochs & Schieffelin 1984; Harkness & Super 1983; Sagi et al.
1985; Pye 1986). Although Infant Direct Speech is the prevalent case in the majority of cultural settings,
children do not need to participate directly as communicating agents with their caregivers to learn how to
speek, but only as vicarious ones (Trevarthen 1988) ; it is enough that they are present in an interactive
linguistic setting that, nevertheless, allow them to be aware of agency, perspective and intentionality in
others, with which they may identify through empathy and role assuming.
23
Something becomes relevant not because it broadens our information about the world as in Sperber
and Wilson (1986) but because it appeals and affects us due to what we have become as persons and
members of sociocultural groups.

12

How do children come to be engaged in this social world for them to grow as
epistemic agents? Children have sociobiological engaged/engagional capacities.
For a given species, and under similar conditions, the pattern of development is
common for all individuals, possibly because of what Super (1991) mentions as
canalisation, the integration of a genetic guidance within an epigenetic landscape that
gives rise to similar outcomes (Johnson and Morton 1991). Some processes and
experiences within suitable conditions have to happen then and there for proper
development. If not, permanent negative consequences may come, depending on the
threshold passed or the local opportunity missed (Jacob 1977). Gottlieb (1971) speaks
of cognitive windows for learning, that are active at specific stages of development. We
all know the case of singing birds that are not able to contact future partners, therefore
to reproduce, if they have not learned how to sing at the right time in development,
becoming barbari in their own species.
Human infants come to the world quite well developed in terms of neural reflexes
(Eibl-Eibesfedlt 1993) and percepto-sensoriality (Kellman & Arterberry 1998), which
explains in part their active, quick and intense responsiveness to the world and to
themselves. Infants are sensitive to some prenatal acoustic clues of prenatal experiences
(De Casper and Spence 1986). But abilities depend on percepto-sensory experience that
is culturally embedded and socially triggered. Sensory potential requires interactive
learning and fine-tuning during extra-uterine development (Stewart & Cohen 1997:140
and ff.) 24
Emotional expressiveness in children appears quite early, thanks to evolved facial
muscles (Ekman 1973; 1979; Izard 1977). Crying and social smiling are specific human
devices for communicating with their conespecifics (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1983:41-42;
Killbride 1975) and establish the typical human bonding (Bowlby 1969; Ainsworth
1983) has important emotional consequences for caregivers engagement in parenting
(Konner 1991). This tendency and openess towards others is called intersubjectivity by
C. Trevarthen (1980; 1988). Babbling is the linguistic (Petitto and Marentette, 1991;
Petitto 2000), developmental sequel of this ability to communicate.
Children show early interest in what surrounds them, which is composed mainly
of faces, voices and bodily practices. From the age of two months, they like faces with
all features nose, eyes, lips, brows - correctly placed (Maurer 1985) 25. If zebras
recognise their mothers by their face stripes, so do human infants (Bushnell et al. 1989),
preferring them to others (De Casper and Fifer 1980; Johnson and Morton 1991). They
also prefer their caregivers voices to those of others. By three months of age they
distinguish different voices and even phonemic contrasts in language (Eimas 1978). At
five months of age they already recognise individual faces and around six months, they
perceive gender differences (Kellerman and Arterberry 1998:274-275). The ability to
establish emotional links continues in another attachment stage from 6 to 12 months, as
shown in the strange situation (Ainsworth et al. 1978).
Autistic children have a defficency in emotional bonding , being later impaired for
empathy and social referencing , proto-imperatives and proto-declaratives, recognition
of intentionality, perspective-taking and social cognition to various degrees (Wimpory et
al. 2000; Baron-Cohen 1995). Learning, memory, language deficits and other cognitive
disorders may also be the outcome of damage in the lymbic system (Bachevalier 1994).

24

Cats cannot distinguish horizontal lines if they have not been exposed to them early (Cf. Stewart &
Cohen 1997). In a carpentered environment , full of angles and straight lines, westerners are much more
susceptible of optical illusions than other people in other ethnographic contexts ( Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1993).
25
Maybe due to the human preference for symmetry (cf. Eibel-Eibesfeldt 1975).

13

Much has been said about early human mimetic capacities (Cf. Meltzoff & Prinz
2002; Nadel & Butterworth 1999). Newborn babies, only 45 minutes old, have been
reported to stick their tongues out in imitation of a human face (Hobson 2002: 30 & ff.).
It seems there is an ability to connect an event, map it neurologically and offer a motor
response to it. Mirror neurons have been found in other primates (Rizolatti et al. 1996;
Iacobonni et al., 1999; Nishitani & Hari 2000) and may constitute precursors for human
imitation.26. When humans imitate, they also attribute intentionality to the interactor 27,
identifying with his/her perspective in a continuous movement of proximity and
distance (Hobson 2002:107); that is how a perspective is gained (Tomasello 1999) as
well as the capacity for externalisation of self and identification with others. Human
imitation is not replication, nor re-production but re-creation: it is the copying that
originates (Geertz 1986:380).
In conclusion, thanks to the sensory and mental openness of the child, we can speak
of an ecological brain (Bateson 1972) that is sculpted (Bates 1979) thanks to socially
elicited and upgraded capacities during his/her co-ontogeny with other persons.
5. The embodied and experiential mind
Neodarwinism, in accordance with a rationalist conception of a disembodied
epistemic agent cannot provide a comprehensive theory of knowledge and how this is
produced.
Mind is the emergent outcome of brain neurophisiological activity. Body, emotions,
action and experience are absent in neodarwinist accounts of cognition. Cartesianism
eliminated passion and sensoriality from rationality, because they belonged to the lower
instincts and bodily humours (cf. Shilling & Mellor 1996) that confuse the mind. Mind
is not only cognition as in Cognitivism. Knowing is also about subjective experience as
in desires, motivation, intention, memory, feelings, senses, actions, which are all
corporal workings that imply different degrees of neural complexity. We do not decode
information and then process it (Searle 1990). As Lewontin (1982, 1983) suggests, we
put much more of ourselves into it. So body, emotions, and practices are relevant for
cognition.
5.1. Body
Only through our body can we really produce knowledge, as the intertwining of
cognition, memory, and emotion in an ecosocial environment.
Embodiment theories of cognition (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Johnson and
Lakoff 1999; Putnam 1999) speak of cognitive structures that emerge from recurrent
sensory-motor patterns that allow for action to be perceptually guided (cf.infra). F.
Varela (1991:173), says that cognition depends on the kind of experiences that we have
thanks to a body with sensory-motor capacities, these capacities being embedded in an
encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context 28.
5.2. Emotions
26

Learning how to pronounce is done not only by listening but also by watching how sounds are
articulated by lips, tongue, etc. (Skoyles 1997). Phonetic classification is not based on sounds but on
motor ways for producing sounds and consonants. Mirror neurons (cf. infra) would easily imitate vowel
movements thanks to categoriality and contrastivity, i.e. taskonomy.
27
Awareness of directionality of gaze as a sign of intentionality is a phylogenetic trait humans share with
other animals such as birds (Griffin 1992) and mammals, thanks to specialised visual neurons (Maunsell
et al. 1987; Perret et al. 1982).
28
We do not want to become too feely/touchy. Embodied cognition does not preclude inference, abstract
or formal thinking, as relatively autonomous and self-organised mental processes subjectivelly devoid of
body awareness (cf. Leder 1990), thanks to recursivity and redescription, reworking and reorganisation in
the brain. Not everything need to be previously experienced. Inference may well be understood as an
emergency of previous experiences mentally reworked and re-elaborated.

14

Cognition and emotion are mental activities that have been split in Western account of
what is the mind, excluding the last one (Ramrez-Goicoechea 2001). But emotions are
important in decision making, because they point towards saliency, relevance, value,
purposes, communication (Schiefflin 1983) and directionality for action (DAndrade
1995; Williams 2001). Emotions and feelings tell us about how things go in the world
for us and for others (i.e. empathy; cf. Hoffman 1981). Emotions are like an
information holding system, reverberating loops that keep information active for
further mental purposes (DAndrade 1981). They allow us to concentrate attention and
energy on certain aspects of the situation so we can hierarchically organise and
reorganise it (Vandamme 1988). Emotional deprivation and depression have been
reported as having consequences in exploratory activity, social intelligence and
inability to envisage mental tasks from a whole perspective. The attribution of
emotional and intentional states, as part of a theory of mind and social cognition has
been decisive during hominisation (Jolly 1972).
5.3. Action and experience
Humans do not exist detached from their own practices and experience by which
they get to appropriate and transform their means and conditions of existence (Marx
1975 1859), including meaning. It is not a matter of connecting behaviour with its
determinants but of social action with its meaning (Geertz 1983:34). J. Lave (1988) has
shown that cognition is constituted through practice, embedded in both an interactive
situation and a constitutive order (political and ideological domains, collective representations and moral orders. This macro-micro environment (Knorr-Cetina 1981:2)
provides both constraints and flexibility (Giddens 1979; Alexander 1987). The person is
best defined as an enacting agent that incorporates a perspective, priorities, beliefs,
values, previous experiences and expectations. Practices have meaning because there is
a community of practitioners (Lave 1988) that share an implicit socially distributed
knowledge and collective memory (Connerton 1989), a series of inter-subjective
presuppositions about the intelligibility of actions and actors (Carrithers 1992:87;
Sainsaulieu, 1985:303), and hindsight and forsight of the course of action as in a chain
of antecedents and consequences (Goody 1985; Gingsburg & Harrington 1996)29.
Through action, perceptual-cognitive systems select a meaningful environment
from which experience is generated for further actions/relations (Gibson 1979). It is the
concept of perceptual guided action as developed by H. Maturana and F. Varela (1992)
from Held & Hein (1958). Perception is not independent of our conceptual schemas
(Lakoff 1987:261; Johnson 1987:ix-xxxviii) nor of our experiences. For example,
smelling is not a passive mapping of external features but a kind of enactment of that
meaning by way of the animals embodied history and experience (Skarda & Freeman,
1987; Freeman, 1991). There is no brain activity responding to smell if the animal (in
this case a rabbit) has not been previously exposed several times to the same smell and a
motivation (anticipation and expectation) with respect to these experiences has been
established thanks to patterns that work as attractors for new experiences. This
perspective obviously questions the Neodarwinian adaptationist approach to organisms
in general and to humans in particular. The objectivist realism underlying the
adaptationist programme imagines that the organisms adapt internally to a genetic
endowment and externally to the constraints of natural selection, but this is not so. By
29

Our cognitive capacities, including social intelligence owes as much to cooperation, reciprocity, trust
and exchange (Ofek, 2001), on a kind of symbiotic, horizontal axis. Cooperation between primates is
based on mutual trust (Bateson, P., 1988) Cheating and lying entail a displacement between the here and
now. But so does trust: if the other does not trust, I cannot lie to him. Cooperative thinking has been fully
demonstrated as creatively successful when solving problems or unusual tasks.

15

means of an operational closure (as in the cell membrane), they actively select an outer
domain of specification (Varela et al. 1991), an environment, through which they build
their own inner space. Thanks to this relational closure, a constituted order less
complex than the environment - is created for the development and future viability (not
optimality) of the system. For any organism, there is an enacted and significant
environment, allowed and propitiated by the organisms own affordances (Gibson
1979). As in accounts of niche construction organisms and environments are mutually
especified (Lewontin, 1982; Lythgoe, 1979; Maturana & Varela, 1992; Laland et
al.2000).
C. Peirce (1987) said that thinking was acting in a chain of thoughts and actions.
Ethnomethodology proposed a practical-theoretical agent (Garfinkel 1984). T. Ingold
(1993:434) criticises the underlying dichotomy between the technical-practical and the
cognitive shown in most social intelligence theories (i.e. Whiten & Byrne, 1988). For
the sake of their intrinsic relationships, he distinguishes between thinking as inwarddirected action, and doing as outward-directed action. Thinking, classifying, decisionmaking, planning and remembering, observing, being, are already actions/experiences,
if only because something happens in our brain-in-the-body30 . Our world is perceived
to be enacted and lived from different experiences of engagement31 and sensory-mental
states (Halton 1995; Tambiah 1992 ). Therefore, it seems better to talk of an
experiential realism (Putnam 1999; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). Things are not more
real because they fit our mental representations more or less but because they are lived
through experience. Our qualitative (DAndrade 1981; Chalmers 1997) and decorated
version of the world (system and environment) is, somehow virtual, a figment of reality
(Stewart & Cohen, 1997:189).
5. Return Ticket: The recursivity of cognition.
In this paper I have supported a non deterministic approach to cognition, which,
nevertheless, does not preclude for a leading role over other domains at some
evolutionary/developmentally point. A property of autopoietic systems as the human
brain-in-the-body is, is that of recursivity. This means that mental activity may be
worked and re-worked itself thanks to connectivity of systems of neural systems
towards other grades of complexity, as in Karmiloff-Smith (1992) re-description,or
Sperbers (2000) meta-representations. But not only up/sidewards. Autopoietic systems
may also re-create complexity within themselves by means of subsystems (and their
micro-environments) that become relatively autonomous, oscilating in between a
dependently independence (Cairns-Smith 1996:49) and a liberation from sensitiveness
to initial conditions. This allows for these subsystems to become powerful triggering
forces on their own for further outcomes and onto other domains.
Motivated knowledgeable human practices become objectified (hence arbitrary) by
means of rutinisation/ritualisation, typification and institutionalisation, that introduce
new dynamics and emergencies within the system. Through this externalisation,
knowledge becomes objectified, communicable, structured, memorised (Donald, 1991),
knowable for others to evaluate, discuss, agree upon and rework. Objectifications could
be understood as attractors that orient, direct and capture human activity in its
30

Action, meaning and communication are related in child development, showing underlying analogies
(not homologies) in categorisation, end-means relations, agent-action-patient links, task constraints
(Bates, 1979; Rivire, 1984; Greenfield, 1991) .
31
Action, participation and experience are not reduced to actual agency. For instance, depending on
different sociocultural and historical contexts, children are differently immersed in the pragmatic world of
their caregivers, in a stage/landscape where things happen (and do not happen) to themselves (childrearing practices, participant/non-participant observation, co-presence, etc.).

16

gravitational space, in its fluxes and exchanges as well as in its more consolidated and
structured forms.
The externalised reification processes were started by hominids through social
relationships and their markers, environmental selection/appropriation/transformation
(i.e.object production, technology), ritual enactments - including bodily work.
Externalisation allowed for a new kind of recursivity that may have sped up both
crossmodality and especialisation as seen in the exponential cognitive and social
complexity of homo sapiens sapiens in the late Pleistocene. Devices that were selected,
invented, exaptated, thanks to sociobiological cognitive abilities became self-organised
and relatively autonomous as new attractors that catalysed some of these very same
capacities, giving them new strength and new direction. Once in motion, as in
Tomasellos (1999) ratchet effect, or Vicos history in spiral, there is no way back.
Language needs some cognitive evolved capacities as its necessary (although not
sufficient, cf. Rolfe 1996) environment; but once emerged (Bickerton 1990) and then
fully developed, it may have pulled the cart of cognition further on, without ontologic
prevalence as in the Sapir-Wolf debate. Technology may be also the case (Lock &
Symes 1996), as in notation and writing as well (Goody 1977; Olson 1980; 1996). As
devices to keep track of and record knowledge, things (objects, people, practices,
rituals, time, events) became countable and hence controlled in a new way, founding
new ways for people to relate to one another and with respect to extensive material
objects. Nor less as communicational devices beyond local place and time. This
changed social relationships. Social experience became structured and formalised by
means of accountability, discourse, classification and formalised representational
systems, proceedings, rules and meta-rules as well as corporative specialised knowledge
and the power it entailed.
6.Conclusions
Tim Ingold has asked on different occasions for a new agenda in evolutionary studies
that would focus on the self-organising dynamics and form-generating potentials of
relational fields. I think that dynamic systems theories offer a more encompassing
approach to the multi-level and multi-modal relationships of embedded processes in human
socio-cognitive evolution. If Evolutionary Epistemology wants to do justice to the
complex process of what it is to become a human as a relational organism with its
environment, it is necessary to pay attention to the overwhelming role that the sociocultural
has in specifying what and how these relations are. I trust that all of us interested in human
evolution and development will benefit from the effort.
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