Tennie Claudio, Call Josep, Tomasello Michael
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 Aug 27;364(1528):2405-15. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0052.
Some researchers have claimed that chimpanzee and human culture rest on homologous cognitive and learning mechanisms. While clearly there are some homologous mechanisms, we argue here that there are some different mechanisms at work as well. Chimpanzee cultural traditions represent behavioural biases of different populations, all within the species' existing cognitive repertoire (what we call the 'zone of latent solutions') that are generated by founder effects, individual learning and mostly product-oriented (rather than process-oriented) copying. Human culture, in contrast, has the distinctive characteristic that it accumulates modifications over time (what we call the 'ratchet effect'). This difference results from the facts that (i) human social learning is more oriented towards process than product and (ii) unique forms of human cooperation lead to active teaching, social motivations for conformity and normative sanctions against non-conformity. Together, these unique processes of social learning and cooperation lead to humans' unique form of cumulative cultural evolution.
一些研究人员声称，黑猩猩和人类文化依赖于同源的认知和学习机制。虽然显然存在一些同源机制，但我们在此认为，也有一些不同的机制在起作用。黑猩猩的文化传统代表了不同群体的行为偏好，所有这些都在该物种现有的认知范围内（我们称之为“潜在解决方案区”），这些偏好是由奠基者效应、个体学习以及主要以产品为导向（而非以过程为导向）的模仿产生的。相比之下，人类文化具有随着时间积累变化的独特特征（我们称之为“棘轮效应”）。这种差异源于以下事实：（i）人类社会学习更注重过程而非产品；（ii）人类独特的合作形式导致了主动教学、从众的社会动机以及对不从众行为的规范制裁。这些独特的社会学习和合作过程共同导致了人类独特的累积文化进化形式。
