All Souls College and Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4AL, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2012 Aug 5;367(1599):2091-6. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0111.
Humans are animals that specialize in thinking and knowing, and our extraordinary cognitive abilities have transformed every aspect of our lives. In contrast to our chimpanzee cousins and Stone Age ancestors, we are complex political, economic, scientific and artistic creatures, living in a vast range of habitats, many of which are our own creation. Research on the evolution of human cognition asks what types of thinking make us such peculiar animals, and how they have been generated by evolutionary processes. New research in this field looks deeper into the evolutionary history of human cognition, and adopts a more multi-disciplinary approach than earlier 'Evolutionary Psychology'. It is informed by comparisons between humans and a range of primate and non-primate species, and integrates findings from anthropology, archaeology, economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. Using these methods, recent research reveals profound commonalities, as well striking differences, between human and non-human minds, and suggests that the evolution of human cognition has been much more gradual and incremental than previously assumed. It accords crucial roles to cultural evolution, techno-social co-evolution and gene-culture co-evolution. These have produced domain-general developmental processes with extraordinary power-power that makes human cognition, and human lives, unique.
人类是擅长思考和认知的动物，我们非凡的认知能力改变了生活的方方面面。与我们的黑猩猩表亲及石器时代祖先不同，人类是复杂的政治、经济、科学和艺术生物，生活在范围广泛的栖息地中，其中许多是我们自己创造的。人类认知进化研究探讨了哪些类型的思维使我们成为如此特别的动物，以及它们是如何通过进化过程产生的。该领域的新研究比早期的“进化心理学”更深入地探讨了人类认知的进化历史，采用了更加多学科的方法。它借鉴了人类与一系列灵长类和非灵长类物种之间的比较，并整合了来自人类学、考古学、经济学、进化生物学、神经科学、哲学和心理学的发现。使用这些方法，最近的研究揭示了人类和非人类思维之间存在深刻的共性和显著差异，并表明人类认知的进化比之前假设的要更加渐进和渐进。它赋予文化进化、技术社会共同进化和基因文化共同进化以关键作用。这些产生了具有非凡力量的领域通用发展过程——这种力量使人类认知和人类生活变得独一无二。
