Michael Tomasello
About
Developmental and comparative psychologist at Duke; the episode's guest
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Claims by Michael Tomasello (20 of 25)
Unique Human Cognition Is Bound to Sociality
The uniquely human cognitive capacity is intimately bound up with a unique social capacity: humans don't operate on individual brainpower but are adapted to leverage what other people know, collaborating, communicating, socially learning, and teaching, which is why a chimp and a child raised in isolation would not end up that different, but a child raised in human culture develops language, mathematics, and institutions.
Human Difference Emerged Late in Evolution
For roughly the first four million of six million years hominins were essentially bipedal apes with ape-sized brains; stone tools appear around 2-2.5 million years ago, collaborative foraging less than a million (perhaps half a million) years ago, and culturally distinct groups with conventional language only about 100,000-200,000 years ago—so the genuinely distinctive human capacities emerged fairly late.
Good Negative Distinguishes Meaningful Ape Failures
A 'good negative' in comparative experiments is when chimps pass a control condition very similar to the experimental condition while children pass both, making the chimps' failure in the key condition a meaningful fact rather than an uninterpretable null result, since ordinary negative findings could be due to anything.
Apes Understand Perception and Goals, Not Shared Thoughts
Great apes share an understanding of the perception and goals of other individuals—a subordinate chimp behaves as if it knows a dominant cannot see food, and apes understand what others are trying to do even when the goal isn't achieved—but they do not understand mental states more narrowly defined, such as sharing thoughts or disagreeing about opinions.
Grammar Is the Least Likely Part to Be Innate
While humans are biologically evolved to use language—prepared with capacities for concept formation, communication, imitation, and internalization—the specific generative grammar/syntax that Chomsky proposed as innate is actually the least likely aspect of language to be innate, because grammatical structures vary substantially across the world's languages even as concepts and pragmatic principles show commonalities.
Evolution Requires a Specific Problem, Not General Smartness
Evolution does not select for organisms simply 'to be smarter' or 'have bigger brains'; selection requires a specific concrete problem, and since big brains are metabolically expensive there must be a specific benefit driving their evolution.
Long Human Childhood Enables Cultural Learning
Humans have a far longer ontogeny than other apes—youngsters in hunter-gatherer groups don't produce more calories than they consume until around age 16—and this extended dependency is dangerous and costly for both children and investing parents, so it must serve a function: providing time to learn, socially coordinate, and become a member of a culture that transmits the accumulated knowledge enabling humans to live in environments like the Arctic where an unaided individual would quickly die.
Altruism Cannot Evolve If Self-Sacrificing
Pure altruism that sacrifices the individual out of existence cannot evolve—because giving away all resources leaves no offspring to contribute to the gene pool—so Darwin was right that individuals must look out for themselves, but cooperation is not necessarily zero-sum and can be a win-win situation, which is the basis for the human version of cooperation.
Two Distinct Moralities: Sympathy and Fairness
There are two distinct moralities: the morality of sympathy/helping—rooted in mammalian oxytocin-driven care for offspring and generalized to non-kin, widespread across mammals—and the morality of fairness and obligation, a more cognitive, rational process where equal effort generates a felt obligation to share equally; the sense of obligation is not the same as being nice and arises specifically from collaborative foraging.
Free Will Lives at the Psychological Level
Denying free will amounts to taking a physicist's view of psychology and eliminating psychology altogether; while the decision-making apparatus is itself evolved and not chosen, given that apparatus the individual genuinely chooses within it, and the existence of agentive decision-makers requires keeping levels straight rather than reducing everything to deterministic physics—moreover, no one truly behaves as if free will is false, since they still get angry at others and worry over decisions.
Humans Have Shared/Plural Agency
Beyond the executive control systems of mammals that plan ahead and consider possibilities, humans evolved to be shared (plural) agents: when two people collaborate they form a joint agent with a shared goal, shared knowledge maintained through communication, and joint self-regulation, where shared agency is the behavioral collaboration and shared intentionality the underlying cognitive capacities enabling it.
Behavior Can Lead Evolution (Genetic Assimilation)
Agency and behavior can be a leading edge in evolution: if insects on the ground disappear and only tree insects remain, lizards that choose to climb trees survive, and subsequently selection favors traits like longer claws that support tree-climbing—so the behavioral choice precedes and directs the genetic change, a process called genetic assimilation that Darwin himself recognized as the agency of organisms.
Agency as Control-System Organization, Not Homunculus
An agent is not a homunculus but an organism with a specific control-system organization: it has a goal state it wants in the environment, perceives the environment to check whether it matches the goal, and acts to make it match—the same circular/cybernetic causality as a thermostat or bodily homeostasis—so behavior should be understood as goal-directed control rather than stimulus-response, just as 20th-century biology replaced vitalism not with a vital substance but with a different organization of ordinary matter.
Vertebrates Have Goals, Single-Celled Organisms Don't
Goal-directed agency likely requires a nervous system: single-celled organisms and bacteria probably do not have goals, while vertebrates from fish and especially lizard-like land animals onward clearly pursue goals as shown in experimental research—though invertebrate lineages like octopi and insects are a separate, uncertain case.
Interdependence Drives the Evolution of Morality
Morality is the human psychology built for cooperation, and its key concept is interdependence: just as kin selection has a mathematics for how much to help genetic relatives, interdependence follows the same formula with interdependence substituted for genetic relatedness, so that to the degree I depend on you for mating, foraging, or other needs, it is in my long-term fitness interest to help you, share fairly, and treat you with respect—and computational cooperation models fail to capture this because they assume independent agents rather than interdependent social networks.
Cooperation Favors Being Mind-Read, Competition Wouldn't
Recursive theory of mind likely evolved for cooperation rather than competition, because in cooperation I actively want my partner to read my mind—I make my plan perspicuous and facilitate mutual understanding—whereas competition gives no incentive to make one's intentions transparent.
Language Is Icing, Not the Starting Point
Language is critically important for uniquely human cognition but is 'the icing on the cake'—a later conventionalization that presupposes prior capacities like concept formation, communicative intentions, recursive thinking, and non-linguistic communication; in principle you cannot start from nothing and simply assign words, so explaining humans by 'language' requires accounting for those enabling capacities first.
One Big Problem Organizes Many Sub-Problems
Rather than many independent evolved modules, humans face one organizing problem—collaborating to get food under partner choice—which brings with it about fifty hierarchically organized sub-problems (cognitive, communicative, socio-moral, reputational), making it more plausible that a single big adaptive challenge in the last million years organizes many smaller capacities than that we evolved separate adaptations for language, theory of mind, institutions, and mathematics each.
Agency Evolves to Handle Unpredictability via Decisions
Agency evolves precisely where the environment is unpredictable: nature cannot in principle specify what a squirrel should do with a particular nut in a particular landscape, so instead of determining the action it builds in a decision-making apparatus—the organism gathers information and makes the best decision—meaning the apparatus is evolved/determined but the particular decision on a given occasion is not.
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