Boyd Robert
Arizona State University(USA).
Span J Psychol. 2017 Jan 9;19:E97. doi: 10.1017/sjp.2016.98.
The human species is an outlier in the natural world. Two million years ago our ancestors were a slightly odd apes. Now we occupy the largest ecological and geographical range of any species, have larger biomass, and process more energy. Usually, this transformation is explained in terms of cognitive ability-people are just smarter than all the rest. In this paper I argue that culture, our ability to learn from each other, and cooperation, our ability to make common cause with large groups of unrelated individuals are the real roots of human uniqueness, and sketch an evolutionary account of how these crucial abilities co-evolved with each other and with other features of our life histories.
人类在自然界中是个异类。两百万年前，我们的祖先只是稍微有点奇特的猿类。如今，我们占据了任何物种中最大的生态和地理范围，拥有更大的生物量，消耗更多的能量。通常，这种转变是用认知能力来解释的——人类就是比其他所有物种都更聪明。在本文中，我认为文化，即我们相互学习的能力，以及合作，即我们与大量无血缘关系的个体共同行动的能力，才是人类独特性的真正根源，并勾勒出一个进化过程，说明这些关键能力是如何相互共同进化以及与我们生活史的其他特征共同进化的。
