Short Flashcards #4

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What two hypotheses compose the standard story of rapid human evolution?

Required: selective hypothesis—fitness depended on managing relationships; architectural hypothesis—specialized modules enabled seamless social competence.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why does Sterelny reject a strongly modular explanation of human competence?

Many hominin challenges involved evolutionarily novel, changing features for which preinstalled information was poorly suited.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What must an account of human cognition explain besides competence?

It must explain plasticity and variable success across dynamic, unstable physical and social environments.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How does Sterelny characterize changes in different domains of hominin life?

They were interdependent: economic, biological, physical, and social changes altered one another.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why can preinstalled information explain routine competence yet fail on novelty?

It supplies solutions to anticipated problems but cannot flexibly handle genuinely new or rapidly changing conditions.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Which cooperation problem does Sterelny think is underestimated?

Making cooperation profitable through effective coordination, rather than merely detecting and suppressing defection.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How were the task demands facing hominins related?

They were variable over time and mutually interdependent.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What major foraging transition occurred by roughly 200,000 years ago?

Hominins became predators of large game before adopting thrown weapons.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What three resources did social foragers characteristically combine?

Required: rich targeted ecological information; cooperation; technology.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What replaces the Machiavellian hypothesis as the source of cooperation demands?

The coordination problems generated by technologically assisted, information-rich cooperative foraging.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Where does Sterelny place the emergence of the social-foraging package?

Probably in the common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why does cooperative foraging require cultural transmission?

Foragers must acquire and share detailed, locally changing ecological information across individuals and generations.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What must source and learner possess for informational cooperation?

A structured learning environment plus suitable perceptual and cognitive capacities.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What may chiefly distinguish behaviorally modern humans from predecessors?

Robust social environments supporting high-volume, high-fidelity social learning.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What distinction answers the objection that adaptation had to precede cumulative knowledge?

Preserving hard-won knowledge is ancient; reliably adding improvements is comparatively recent.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] State Sterelny’s feedback loop linking foraging, environment, and learning.

Required: cooperative foraging changes environments; new demands increase ecological coordination; cross-generational learning preserves solutions; inherited specialization becomes less adequate.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Which knowledge domains must social foraging integrate?

Social, technological, and ecological knowledge.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Does Sterelny posit one adaptation that separated humans from apes?

No. Human divergence arose from multiple ratcheting feedback loops across social, ecological, technological, and developmental life.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why was social learning especially useful in changing hominin environments?

It transmitted local solutions faster than genetic evolution could track environmental variation.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What does Sterelny’s lineage explanation seek to explain?

How ordinary ape social learning became a life-organizing dependence on cross-generational information.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] In the West-Eberhard transition, which came first: cultural learning or genetic adaptations for it?

Cultural learning began through existing plasticity; genetic adaptations followed by making the induced phenotype cheaper and more reliable.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What is phenotypic accommodation in this context?

Selection for genes that stabilize or improve phenotypes initially produced by developmental plasticity in changed environments.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What five changes compose Sterelny’s lineage explanation of social learning?

Required: learning preceded adaptations; learning channels expanded; social tools emerged; environments became adapted for learning; hybrid learning joined a cooperation syndrome.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why were early learning channels relatively resistant to deception?

They were narrow, error-tolerant channels offering few opportunities for manipulative informational exploitation.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How can artifacts become social-learning tools without being designed as such?

Their informational effects can begin as side effects and later be recruited into organized learning environments.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How did adapted social environments improve childhood learning?

They protected and provisioned children while arranging access to models, materials, and practice.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What is hybrid learning?

Learning that combines socially supplied information or environmental scaffolding with individual exploration and trial-and-error.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What two feedback loops organize Sterelny’s account of cognitive capital?

Required: expertise–social learning–life history; expertise–individual learning adaptations–organized learning environments.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Which life-history changes support high-bandwidth intergenerational information flow?

Longer childhood, adolescence, and an extended lifespan.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why is cross-generational information flow tied to resource flow?

Adults can generate surpluses using pooled knowledge, enabling them to provision the long education of younger learners.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What does macaque potato washing show about social learning?

Environmental traces of others can mediate learning even when learners use ordinary exploratory cognition.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why is environmentally mediated exploration not simply solitary learning?

The social group created the informative environment that channels exploration and allows innovations to accumulate.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Can information-rich traditions arise before specialized social-learning cognition?

Yes. Chained environmental modifications can preserve skills without changes in individual cognitive equipment.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What technological practice illustrates environmentally chained innovation?

Stone-flake manufacture, where discarded materials and partial products scaffold later learners.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] When does selection favor adaptations for reliable, low-cost skill acquisition?

After a culturally supported lifestyle becomes established and recurrently rewards those adaptations.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Which early motivational changes may have supported social learning?

Greater tolerance and curiosity toward others, their activities, and their artifacts.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why does Sterelny think Baldwinian cognitive evolution is plausible here?

The same capacities—working memory and inhibitory control—improve both social and individual learning, broadening their fitness benefits.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What is apprentice learning?

Hybrid learning in an organized environment where experts, tools, partial products, and structured practice guide trial-and-error.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How do experts contribute without explicit instruction?

They organize the learner’s trials, materials, tasks, and access to skilled practice.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What four virtues does Sterelny claim for the apprentice-learning model?

Required: incrementally assembled; high-fidelity and high-bandwidth; ethnographically supported; archaeologically illuminating.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Does apprentice learning require schools or explicit verbal instruction?

No. It can operate through informal, organized participation and scaffolded practice.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How could apprentice learning begin before specialized teaching adaptations?

Youngsters’ proximity to elders exposed them to tools, partial products, raw materials, and productive trial-and-error.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What ethnographic practices support the apprentice model?

Foragers give children miniature tools, pets, size-appropriate equipment, and access to safer subsistence excursions.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How do Csibra and Gergely broaden teaching beyond explicit instruction?

They include informal advice, encouragement, and other learner-directed modifications of activity.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What does Stout infer from Acheulean hand-axe production?

Cumulative improvement existed in material choice and shaping even without obvious high-fidelity copying of finished axes.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What can Bamforth and Finlay’s methods establish?

They can distinguish high-skill from low-skill stonework, indicating valuable learning, but not its organization or underlying cognition.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What two facts must a model of the human mind explain?

Required: humans usually handle novelty competently; they do so by accumulating and wielding cognitive capital.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What two puzzles does Sterelny use to test his model?

Required: Neanderthal extinction; the long lag between Homo sapiens’ origin and behavioral modernity.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What shared mistake generates both puzzles?

Overfocusing on individual cognition while ignoring socially engineered information environments and individual–group thresholds.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why may the apparent behavioral revolution be partly a mirage?

Older technologies are rarer archaeologically, and many supposedly late traits have earlier, scattered precedents.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What could explain Europe’s abrupt Upper Paleolithic change without a cognitive mutation?

Immigration of populations carrying established cultural packages from Africa.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How do McBrearty and Brooks characterize behavioral modernity’s emergence?

As patchy, gradual, hesitant, and geographically dispersed—the revolution that was not.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why have archaeologists emphasized symbolic behavior?

It indicates collectively made meaning, transformed group identities, and potentially new cooperation and division of labor.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why does Sterelny separate two functions of symbols?

Arbitrary displaced reference and social-identity marking require different symbolic capacities.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why are rare shells poor examples of arbitrary symbols?

Their rarity and attractiveness non-arbitrarily advertise status, like conspicuous luxury goods.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What does burial by itself establish?

Modern-like emotional attachment—not necessarily religion, narrative thought, hierarchy, or fully modern symbolic cognition.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What might rich grave goods reflect besides new cognitive capacity?

New social hierarchy and wealth differentiation that made status display materially visible.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How could ochre become a social signal?

A utilitarian material, perhaps used for camouflage, could later be conventionalized for human-to-human signaling.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What does the population-structure hypothesis say material symbols advertise?

Identity to unfamiliar outsiders when populations encounter many strangers, rather than the initial existence of group identity.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why are physical symbols unreliable measures of cultural richness?

No artifact type appears if and only if a group inhabits a modern-range social world.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How does Sterelny define behavioral modernity?

The collective capacity to retain an upgrade-rich system of information and technique.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why is ancient Australia important to the behavioral-modernity argument?

Behaviorally modern settlers may later have lost visible complexity when social conditions no longer sustained cumulative information.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What separates information preservation from information expansion?

Preservation reliably retains existing skills; expansion reliably retains incremental improvements produced through cultural learning and trial-and-error.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What three archaeological phases does Sterelny distinguish?

Required: long preservation; unstable expansion; reliable intergenerational retention of innovations.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] In what two senses did culture become cumulative between 300,000 and 150,000 years ago?

Required: more behavior guided by inherited information; stepwise improvement of particular technologies.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What three supports are required for sustained cultural accumulation?

Required: individual cognitive adaptation; adapted learning environments; demographic support.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why does group size protect cognitive capital?

Larger groups support specialization and redundancy, reducing accidental loss when experts die or learning is imperfect.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What does the repeated appearance and loss of innovations suggest?

At least one pillar—cognitive adaptation, learning environment, or demographic support—was unstable or absent.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What explanation of Neanderthal extinction does Sterelny prefer?

Environmental change producing negative feedback between shrinking demography and deteriorating cultural adaptation, not direct cognitive inferiority.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why is direct sapiens–Neanderthal competition insufficiently supported?

There is little direct evidence that the populations repeatedly occupied and competed within the same local areas.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why are refuges traps for culturally dependent populations?

Shrinking populations lose specialists, division of labor, and reliable transmission precisely when environmental adaptation becomes urgent.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What happens when Neanderthal bands fall below a critical size?

Hunting becomes less safe and effective, while composite-weapon skills and other cognitive capital become harder to preserve.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What is the Neanderthal fitness trap?

Adaptation to a declining local optimum from which a better strategy is separated by costly, initially disadvantageous transitions.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What made shifting from ambush to endurance hunting costly?

Required: new prey knowledge; new weapons skills; new clothing and technologies; few local models and high initial learning costs.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why could individuals not escape the fitness trap alone?

Successful transition required an entire interdependent group to acquire complementary skills while ecological zones changed abruptly.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What environmental change may have initiated cooperation–cognition coevolution?

Increasing seasonality around 1.8 million years ago made coordinated resource acquisition, provisioning, and defense more valuable.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How did ecological defense reduce free-rider pressure?

Predator defense generated broadly shared benefits and reusable coordination skills for other cooperative activities.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why does Sterelny reject magic-moment explanations of human uniqueness?

He favors interacting feedback loops rather than a single decisive adaptation.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Which two feedback loops drive the cooperation complex?

Required: technology–division of labor–cooperation; engineered developmental environments–social learning.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why do embodied-capital models extend childhood and add adolescence?

Complex foraging expertise requires prolonged cross-generational learning before individuals become maximally productive.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Which additional caregivers distinguish human reproduction from ape reproduction?

Fathers, older siblings, grandmothers, and other kin or non-kin alloparents frequently support children and mothers.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What is Sterelny’s central objection to strong grandmother-first accounts?

Reproductive cooperation was one leg of a broader tripod, not the foundational source of all cooperation.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why do grandmother theorists explain long childhood differently from Sterelny?

They tie it to large body size and delayed maturation; Sterelny emphasizes education for culturally complex foraging.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What life-history puzzle motivates the grandmother hypothesis?

Human women often stop reproducing long before death despite long lifespans and delayed maturation.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How does reduced adult mortality lengthen childhood in the hypothesis?

It favors larger adult bodies and delayed maturation, extending juvenile dependence.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What dry-season problem follows from delayed maturation?

Dependent children cannot extract difficult seasonal foods and must be provisioned or moved to less seasonal refuges.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] State the five components of the grandmother hypothesis.

Required: lower extrinsic mortality; seasonal habitat; older-women surpluses; more adults; female philopatry.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Which grandmother-hypothesis claim does Sterelny find credible?

Human longevity has deep evolutionary roots, and grandmothering plausibly contributed to the wider cooperation revolution.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why should grandmothering not automatically precede other alloparenting?

Aunts and fathers could also provision dependents; weaned children’s protein likely often came from male hunting.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What earlier capacities does grandmother provisioning presuppose?

Required: reduced risk through cooperation; ecological know-how; food extraction skills; temptation-resistant motivation to transfer valuable food.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What most plausibly reduced adult mortality before climatic stability?

Cooperation that improved predator defense and buffered variation in food supply.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why cannot grandmothering be the base case of cooperation?

It requires costly search, processing, self-control, and transfer capacities already supported by ecological, informational, and reproductive cooperation.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How could distributed caregiving shape infant psychology?

It selects for joint attention, joint action, and sensitivity to multiple caregivers—capacities relevant to theory of mind.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why may alloparental free riding be manageable?

Indirect reciprocity and reputation can generate substantial benefits from relatively low-cost assistance.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why does Sterelny call modern forager evidence a conservative test?

Recent technologies and diversified subsistence reduce dependence on the intensely cooperative patterns likely required earlier.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What was the broad-spectrum revolution?

Expansion from large-game reliance to small game, marine resources, and diversified foraging, increasing specialization and individual success.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] Why did projectile technology make cooperation more fragile?

It increased individual hunting success, making participation more optional and distribution more contestable.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What four conditions do Kaplan and colleagues associate with egalitarian cooperation?

Required: unmonopolizable resources; skilled adult work; complementary sex roles; small communities.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] How does the costly-signaling view interpret hunting?

As a hard-to-fake display of male quality yielding prestige and mating benefits rather than mainly food.

[B01 | Sterelny – Evolved Apprentice] What three caveats qualify Sterelny’s economic view of hunting?

Required: some hunting signals; hunting is not purely instrumental; even non-signaling hunts can provide cues.