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The evolution of cognition is the process by which life on Earth has gone from organisms with little to no cognitive function to a greatly varying display of cognitive function that we see in organisms today. Animal cognition is largely studied by observing behavior, which makes studying extinct species difficult.
Merlin Donald has claimed that human thought has progressed through three historic stages: the episodic, the mimetic, and the mythic stages, before reaching the current stage of theoretic thinking or culture. [2] According to him the final transition occurred with the invention of science in Ancient Greece. [3]
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept ...
In fact, humans have shown an enormous increase in brain size and intelligence over millions of years of evolution. [39] This is because humans have been referred to as an 'evolved cultural species'; one that has an unrivalled reliance on culturally transmitted knowledge due to the social environment around us. [40]
The theory of evolution by natural selection has also been adopted as a foundation for various ethical and social systems, such as social Darwinism, an idea that preceded the publication of The Origin of Species, popular in the 19th century, which holds that "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined in 1851 by Herbert Spencer, [1] 8 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution ...
Machery argues that while the idea that humans have an "essence" is a very old idea, the idea that all humans have a unified human nature is relatively modern; for a long time, people thought of humans as "us versus them" and thus did not think of human beings as a unified kind. [90]
Cultural evolutionary models may also shed light on why although evidence of behavioral modernity exists before 50,000 years ago, it is not expressed consistently until that point. With small population sizes, human groups would have been affected by demographic and cultural evolutionary forces that may not have allowed for complex cultural traits.
This disease attacks humans early in life. Thus humans who are resistant enjoy a higher chance of surviving and reproducing. While humans have evolved multiple defenses against malaria, sickle cell anemia—a condition in which red blood cells are deformed into sickle shapes, thereby restricting blood flow—is perhaps the best known. Sickle ...