Title: Thought in a Hostile World - the Evolution of Human Cognition
Author: Sterelny, Kim
Published by: Blackwell Publishing
Year: 2003
First published: Blackwell Publishing, 2003
Date reviewed: 02.06
ISBN: 0-631-18887-8

If you are interested in the questions central to this book – how and why human minds have evolved – but are not closely in touch with the latest academic and scientific thinking on the subject, be warned: this book is not written for the layman. One back-cover reviewer calls it “densely, but elegantly, written”, and confessing myself to be indeed a layman I have to say it takes a bit of getting into. The language is technical, specialised, and at times fairly impenetrable, but with perseverance you can start to become familiar with the vocabulary and follow Sterelny’s arguments.

His main proposition is that human thought evolved in response to a rapidly changing environment, both physical and social, in which things were not always as they seemed. Competitors, enemies, and resources hide, lie, and pretend to be other than what they are. The ability to respond flexibly to these uncertain signals became advantageous and so was selected for under evolutionary pressure. (This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of Sterelny’s thesis.)

Work in this field over the past few decades has been dominated by linguistics and by evolutionary psychology, with linguistics developing into various theories and hypotheses about modularity of human minds. Sterelny examines these ideas critically in the light of his own theories, rejecting some and accepting others either as useful bases or at least containing an element of truth, but his synoptic view of the development of human thought is not built on either of these foundations.

The building blocks he identifies are, I think, these. First there was – and still is in many organisms – only a simple and direct link between stimuli and responses. Understanding and choice play no part: stimulus and response are “closely coupled”. The first significant step was decoupling, where an organism is able to exhibit a range of behaviours when it becomes aware of a particular stimulus. The greater the breadth of the organism’s response repertoire, the more adaptive and potentially successful its behaviour becomes.

Then there is the importance of social behaviour. Humans are undeniably social creatures, and Sterelny hypothesises about the mechanisms by which social co-operation may have developed. For an individual to be successful in a social group requires it to be able to interpret the behaviour of others in the group – behaviour which may or may not be what it seems. He sees group selection (the process whereby groups rather than individuals are more or less successful in evolutionary terms) as playing an important, even vital, role.

Possibly the most powerful adaptation shown by humans is “niche creation”. This is the ability of humans to modify their environment to their own advantage. Although some other organisms have some ability in this area, none come close to humans in this respect. This is not just the ability to use sophisticated tools to modify the environment, but also the capability of true imitation – the difference between Douglas Adams’ “keep banging the rocks together” and an understanding by the observer of what the observed is setting out to do. Imitation fosters learning, which is the way in which better ways of doing things can be transmitted both down generations and sideways within a generation. “Veterans of this industry” (Sterelny’s phrase) apparently know this process as Tomasello’s Ratchet. Language, obviously, is a vital component of this complex behaviour.

Sterelny says at the outset that his “whole discussion is both tentative and gappy: the main aim is to foreground issues and ideas that have been underplayed in current debates”. While I am not sure if he is referring to all or just part of his project, it probably doesn’t matter. In developing his own arguments he reviews the whole range of current work in this field. The book is rich in references and impressively up-to-date: in more than 16 pages of references in the index, few entries are earlier than 1990 and quite a few are “forthcoming”. Anyone wanting to go further could easily draw up a reading list from these sources. As for me, now I’ve got to the end and feel more at home with the language and the concepts I think I’ll go back and read it again.