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DIE EVOLUTION DER MENSCHENSPRACHE - WIE AUS GESCHEITEN AFFEN DUMME MENSCHEN WURDEN Francisco Varela/ Humberto Maturana:
pg. 207 Keywords: - innate cognitive modules - cognitive skills of language and complex mathematics are like chess: they are the products of both historical and ontogenetic developments working with a variety of preexisting human cognitive skills, some of which are shared with other primates and some of which are uniquely human - my account for how a single human cognitive adaption could result in all of the many differences in human and nonhuman primate cognition is that this single adaptation made possible an evolutionarily new set of processes, that is, processes of sociogenesis - symbolic forms of communication to emerge - human cognitive ontogeny - imitation - The new and powerful forms of social cognition that result open up the cultural line of human development in the sense that children are now in a position to participate with other persons in joint attentional activities and so to understand and attempt to reproduce their intentional actions involving various kinds of material and symbolic artifacts. And, indeed, this tendency to imitatively learn the actions of other persons is a very strong one - Children's mastery of one very special cultural artifact-language-has transforming effects on their cognition. Language does not create new cognitive processes out of nothing, of course, but when children interact with other persons intersubjectively and adopt their communicative conventions, this social process creates a new form of cognitive representation - all, the tired old philosophical categories of nature versus nurture, innate versus learned, even genes versus environment are just 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 Robin Dunbar
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