Michael Tomasello - Cooperation and Cultural Learning

[Music] thank you I welcome you here in presence and everybody in zoom and my name is Marty Brinkmann I'm the executive director of the it's at BF and before we begin our members meeting on the panel discussion on the future of educational research this afternoon we will start with a talk by Michael tomasello whom I would like to welcome in particular uh first uh very briefly introductional remarks on his person Mike tomasello's research which has received many International Awards and honors addresses issues of cultural Evolution shared intentionality and attention Joshua communication from developmental comparative and cultural perspectives they are based on the extensive empirical studies of human and non-human primate communication and cooperation child language acquisition and deaf communication he is well known to us all from its many books which are published in Germany in Translation by zokamp Michael is professor at the department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Duke University in Durham in the states he is director emeritos it's a Max Planck Institute for every legendary anthropology in Leipzig and in Leipzig University honorary professor a war warm welcome to you Mike we are very excited about your lecture cooperation and cultural learning thank you very much foreign yes well thank you very much Malta um uh in my various in my 18 years or so in Leipzig I had many occasions to come to the hauu for various things um and uh both as a presenter and as a a a participant in workshops and whatnot and so um I missed Germany very much I have to tell you the uh the United States uh has some nice features but um yeah my friends and I have lived in Germany all just say well Germany's a better country but that's uh that's another story I guess any case um uh uh I'm very happy to be back if only virtually so let me share my screen with you yes and uh as you may know if you've not familiar with the research that I've been doing for the last 30 years or so I don't really study education directly but um I have um worked on things in young children mainly what I Toddlers and preschoolers that is before age five or six or so and there are a lot of those things that are definitely relevant to education more narrowly defined formal education and they are directly relevant to what we might call informal education so I just want to share some of that research with you uh today and actually at the end um I want to tell you a little bit about a theoretical paper that um a colleague of mine and I wrote that is is sort of a a direct uh directly relevant to the notion of the evolution of pedagogy and cultural learning all right just to set the evolutionary background um the the puzzle of humans is that uh we are very closely related we are a species of great ape and we are very closely related to the other great apes we separated from them only about five or six million years ago in evolutionary terms we are as close to the other Apes as lions are to tigers as Horses are to zebras and rats are to mice so those species are all distinct but cognitively speaking they all live in somewhat similar ways whereas humans live in a completely different way than do the other Apes we live with complex Technologies we live with complex symbol systems like languages and Arabic numerals and we live in with complex institutions like universities and governments so where did all these things come from when you look at the when you look at experiments comparing uh humans and great apes you can find differences I've spent my career looking for differences and establishing some but they're all relatively small and so I have taken the kind of formula a small difference that made a big difference and the small difference I I described many years ago as as leading to the possibility of the ratchet effect so let's assume I I assume these shadowy figures here are hunter-gatherers I couldn't find any uh clip art of hunter-gatherers and they're all using Stones as um hammers and then one genius invents that figures out that if you have to uh the stone uh to a stick it gets it gives it more power so some one genius say um made this discovery and then because humans are such great social Learners everybody got the new thing right away everybody got the new invention right away um and then skipping several tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years uh some individual admit some new thing and everybody gets that and then somebody invents that so I've sort of characterized this as humans pool their cognitive resources because any individual can innovate and then everybody gets it and that's not true of the other Apes uh Jane Goodall once made an observation she said we miss a lot of intelligent things that Apes do because they do them once off and we never get to see them that doesn't happen in humans some genius invents something and everybody learns it immediately so it spreads in the group so I call this the ratchet effect and the the sort of um Counterpoint to that is imagine a child who grew up on a desert island with no social interaction and no culture what would they invent on their own and the answer is not much so they would be very similar to great apes as adults uh maybe they'd have a little they'll be a little bit different but they wouldn't have cultural institutions and they wouldn't have Arabic numerals and they wouldn't have um uh you know complex Technologies on their own so um what the the huge difference in humans is that we have pooled our cognitive resources we put our heads together we've accumulated these things uh and this is all um based on basically a Cooperative attitude and skills for cooperating skills for putting our heads together either at the at the moment to collaborate or like the ratchet effect over time by exploiting what others have done in the past and more recently I have sort of proposed an evolutionary scenario where we start with ape-like creatures who are mainly competing with one another and we can talk about them as having individual intentionality and then before you get to culture there's an intermediate step of collaboration and there we don't have culture yet we don't have conventions we don't have Norms we don't have institutions we don't have a conventional language what we have is collaborating and communicating with gestures like pointing and and iconic gestures or signs and then and only then do we get to culture right and culture then scales up this collaboration um to um to the whole group so actually one way I characterize the evolution of my thinking over the last 30 years or so is that I used to think that what made humans come different from apes is culture and that's still true but I think there's a deeper answer than that and I think it's cooperation or collaboration because I think of culture as a special form a group level form of cooperation not just between individuals so so this is important because in ontogeny we're going to see a period in early ontogeny really from like even one-year-olds who are already collaborating and communicating with one another in ways that great apes don't and they are not yet active participants in their culture yes they live in a culture but they're not active participants in the collectivity of culture at one year old so in ontogeny joint intentionality or collaborating with others uh joint attention uh Cooperative communication like with pointing um is nine months and then Collective intentionality where they really understand cultural conventions and social norms and so forth is really going to be about three years of age so that's the um in my 2019 book called um becoming human I I provide a lot of evidence for big transitions in human cognitive ontogeny at around nine months uh and then again at around three months uh nine months is about something let's say shorthand is about cooperation and uh three years for shorthand let's say it's culture cooperation and then culture so the nine-month revolution which I've been uh talking about for some time I think we can see how they're different from apes in just a few little videos uh so two of these are home videos actually all of them are but two of them are me my daughter on her exact nine month birthday I decided since it was nine months I should have the sibling here with the camera filming uh what we did at nine months and Watch What Happens uh at nine months here I get very excited because she does something cool at nine months now watch where she's looking right she's not she rolls it back to me I go oh my gosh she rolled it back to me and now she's gonna roll it back all right and she's looking at my face see where she looks she looks up because she wants the reaction we're sharing this activity okay and now see she looks to the face so this is important because I'm going to show you a chimp in a second and they don't look to the face like this they're not really sharing the activity second is the famous showing behavior and and you'll and it's similar to some pointing things that you'll see in a minute and uh I want you to this happens very quickly so watch the showing this is a about a 14 or 16 month old baby that's it okay what's the motivation for that the motivation for that is just isn't this cool she's just he's just sharing it with his Dad he doesn't want the dad to do anything with it he's just saying isn't it cool now if you say well this is you know this is cute but you know does this apply to adult humans well yes it does this is basically us gossiping with one another saying did you see that game last night or did you hear who got divorced or something gossip is just sharing just for the sake of sharing information um and and this already starts at nine months of age and great apes don't do this and great apes don't collaborate in the same way that you just saw and here is the famous picture book reading joint attention so this is Mom also in the nine month birthday you can see the babies wearing the same clothes um and now watch the baby look so not only is she following the pointing but she looks to Mom to say yeah and then she points all right she's pointing also right and and so we get uh we get we get very excited about that because all right so this is what's happening at nine months collaboration where we're sharing communication where we're inviting someone to share attention with us and join attention to where we go back and forth communicating about these extra things now here's an ape this is a human raised chimpanzee at about three years of age and I tried to get some uh toys that were somewhat similar to those all right and then you see the ball right now she's trying to engage the chimp with the ball she's going to grab it she asked for it he doesn't give it to her she doesn't get it all right and now she's bouncing it inviting play and yes the chimp is interested in the ball but she's not interested in sharing it she's not interested in collaborating or showing or sharing or joint attention she's playing with it on her own so you notice no looks to the face of the uh human okay so she's having fun with the ball right now that was a quick clip now that now we're coming to a little scene with the book and this is uh the chimp's name is Annette and Annette is very interested in the pictures in the book she likes the pictures but she doesn't turn around and reference the human she's just looking at them on her own and in just a minute uh she's gonna pick up the book herself right first of all she's gonna she's gonna rake the book because again it's just a physical object and now we'll have a little quick now we have a quick new scene this is when she gets the book herself and again um she she actually likes to poke at the pictures a little bit herself but she doesn't share them or say you know turn around and look or uh or do anything that looks like joint attention now she gives you the ball and she plays with a ball on her own she plays with the other ball on her own but you notice just the complete different kind of Engagement the triadic engagement me you and the thing we're focused on that you see here in the nine month old that you don't see in the ape now adult Apes this is only a three-year-old here but adult apes are way more competent than infants they get their own food they fight with others they have sex they do all kinds of things but they don't have this sharing dimension so I think the shared intentionality schema I think what characterizes it cognitively is what I call the Dual level structure that is at the same time that we have a joint goal and Joint attention you have your role and your perspective on the situation and I have my role in my perspective we're building a tower together that's our joint goal you hold the block steady I put one on top you're focused on them from this side I'm focused on them from this side so this dual level dual level structure I believe is the um uh um is what is unique uh about the human way of thinking about things from nine months of age and what I want to do now is I want to show you a little bit more that what were those were just sort of impressionistic videos and I want to show you some more um systematic experiments on on these things sorry when I'm sharing the screen I can't see my clock I need I need something to make sure I'm on time here okay collaboration um here's an experiment by Felix varnikan um he graduated from uh the the other university in uh in Berlin um and uh you can see them um uh collaborate let's see kind of the little child 18 months old kind of teases but then she puts the block he puts the block down the right side and it makes noise and then part of the experiment is that now Felix is going to uh stop and the the kid says over here over here come on his hand is stuck for the moment he has to pull it out and you say come on do your part do your part okay so they're coordinating they're re-engaging to the goal they're coordinating with respect to a shared goal so they have the shared goal for the moment the adult steps out and stops interacting and the child communicates by gesturing to get the adult to come back in to the game chimps don't do this one of the things when you're going to see a couple of cases of chimpanzee collaboration in a moment and one of the things that stands out most when you're comparing to human children is no active communication to coordinate the collaboration to coordinate the roles this child is saying you're not doing your role come on if we're going to play this game you have to play your role chimps don't do that here's another this was actually a pilot subject again Felix and they were um this was a helping study so um you can see he puts away the magazines okay and now here comes some more again this was a study of helping oh he's having trouble and the 18 month old now for current purposes since we're talking about collaboration I want you to notice not just that the child is helping that's interesting but for purpose of collaboration watch she's gonna he's gonna tell Felix how to play his role he's going to say put them you put them there and watch he actually looks to the face he points they go there right so to play your role you have to put them there so the child is actually taking the perspective of the adult knowing what the adult's role is and I wouldn't call this teaching I'm going to come to some distinctions in a moment but showing the adult what to do by pointing where he needs to put the things with the magazines yeah okay so now oh gosh sorry so now when it comes to this third round the 18 month old is going to anticipate the whole thing and not wait till he has the problem but actually anticipate what he's going to do in his role and again tell him how to play his role they go there okay all right and even you know troubleshoot a little bit when the door closes she opens it and then initiate the closing this this might be my favorite video of all time because it shows first of all the child not knowing what's going on at all seeing what the adult does understanding it and following into it and helping and then from that one little interaction understanding both roles in this interaction and how they relate to one another and helping the other play his role by communicating and coordinating uh those roles this is an 18 month old barely talking and been walking for a few months and maybe just saying a few words so this is already completely different from what you would see um in Apes now you are going to see the Apes can coordinate in some situations so here they are this they have to collaborate by pulling they have to both pull on the Rope at the same time the Rope is threaded through some hooks so if you pull by yourself it just comes through right and you're going to see this was done for a TV thing so there's a I'll just let you listen to the voiceover I'm realizes you can't do it on his own and remove the page to release the other chip so this is actually for the TV they did two experiments in one so this was the first experiment really amazing the chimp knows he needs a partner and goes and opens the door for his partner I should say her okay right again okay so this is you can see they can collaborate but one reason is because we have solved the problem for them of how to divide up the spoils each of them has food on their end of the plank now we're going to put the food in the middle and see what happens in this situation the chimpanzees help each other will detention still help each other as humans would so now the food is in the middle this is the dominant chimp here closest to us the other one knows she's subordinate and is not very enthusiastic about the dominant chimpanzee grabs all the food so now the subordinate chip just quits on the next trial okay so they can't maintain collaboration and one reason is because they haven't they they are evolved to solve problems of competition over Resources by dominance as are a number of species now here we get our two little three-year-old uh German children in Akita they have four Gumi version in the middle of this thing here so you're only going to see the case where they're in the middle you're not going to see the case where they're separated um and I actually chose this one because one of the little boys acts a little like the first chimp but then you'll see there's a very different result in the end all right so this little boy goes over but he doesn't take them all and in fact he took two and then he put him back and now this little boy says meaning they're not on my side so he comes over to the middle and he actually starts to take all of them and the other little boy says no and so then he takes two and he he takes he they each take two yeah okay and they can do this all day long as as many gummy bears as their parents will let them have they can do this so they have a way they they generally divide them equally these are preschoolers but they know two and two is equal they know this is the same amount and they know that this is not the same amount and they almost always divide them equally um and um if not uh if one of them starts to take more as you saw here the little boy says no and that uh um uh and and just the saying no uh is enough to negotiate so that um we end up equal nonetheless okay so humans are involved to collaborate I think the context for this was collaborative foraging where they were going for resources and they've had a way of dividing the spoils fairly at the end now as I mentioned communication is a key part of this we communicate we communicate to coordinate um uh chimpanzees one of the things one of our my earliest research with chimpanzees was about their gestural communication their vocal communication which a lot of people take as maybe a precursor to language is not really the vocal communication is a very much hardwired and fixed and has very little flexibility um and so the gestural communication if you look at this little gesture here you can see that it's much more uh deliberate and intentional we call them intentional gestures and tension movements and the little probably three or four-year-old and Mom go for a walk together okay so they have this flexible gestures but notice the gestures are always imperative it's always what I want you to do so they gesture to get the other guy to play or to come for a walk or to groom or to have sex or whatever it is the gesture is about what I want you to do so there's always imperative and they're not just oh look isn't that interesting or declarative or indicative they're not just that and they're not triadic it's about you and me and what I want you to do it's not you and me sharing attention so you're you're gonna see that human gestures uh human children as early gestures this is a 16 month old have this triadic quality right so it's not me telling you what to do it's me showing you something me sharing attention to something and again she doesn't want the father to do anything um uh she just wants him to look and share attention um I should say that we have done an experiment of who's now a professor in Hamburg um and um um the study was that when you children pointed for you like this uh you could do one of several things and see if they were happy with the outcome and if you just looked at it they point and you look they aren't particularly satisfied what they want you to do is look at it and go oh that's great oh wow they want you to share your enthusiasm for it so that's the real goal of the pointing is joint attention is to sort of a clinical a word it's really shared interest shared enthusiasm about this thing and here's the showing again just to emphasize again that the that you know this is just to share that's all that all this these gestures uh in this modality triadic gestures referential to X something external for just a declarative purpose not imperative are unique to humans uh and here you see it in the in a in an iconic gesture uh or pantomime so this little child is 24 months old it doesn't iconic gestures aren't quite as natural as pointing uh children all over the world point at around the same age um uh quite reliably iconic gestures are a little more variable and what we did here was this little girl knows how to operate this uh Toy uh and we have a little Plexiglas so she can't actually touch it now and a puppet is struggling with it and not being able to um solve the puzzle and she and the child is going to show the um the puppet how to do it yeah and so again this has that uh showing quality but now we're getting in the direction of pedagogy or teaching right and this is something I've written about theoretically that pointing and showing uh um is probably the first uh manifestation of a pedagogical motive and in this case it's simply helping so helping uh and uh teaching and showing are all the same thing for an 18 to 24 month old I'm showing you how to do it I'm helping you do it um I'm teaching you how to do it they probably don't think of teaching as teaching per se but certainly showing and sharing is a step on the road uh in that direction um and even in community and even in comprehension um uh um people find this hard to believe but we have we have probably a half a dozen studies showing that chimps are can't even comprehend a declarative pointing gesture so here's a little 12 month old 12 months now so this is mainly pre-linguistic um and we're going to just look at a very simple case of comprehending declarative pointing she's going to hide the toy and then point it out to me he hides it he doesn't know where now she's like call his name to get him to look straight at her and then she's gonna and now and now you say well of course she showed him where it was she told him where it was but I tell you chimpanzees don't process this they don't understand this they don't understand that you're trying to help them find it that you're trying to show them where it is they don't understand that Cooperative dimension um so um uh um uh this uh I say chimpanzees but no other species does either accept domestic dogs and that's a different story but I'm gonna leave that aside um so um um uh so again um gergay and chibra whom you may have heard of in um a theory they call Natural pedagogy uh I've had disputes with them about what came first pedagogy or Community or this kind of Cooperative communication and my argument is that this is foundational to pedagogy here this just um just uh sharing information and showing things um and then ultimately you get to this kind of thing um and uh these are two little boys who've been taught two different rules about this game one of them is taught that this block goes on the the card with the same color and one has told this goes on the one with the same animal so you hear them talking about into the duck uh and I forget what the other animal is the Eagles hmm the arms no it's a duck against me [Music] um this is normative language so now once they get to three years of age it's not just doing it it's the right way to do it and so they can actually exchange perspectives with respect to the right way to do it gate so all right that's that's the that's that's that's a shift in their way of thinking that there's a right and a wrong way uh to do things and we have various lines of evidence I review them in my 2019 book on becoming human um uh for this kind of normative uh thinking that emerges at around three years of age now in the so that's all about collaborating and communicating it's about coordinating now what about actually transmitting information social cultural learning and so another thing that's unique to humans is teaching now we normally think of I showed you some things that are on the way to teaching even in these little toddlers but obviously the prototypical situation is an adult teaching a child and I want you to notice a couple of things here the first thing is that this um uh this is uh Tanya Benet uh she also got her degree at the other university in uh in Berlin and uh uh um she's going to show this child how to do something is she going to show it in an unusual way we know that if the child um um uh has it on her own she will just do like this with her hand and she'll turn it on you turn on the light by pressing it down but the LaTanya is going to do it with the ball and then she's going to do it a different way you're going to see the child copies the exact way she does it and now all right so she does it and now she looks to the child okay your turn right that's pedagogy she wants the child to learn it so this is not this is showing she's showing her how to do it but she's showing with a pedagogical motive I want you to learn it and when you learn it then you're done right and this this pedagogy motive I think is really important in cultural transmission because it stabilizes things the adults make sure that children uh learn things and that they do it a particular way now watch this child she's going to use the ball which is unusual she's definitely copying the adult and then she's going to look to her face like like is this right is this the way you do it see is that how you do it yes okay and actually Tanya gives her a quick nod okay there we are that's the way you do it okay now just to show um she's going to now do it a different way just to show you how flexible this learning is the child already has a successful way of doing it and now she says why she calls her name watch that's the pedagogical cue watch now she does it with her wrist and now the child does it with her wrist even though again that's not the normal way she would do it so this is an 18 month old baby already responding by doing things in a way that she wouldn't normally do them because pedagogy is telling her that's how to do them um in a study with uh comparing children and chimps in two different studies um we had them basically learn how to do something one way that's this hole on the left that says they were previously successful so they learned how to do it by putting a a ball into the hole on the left and they're successful doing it now they see three individuals putting a ball in the hole on the right so they have a successful way of doing it now they see others doing it a different way and The Chimps you can see the the results from the title of this paper the title of this paper is children conform to the behavior of others chimpanzees stick with what they know so this is a special case that some people have called strong Conformity because I already have a successful way of doing it and I have no reason to switch uh and so the chimps don't switch but children do quite often they switch about 60 of the time so they are these are three-year-olds so um uh um uh they actually conform change what they the way they do things to conform and here's you may have heard of over imitation it's a clever term used by Derek Lyons um uh this adult has told the child this is the five-year-old at Akita in Leipzig and she's telling her we're going to transfer this rice from this big bin over to this bucket and she says okay here's how you transfer the rice over to the bucket okay so she raises her hands over her head and then she gets the rice and does this and now this little five-year-old is going to do it she gets the little thing and does this okay all right so putting your hands over your head is obviously completely irrelevant and useless okay so we and others had shown conformity in in children like this before what Derek Lyons did was he just uh he did something very clever is after they did this he asked children about the raising their hands over their head uh it was that necessary and the vast majority of them say no it wasn't necessary and then why did you do it and he said well because that's the way it's done she showed me how to do it and that's the way it's done so pedagogy there's a famous paper by Liz bonowitz called The double-edged Sword of pedagogy that pedagogy can also have the effect of children uh uh copying mindlessly uh and uh even without thinking you know if it's a useful thing to do or not uh and so pedagogy can also have the consequence of making kids do things in one rigid way and not exploring other ways so um uh you know you need both I know these are two different very deep philosophies of Education whether the child the child the child LED exploratory type mode and the you know adult to child pedagogy transmission mode um you know I think you need both of them um and finally by three years old uh you're going to get um uh the the child being very upset when somebody does it the wrong way and you're going to see this normative language the the the the puppet is going to play a game called daxing and announcing he's daxing and he's going to do it the wrong way and you're going to see this three-year-old uh how upset he gets that she's doing it the wrong way yes [Music] thank you in the mornings I assume I don't need to translate and now here comes the teaching sorry oh gosh sorry uh and then the teaching comes it's gonna say because he's going to say I'm gonna say first you have is going to say first you have to take this you have to take this yeah here okay so we got the correcting him doing it wrong and showing him how to do it uh and there's this normative language Dusky Nick duskate gardening um so uh you know you you get the and and that child you saw in the previous one gate so this Norman language is a right and a wrong way to do it so that's three years old the before three years old they can show you how to do things but there's not a sense of the right and wrong way to do it um okay so we actually my colleague uh Carl O Madigan who is a philosopher um we were invited to write a paper for um uh this philosophical transactions of the Royal Society in uh just uh last year and uh it was about you can see the title over here on the left the emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture and so we wrote a paper called Sharon intentionally reason giving and the evolution of human culture which was meant to be a kind of an update on my cultural learning paper from 30 years ago um and um what we did was we tried to compare what um apes are doing what chimpanzees do and what human children do at different ages and try to reconstruct a kind of an evolution of uh of of pedagogy in some sense all right um and what you have on the y-axis is the degree and the extent of cumulative cultural transmission that is that um the degree to which a knowledgeable individual can transmit that faithfully and well to a less knowledgeable individual and let's sort of Step through these steps here okay so down here at the bottom and we actually did this evolutionary thing so we're calling these um australopithecines and those would be very early humans who are basically like apes they're basically another species of ape and what you see what you have here in in all cases of cultural transmission you have to have the invention in the first place and then you have to have the transmission so at the beginning you have individual Innovations or individual inventions and yet and there's conservative social learning and by that I mean what you saw with the Apes in those studies where if they haven't if they already have a way to do it they don't change they stick with what works now that doesn't mean they can't learn an innovation if it's a new area and they don't already have a successful way of doing it they might get a hint from another person doing it and so there might be some transmission but but it's conservative meaning that it won't lead to Innovation if the other individual already has a an established way of doing it all right so that's sort of ground zero um and I I think if you if you really want to map this onto human ontogeny I think uh human infants are don't imitate very much uh and not when they already have a successful way of doing something so there's really not much going on they say infants before a year old now a next step with early homo um uh so maybe a couple million years ago or one to two million years ago you still have individual Innovations but you now have more flexible social learning so I think that's the very first move and you saw that in the experiment where the young children uh even though they had a successful way of doing it they did it a new way if they saw a new interesting way now maybe they're just kind of conforming blindly maybe they um uh they see the virtues of the new way maybe they only switch if they see that the other way is better but in any case they're capable of abandoning their previously successful procedure and going to a new one so I think that's the first step is um is a loosening up of that now let's say 400 000 years ago homo heidelbergensis uh from the obviously from the uh from the fossils discovered near Heidelberg um and now you still have individual Innovations but you get demonstrative pedagogy and now that pedagogy may be slightly uh exaggerating here this is the kind of thing that I was showing you before where the child is going like this or they're pointing to what you need to do uh and I think toddlers are capable of this uh so they're showing you something they're showing you how to do it typically with gestures they don't have a conventional language yet now toddlers do have some language but that's a different story language has some special characteristics but in early humans I think there wouldn't have been a conventional language at this point they would be demonstrating by physically uh showing um and again you still have the flexible social learning there so um they would uh be able to um uh individuals would be able to see a new and better way of doing something even if they had um already they already had a way of of doing it successfully on their own I should say all of the theoretical analyzes of pedagogy assume I shouldn't say all all the ones I like assume that pedagogy cannot get off the ground without good social Learners right so the if if the if the if the sort of Foundation of pedagogy is that I show you something and you learn it then you have to be capable of learning it or the showing doesn't uh doesn't work um and then the next step and this will be early Homo sapiens so this is the modern humans but by modern I mean 150 000 years ago or something and now for the first time you get really collaborative Innovations where the Innovations are not just individuals but can be collaborative and you get normative pedagogy and normative Conformity and by that I mean it probably does take language and you have normative pedagogy where um that's what becomes important there is that the solutions are opaque so the individual can't really invent them on their own um and uh and sometimes they won't even be able to see the virtue of the new way of doing it so like that little girl who raised her arms you just do it the way others do it even if you don't see the USA in it right so that's normative Conformity I just conform because that's the way it's done that's the way you do it you know gate Zoe it goes like this right so um I think that is one of the key one of the things that characterizes the faster cultural transmission and the faster cultural evolution of modern humans is we have pedagogy normative pedagogy and normative conformity and then finally um it might even be uh the first civilizations so maybe you know 10 000 years ago or 8 000 years ago or something like that you have collaborative Innovations again but now you get what we call and this this is the whole reason we wrote this paper you can see the title is shared intentionality reason giving is that Cola Madigan and I had written a previous paper on the importance of Reason giving in cultural transmission so now I not only do I normatively teach you what to do so I know I say here it goes like this but I give you a reason for why we do it like this and again this almost certainly requires language you could we actually have a study with little kids where they give a Reason by pointing they say you know you know why are you doing it like this oh I see so in theory you can give reasons non-linguistically but probably language is critical here um and the reason giving um again enables you uh to do things when it's opaque so I said before the the step before I just do it the way you did it I raised my arms because that's the way it's done but now maybe I'm deciding well you know maybe you don't need to do that and then I say oh but you do need to do it you do need to raise your arm because when you raise your arms it opens the little uh the little cup in some way and you say oh I didn't know that oh Odyssey oh I see the little cup opens when you raise it so if I can give you reasons then that's going to help in the in the normative pedagogy and normative Conformity but it's also going to give me flexibility so now if things don't go the situation changes in some way and the way you showed me is not working anymore I know the reason why it worked previously and so I can troubleshoot and I can adapt and I can accommodate uh because I know the reason behind it so actually this was a main point of our paper was that everyone has focused on the previous step of normative pedagogy and normative Conformity which is kind of rigid uh it's the rigidity helps because it really helps in the cultural transmission but the reason giving gives it flexibility so you not only have powerful transmission it's a powerful cultural transmission that hooks up to the individual's cognitive skills uh so that they can understand why things work why this way of doing it is better and therefore that makes it possible to be more flexible if the situation changes so um just to start wrapping up here um one of the things that is characteristic of modern humans contemporary humans like our little two-year-old here um is that humans develop much more slowly than other Apes so um here is the brain development now human brains are roughly three times larger than those of other great apes three times larger but this graph corrects for that and says how long does it take you to get to your species adult brain size and what you can see is that um at uh two years of age human children are only at 50 percent of their human adult brain size and chimpanzees are already at 90 percent at 90 percent at two years of age already all right and chimpanzees are basically at their full human brain size at age four more or less and humans don't get there until age eight more or less so um actually it's it's adolescence before it's full you can see here that's about 90 at age eight so this is almost certainly an adaptation to cultural transmission this humans have so much to learn to be effective members if you're born in an Eskimo culture you have to learn how to make igloo build igloos if you're born in some other kind of hunter-gatherer culture you have to learn how to build canoes if you're born into a modern culture you learn how to read a a industrialized culture you need to learn how to read and write you have so much that you have to learn that we have to slow things down if they're going to learn it all before they become independent on their own so if you look at the age in which you can feed yourself chimpanzees as soon as they wean they're on their own once they wean at age three and a half or four they no longer get any help from parents they have to get to get their food on their own what age do these my children feed themselves they're actually studies of hunter-gatherer societies where it's age 16 before children before kids bring in more calories than they consume so they're not pulling their own weight till they're 16 in a hunter-gatherer culture and in the modern culture I don't know about you but my college age kids still have the credit card so um so they're not feeding themselves even in their 20s um and uh yes so so this slowing down of uh of ontogeny is clearly an adaptation to the huge amounts of cultural learning that has to go on and so um I I have adopted as my more General uh way of looking at um at human development I borrowed the Dual inheritance Theory from Boyd and Richardson and they want to point out what what what a lot of people uh of people in behavioral ecology who study a non-human species have argued uh uh um in the past is that individuals inherit their environments as much as they inherit their genes yes it's a different kind of inheritance but fish are born into water they inherit water they're born into water uh birds are born into a world of with has nests those nests are already in there before they uh before they are born when they're still in their eggs so they're inheriting their environment by being born into it and of course they inherit their genes biologically and the more classic sense of inheritance um and humans uh uh inherit a culture so they inherit I inherited the English language when I was growing up I inherited all the stuff around me in American uh culture and of course I inherited the genes uh of the human species and so ontogeny is dual inheritance it's bringing together my biological adaptations of my species with my cultural groups uh cultural products that I inherit I inherited you know tools for writing I inherit clocks I inherit computers I inherit all this stuff and I have a biological capacity for cultural learning and response to pedagogy that enables me to take advantage of these cultural things children with autism is an example that people bring up a lot to me they don't have the biological capacities for taking advantage of culture and engaging in cultural learning in the same way as do typically developing children so there is a there we can see when the biology is not sufficient that that you're not going to engage in this dual inheritance in the same way and of course if you were born on a desert island you'd have all the biological capacities but you wouldn't have a culture well you're not going to develop all these things either so you need both of them it's dual inheritance Theory you need your biological adaptations given to the species through Evolution and you need the culture of your cultural group into which you're born that shows you how to do things in a way that keeps you alive and thriving in your local environment and ontogeny is the Confluence of both of those a good example is language if you were born on a desert island you would not invent a language on your own there'd be nobody to talk to you why would you uh but of course we're biologically prepared not with a Chomsky and Universal grammar I should emphasize but we're biologically prepared to communicate with others uh and to conceptualize the world into categories and all these other ways which we're prepared for language so my biological preparation for communication and the uh cultural conventional language of my culture i inherit both of those and my task in ontogeny is to put them together by learning the language so to conclude human children are adapted for cooperation and culture in ways that other great apes are not and these adaptations for cooperation and culture are fundamental to the ways that humans communicate learn from one another and teach one another thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: IZBF Berlin

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Id: LCk2bkVZAJ8

Length: 54min 25sec (3265 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022