The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

From the last chapter of Michael Tomasello's book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999):

We are, as Wittgenstein (1953) and Vygotsky (1978) saw so clearly, fish in the water of culture. As adults investigating and reflecting on human existence, we cannot take off our cultural glasses to view the world aculturally—and so compare it to the world as we perceive it culturally. Human beings live in a world of language, mathematics, money, government, education, science, and religion—cultural institutions composed of cultural conventions. The sound 'tree' stands for what it does because, and only because, we think it does; men and women are married because, and only because, we think they are; I can obtain a car in exchange for a piece of paper because, and only because, we think the paper is worth as much as the car (Searle, 1996). These kinds of social institutions and conventions are created and maintained by certain ways of interacting and thinking among groups of human beings. Other animal species simply do not interact and think in these ways.

But the human cultural world is not thereby free of the biological world, and indeed human culture is a very recent evolutionary product, having existed in all likelihood for only a few hundred thousand years. The fact that culture is a product of evolution does not mean that each one of its specific features has its own dedicated genetic underpinnings; there has not been enough time for that. A more plausible scenario is that all human cultural institutions rest on the biologically inherited social-cognitive ability of all human individuals to create and use social conventions and symbols. However, these social conventions and symbols do not wave a magic wand and turn nonhuman primate cognition into human cognition on the spot. Modern adult cognition of the human kind is the product not only of genetic events taking over many millions of years in evolutionary time but also of cultural events taking place over many tens of thousands of years in historical time and personal events taking place over many tens of thousands of hours in ontogenetic time. The desire to avoid the hard empirical work necessary to follow out these intermediate processes that occur between the human genotype and phenotype is a strong one, and it leaeds to the kinds of facile genetic determinism that pervade large parts of the social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences today. Genes are an essential part of the story of human cognitive evolution, perhaps even from some points of view the most important part of the story since they are what got the ball rolling. But they are not the whole story, and the ball has rolled a long way since it got started. In all, the tired old philosophical categories of nature versus nurture, innate versus learned, and even genes versus environment are jut not up to the task—they are too static and categorical—if our goal is a dynamic Darwinian account of human cognition in its evolutionary, historical, and ontogenetic dimensions.

 

—oOo—