Evolution of thought

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The evolution of thought or in a broader sense evolution of cognition describes a way of thinking of the ancestors of modern apes on the early humans to humans . The subject was already discussed by Darwin in 1871. He emphasizes the gradual, not fundamental, differences between the intellectual abilities of humans and animals. Today it is undisputed that thinking has an evolutionary origin that can be explored by various disciplines. According to Tomasello, the evolution of thought proceeds from largely individualistic, competitive thinking in the great apes to distinctly cooperative forms of thinking in humans. The theory of the social brain points to a connection between the size of the brain and the maximum group size of socially living species. Social conditions with ever greater demands on intellectual performance in growing groups drive brain growth in the course of evolution and thus also the increasingly complex forms of thought in the history of the social life of humans and their ancestors, not the other way around.

In addition to insights into the cognitive evolution of humans, new insights into evolutionary thinking abilities in animals are increasingly being gained. Birds are characterized by a different brain architecture from other vertebrates. In particular, their forebrain with higher-value functions is convergent , i.e. independently evolved. Although they do not have a neocortex , with an alternative structure of the forebrain they developed highly developed cognitive abilities that were previously not thought possible. This includes diverse tool use, causal and analog trains of thought, self-recognition and other skills. This is especially true for corvids , pigeons and parrots . The eusocial bees , which evolved late in the class of insects, are capable of individual thinking, as Randolf Menzel in particular analyzed. Their large mushroom body , an analog part of the vertebrate neocortex, is involved in color memory, olfactory map, second-order learning, contextual learning and symbolic learning with a “quasi-episodic” memory. Octopuses also show a convergent brain development compared to vertebrates with similar structures that are fundamental for learning. Their mental abilities are comparable to those of many mammals.

Science history background

Darwin's reflections on the origin of thought

Charles Darwin expresses himself in his book The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection (1871) in detail on the evolutionary origin of the mental faculties of man and animals. He says in it that we could not have any conviction that our high mental faculties would have developed gradually if our mental faculties were fundamentally different from those of animals. He sees “no fundamental difference between humans and higher mammals” in mental abilities. In the following, he discusses a variety of examples from the animal world. In particular, he goes into attention, memory, imagination and reason. He also takes a position on imitation, comparison and choice and emphasizes their various degrees. He argues that we can infer from the side effects of an action whether it arises from instinct, from the mind, or from a mere association of ideas. He encounters critical views of his contemporaries on the evolution of thought individually. This includes the notion that no animal possesses the ability to abstract, can form general terms, has self-confidence, uses tools or has language. Darwin invalidates all of these views. He concludes with the remark: If the abilities mentioned, which he sees very differently in animals, are capable of training (evolution), then it is not unlikely that the most complex abilities such as abstraction and self-confidence and others will develop from the simpler ones to have. When asked why the monkey's intellect is not as developed as that of humans, he replies that it is simply ignorance of the successive stages of development that prevents more precise answers to be given. In summary, it is Darwin's intention to present the differences in intellectual abilities between humans and animals as gradual rather than fundamental.

Scientific viewpoints at the beginning of the 21st century

According to Darwin, towards the end of the 19th century psychologists began to develop concepts that humans are a product of their evolutionary past not only in terms of their physical form, but also in terms of their behavior and culture. The behaviorism interrupts among other concepts that mindset to the mid-20th century. After that, the mind could not be an object of scientific discussion because it could not be observed directly. The archeology has long been arrested this principle, closing many questions for the study of human evolution from about feelings and intentions. At the beginning of the 21st century there are hardly any doubts that humans are a legitimate research interest for anthropologists, biologists and psychologists, not only in their actions and their cultural embedding, but also in their thinking, who today are predominantly guided by the conviction, that in addition to our cultural achievements, our intellectual abilities can also be explained on the basis of our phylogeny . The focus is on two central evolution-related theses. First, evolution through natural selection and adaptation is the only known natural process that can produce a complex structure like the human mind. The characteristics of thought that we have today are adaptive because they were beneficial to our ancestors in the natural selection process ( evolutionary epistemology ). Second: evolution is long term. Our minds are therefore shaped by the long-term challenges that humans have been exposed to in their natural environment. During the greatest evolutionary stretch of time, our hominin ancestors were hunters and gatherers . In the second half of the 20th century, the inclusion of human culture and the idea of cooperation became increasingly important pillars in research into the evolution of human behavior. The framework of the synthetic theory of evolution , which was long limited to the survival of the fittest , was thereby expanded.

Prehuman, earlyhuman and human thought development

The concept of shared intentionality from Tomasello

The anthropologist and behavioral researcher Michael Tomasello presents the evolution of thinking as the path from the non-human apes to the early humans to today's humans. Three stages of the evolution of thinking are distinguished: individual intentionality in the great apes and the two forms under the umbrella term shared intentionality common intentionality in early humans and collective intentionality in modern humans. Intentionality means the self-regulating, cognitive way of dealing with things. In summary, according to Tomasello, we can say that modern humans think by means of shared intentionality in order to cooperate, while great apes behave largely individually. Here, in his opinion, the language that emerged on the way through symbolic pointing gestures is the keystone of human cognition and thinking and not its foundation.

Individual intentionality of the great apes

Chimpanzees can think.

Great apes can think from this perspective, in the form of individual intentionality. You have three key competencies in thinking: firstly, schematic , cognitive representation. For example, you can use it to introduce yourself and know that a leopard can climb trees. With a second key skill, great apes can draw non-verbal, causal and intentional conclusions. A well-known experiment in this area is hiding objects behind a screen. The monkey expects to find it there. When he sees it being taken away and replaced with another, he doesn't expect to find it behind the screen. The fact that great apes can understand the goals of other monkeys is also causal inference. As a third key competence, great apes can observe their behavior themselves, or they have the ability to monitor the result and also the elements of a decision-making process. For example, if they do not have sufficient information, they know that they can make an appropriate behavioral decision. According to Tomasello, this first form, individual intentionality and instrumental rationality, applies to non-human great apes for the period after today's human being split off from the chimpanzee ancestors to the australopithecines . Such beings are primarily competitive. Thinking always takes place in the service of competition. Without language skills, great apes can cognitively represent the world and, in a sense, seem to know what they are doing while they are doing it. A discontinuity in the sense that only humans can think and that only through language and that animals cannot think is no longer tenable.

Evans' generality condition can be used as an evaluation criterion for whether an animal can think. According to this definition, thinking is when every potential subject of a thought can be combined with different predicates and likewise every potential predicate with different subjects. Both can be achieved linguistically and non-linguistically. An example of a thought subject with different predicates is the idea that an ape thinks that a leopard can run fast, climb a tree, and hunt and eat monkeys. In the second case, a monkey can know that leopards can climb trees, but so can snakes and small monkeys. According to this criterion, which only addresses the ability to represent, but does not use the ability to draw conclusions and reflect on one's own actions as cited for great apes, it can at least partially apply to great apes that they can think.

Common intentionality of early humans

The manufacture of stone tools in precise individual steps (here: Levallois technique ) was only possible through a high level of cooperation early on and already required the inheritance of jointly acquired, accumulated knowledge.

Early humans and humans developed a second and third level of more complex cognition, which is summarized as shared intentionality . This includes common intentionality and collective intentionality .

With common intentionality of early humans who do not yet have a conventional language, there are common activities, such as foraging for food, with common attention and common goals, a we-intentionality , but with individual roles and perspectives. Communication takes place through natural, iconic gestures of pointing. The early humans transform the individual intentionality of the great apes through cooperation into common intentionality. The cooperation partners become mutually dependent. The survival of the individual depends on how the cooperation partner assesses him. The communication is strongly related to me and you and not yet related to a larger, anonymous group. One participant has an interest in helping the other play their part. To do this, he has to provide him with information that is of interest to him. The conclusions of such thinking are now no longer individual but socially recursive; H. the intentions of the partner are reflected alternately and repeatedly. Great apes are not capable of the cooperative way of thinking described here. They do not make joint decisions and consequently cannot reflect on them together.

Collective intentionality of man

Planning, development, construction and operation of a highly technical system like the Hubble telescope are evolutionarily possible for humans on the basis of cross-generational, cumulative knowledge acquisition and information transfer. Thousands of people can be cooperatively involved in a single project. Animals cannot do that in this form.

In the highest level, collective intentionality , cooperative thinking has finally evolved in such a way that it happens in a group-oriented culture. Here is the accumulated transfer of knowledge and skills over generations. In contrast to humans, great apes do not know the motive to inform others about things or to share information with them. This motif leads to the so-called jacking effect in human thinking . With the jack-up effect, successful cultural adaptations to local conditions are retained across generations, unsuccessful attempts die out. This way of thinking can result in stable, cumulative cultural evolution. Modern humans have a stronger jacking effect (e.g. technical evolution ) than early humans and great apes.

Within the framework of collective intentionality and socio-cultural thinking, people create objective norms for the group with the help of linguistic thinking. These norms can be reconsidered and justified by any individual in order to convince others of them. The group acquires normative conventions and standards and is able to reflect them with objectified criteria. Shared intentionality is seen as a key innovation or a system change in evolution. In cultural evolution, the group can then itself become a unit of natural selection ( group selection ).

As a further evolutionary ability, humans are the only living beings to have a pronounced episodic memory , which enables them to clearly assign past, present and future thinking and to differentiate between them. We can do mental time travel in both directions, combined with the ability to design nested mental scenarios, e.g. B. to plan and carry out complex technical or artistic projects.

Social brain theory

Mentalization

Representations (here in Aztec ) of other, especially not present, people testify to evolutionarily high intellectual performance as an element of complex social life in larger groups. Artifacts carry the artist's thoughts on other people. Such representations did not appear until Homo sapiens.
Complex mystical narratives with many participants, such as on this Mayan illustration with gods, animals and fantasy figures, require a high level of mentalization. It was only on this basis that religions could evolve to cope with social tensions in increasingly larger groups of people.
Laughter is one of several mental forms of coping with stress in increasing group sizes in the course of human evolution

The social brain theory claims that the social environment and group size of a species promotes the evolution of its brain in the form of increasing brain size and therefore in the form of thinking. It is therefore not the other way round, that brain growth has increased and as a result humans have been able to live and act in larger groups in evolutionary terms. Rather, climate-related increased selection pressure in the last 2 million years led to the compulsion of increasing group sizes with evolutionary advantages, which in turn resulted in larger brains with more complex thinking skills being selected. The brain size is thus a constraint for the group size of a species.

The change in thinking that followed this theory is represented by mentalization . Mentalization is the ability to understand and suspect what another is thinking or the ability to recognize that others may have views. This has been called the Theory of Mind . Mentalization is more than empathy and means, in addition to feeling what the other is feeling, the cognitive understanding of the other. Gamble, Gowlett, and Dunbar propose six orders of "intentionality". Brain sizes are assigned to average group sizes for possible lifestyles of the individuals by linear regression . The Dunbar number expresses that in the history of human evolution, 150 individuals formed the average group size from a brain size of more than 900 cm³, and that this remained stable over a long evolutionary period. The levels of order according to Gamble, Gowlett and Dunbar are one of the models of how thinking could have evolved.

First order intentionality in chimpanzees and Ardipithecus

According to Gamble, Gowlett and Dunbar, mentalization of the first order is not a theory of mind, i.e. not a spiritual recognition of the other as other. It applies to brain sizes smaller than 400 cm³ and thus to chimpanzees or the Ardipithecus ramidus and the Ardipithecus kadabba . The group size in which such individuals' intellectual capacities could move could not exceed 30 to 50 individuals. Communicative thinking takes place here in a socially simple form.

Second order intentionality in the Australopithecines

Second-order intentionality, according to Gamble, Gowlett and Dunbar, is what the Theory of Mind addresses. You can realize that someone else like yourself has a mind and believes things that you believe in yourself. (“I believe something about what you believe.”) This second order is assigned to a brain size of 400–900 cm³, which applies to the australopithecins . They are believed to have been able to live in groups of 60 to 100 individuals. The second order requires self-awareness . The fact is that some animals are self-aware, including chimpanzees, elephants, and corvids. Whether language is also a necessary condition at this level is the subject of discussion. However, there is no archaeological evidence of possible group sizes.

Third order intentionality in early humans

The third order of intentionality according to Gamble, Gowlett and Dunbar is expressed in the example sentence: "You believe something about what she believes, but I don't believe it." This form of thinking is assigned to hominins who have a brain with more than 900 cm³, these are Homo habilis , Homo rudolfensis and Homo ergaster or Homo erectus . From this order group sizes from 100 to 150 are possible (Dunbar number). Evidence for larger groups exists almost only in Homo sapiens. The use of symbols and language emerge in this order. However, language is certainly not comparable with today's languages ​​and their syntax and semantics. The associated culture is the Acheuléen culture of stone tools . Hand axes already represent mental achievements with a high demand for a cooperative exchange of ideas between several individuals. Information had to be passed on. Tools are socially determined. The mental performances are a selective consequence of the more demanding, complex social life.

Fourth order intentionality in Neanderthals

Homo heidelbergensis , Neanderthals and other early humans are assigned the fourth order in their thinking by Gamble, Gowlett and Dunbar. This in turn can be concluded from the size of the brain. If they had a language, it cannot have been a complete language in the modern sense either. The fourth order intentionality has placed a considerable restraint on mentalization. The idea of ​​a distinctly spiritual, religious world is not yet possible on this level. There are known cases in which Neanderthals cared for and cared for the injured. They are examples of cooperation and interpersonal solidarity. They require high mentalization skills.

Fifth and sixth order intentionality in Homo sapiens

According to Gamble, Gowlett and Dunbar, a fifth and sixth form is only common to anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ). Complicated myths and stories can be formed here. They contain real and imaginary worlds with real and fantasy figures. This also includes religions that only appear on this level. Religions are parallel worlds to daily life. In addition to imagining such a world, you have to be able to talk to others about it. This presupposes an “I”, a “you”, at least one third person and one or more spirits in the spiritual world. Complex symbol use is at the upper end of the order. In this level of mentalization, people have learned to think of other people who are not physically present but rather absent. This can also affect the deceased who are thought of and who are buried . Ideas can be guided by the thoughts of others. Absent people play a role in social behavior. People also play a symbolic role in artefacts , in their shape, taste or smell. One speaks here of decentralized cognition . Hominins with such mentalization skills had social feelings like guilt, shame, pride, pity. They are only possible when one has opinions about the opinions of others.

According to the theory of the social brain, evolutionary counter-reactions arose in higher mentalization levels in order to be able to compensate and withstand the increasing stress levels in larger groups. Chimpanzees are still able to permanently high emotional tension in the group with mutual crawl to cope (grooming), resulting endorphin leads -Ausschüttung. At higher levels of mentalization, however, new methods of stress reduction had to evolve in order to be able to guarantee permanent cohesion in the group. In addition to religions, this also includes laughter and music , and later also sports . All of these forms of behavior ensure the release of endorphins and thus the necessary reduction in stress.

criticism

Thomas Nagel questions the unified explanation of a physical view of the world, which includes the theory of evolution, and an explanation of the spirit . The emergence of the mind, consciousness and reason is unexplained. This does not apply exclusively to human evolution. According to Nagel, consciousness has an irreducibly subjective character. He calls the program that shapes our current scientific worldview reductionist. It explains “the mental nature of complex organisms entirely from the point of view of the properties of their elementary components”. The mental cannot be reduced to the physical in this world view, that is, the mental components of which we are composed are not merely physical. Nagel emphasizes that a worldview that can resolve and explain this incompatibility must represent a radical change. According to Nagel, principles of self-organization are by no means sufficient to explain the mind. Rather, consciousness is something completely new that evolutionary theory does not explain.

While Nagel sees the emergence of spirit in evolution as unanswered, evolutionary adaptations to an already existing mental world, as described in the concept of shared intentionality or in the theory of the social brain , are not necessarily addressed by Nagel. Such evolution is possible through epigenetic inheritance with imitation and learning. The origins and consistency of such adaptations with physics are, however, a mystery according to Nagel from the point of view of today's scientific knowledge.

Birds brain and cognition

A magpie recognizes a mark on its neck in front of a mirror and tries to remove it. After successful removal, she looks at herself in the mirror.
A New Caledonian crow shows sequential tool use. Correct sequence of actions: 1. Call up a 20 cm long tool (toolbox on the left). 2. Using a 25 cm long tool (center toolbox) to access the food (top). Observed behavior: Uék picks up the longer of two tools lying freely in the middle in order to get to the 20 cm long tool. She then uses the 8 "long tool to get to the 8" long tool, first from the roof of the toolbox, then from the front. As soon as she gets hold of the 25 cm long tool, she immediately puts it in the feed box above and fetches the feed.

Convergent evolution of the avian brain

At the beginning of the 20th century, the comparative anatomist Ludwig Edinger ascribed largely lower functions to the bird's brain . Since the bird's brain lacks stratification and furrowing, as is the case in the vertebrate brain, higher cognitive performance was viewed as not possible in principle. The prevailing opinion for a hundred years was that birds do not have a cortex , so they cannot think.

Recent findings into the structure of the bird's brain and a large number of studies on the cognitive abilities of birds have led to a revised picture of both their brain structure and the thought performance of birds since the beginning of the new millennium. The abilities described had previously only been thought possible in humans and primates.

The avian brain is more densely packed in terms of neurons than the human brain. This is cited as a justification that high cognitive performance can be achieved in the space of less than ten grams.

The evolution of the forebrain and the cognitive performance of birds and other vertebrates have been convergent , i.e. independent , for about 300 million years . Because of this long period of time, the brain structures differ significantly. According to the definition of 2004, the predominant part of the forebrain of birds is not the striatum , as originally thought, but the pallium ( cerebral cortex ). There the nidopallium caudolaterale corresponds to the neocortex of the vertebrates . It has allometric proportions comparable to those of the neocortex.

Selected intellectual abilities of birds

The services that birds can provide on the basis outlined include those of corvids , pigeons , parrots and others. Exceptional skills in making and using a variety of tools have been observed among the corvids, particularly the New Caledonian crows . You can u. a. Forming wires into functional tools or making another from one tool. You solve complex tasks that require causal and analog lines of thought. These performances are the same as those of monkeys. Among the corvids, the magpie can recognize itself in the mirror ( mirror test ) and shows an understanding of object permanence, similar to humans. Other corvids like the blue jay have an episodic memory. Ravens and crows demonstrate behavior that is similar to the Theory of Mind . In doing so, they demonstrate highly developed skills in causal reasoning in connection with the use of tools. Pigeons can memorize up to 725 different visual patterns or sequence patterns using transitive inferent logic .

In summary, a highly developed repertoire of cognitive abilities such as selective and sustained attention, categorization, episodic memory, spatial and social cognition, tool use, problem solving and self-recognition could converge primarily through different growth in the size of the structures of the forebrain, i.e. evolve independently without a common ancestor.

Memory performance and learning ability of the bees

The bee brain in evolution

Eusocial bees are among the most highly developed species of insects . This applies to their sensory and motor skills, their intelligence in social organization and their ability to learn. Bees also have a simple communication system based on attention stimuli and can even communicate with a system of symbols. In the line of the invertebrates ( primordial mouths ), the bees' brain has thus achieved a uniquely highly developed form, structure and capabilities comparable to that of humans in the line of vertebrates ( new mouths ). In both lines, all species (with the exception of sponges ) have a central brain and there the same principle of conveying information by means of neurons and synapses . The small absolute size of the bee brain of around one cubic millimeter and a weight of 1 mg is no reason why the above-mentioned services cannot be achieved, since among other things the neurons in the bee brain are more densely packed and the conduction paths are shorter and thus the transmission speed between them is faster.

Eusocial female bees have the largest brains of all insects in terms of body weight. The female bee's brain must be larger than that of the male and also that of the queen, as it can do much more. The mushroom body, the brain part that is analogous to the neocortex of vertebrates, is particularly large and additionally structured in them, while it is not very pronounced in flies, grasshoppers and many other insects. In honey bees, the mushroom body contains a third of their neurons, which is significantly more than in solitary bees.

Color memory

The ability of bees to retain information about color-related rewards for a period of several days after brief exposure to a colored background indicates a well-developed color memory. The continuity of flowers in bees requires a long-term memory.

Scent card

Bees are capable of learning . As has been proven with imaging processes ( calcium imaging ), they have a scent map in the brain. The scent map allows the bees to smell the flowers spatially so that they can find the nectar quickly and precisely, but also for the scent orientation in the trunk. Not only can you identify a wide variety of scents, but you can also learn and reliably remember new scents. The ability to learn new scents that are different in a single carbon and also foreign to them, such as unloved fatty acids, speaks against genetically pre-programmed scent identification, as was found for Drosophila in connection with pheromones . Not only the protocerebrum , which controls reflex-like behavioral reactions to smells, is responsible for the bees' memory performance, but also the antenna lobe and the mushroom body . The former is the evolutionary equivalent of the olfactory bulb , the latter to the cerebral cortex of vertebrates and thus also of humans. The fact that scent information as well as information from the visual and tactile center is always passed on to the mushroom body responsible for higher tasks is an indication that its further processing is of a complex nature and not solely genetically fixed.

Second order learning

Bees can learn a scent without being directly rewarded for it. This happens on the way that a bee z. B. is rewarded for a rose scent. As a result, immediately before the rose scent, she is given another scent, such as a clove scent, for which she is not rewarded. In this way she learns the scent of cloves ( higher-order conditioning ). The same learning effect plays a major role in humans.

Contextual learning

Bees can learn contextually. That is, they learn that they are only rewarded with a certain color and a certain fragrance. The context switches on the attention which, depending on the context, leads to an increased response in behavior and in the neurons after one to 3 days. The mushroom body receives an exact picture of what was learned under which circumstances.

Symbolic recognition, distance measurement, “quasi-episodic” memory

Bees could also recognize symbolic images (symmetrical and asymmetrical figures) if they were rewarded for this. This means that they can distinguish between categories and incorporate knowledge about them into their behavior. Furthermore, they can recognize facial patterns and learn by observing and exploring ( exploratory behavior ) without being rewarded. When it comes to spatial orientation, bees have a relative and absolute distance measurement and a cognitive map of their environment with which they can store a network of landmarks in their geometric relationship. Ultimately, it can be assumed from the experiments made for this and other experiments that bees have an animal equivalent to an episodic, so-called “quasi-episodic” memory for a “what-when-where?”. This enables them to remember when and where they are rewarded at a certain time of day at a certain feeding point and at another time of the day at another point. In summary, bees make decisions based on the expected consequences of their behavior. Such individual behavior does not fit into a mechanistic scheme. Menzel therefore calls it thought and intelligence.

Dance communication

Dance forms of communication are already known from the ancestors of modern honeybees. The waggle dance is believed to have evolved to convey information about new nesting places rather than about feeding places. With the honeybees the dance took on a highly developed form. The information that is transmitted concerns: availability, type, quality, distance and possibly also the location of food. The vocabulary of dance communication is very narrow, genetically predetermined and cannot be combined. Language syntax and semantics are not given according to Menzel, so that it is not necessarily possible to speak of thinking in the transmission and reception.

Individual thinking of bees versus sociobiological view

The individual thinking skills of bees and other animals are inevitably seen by sociobiologists and social-brain representatives as absurd. Sociobiologists such as Edward O. Wilson or Thomas D. Seeley see the intelligence of bees evolving on the swarm level ( swarm intelligence ). You are not looking for it on the individual level. Similarly, social evolutionary biologists like Robin Dunbar see bees as being entirely genetically programmed in their behavior. Individual bee behavior in a colony with tens of thousands of individuals would not be explained with the Dunbar number, nor could it be reconciled with it and the theory of the social brain.

Convergent brain evolution and cognition in the octopus

To the genus of molluscs and to the family of octopus counting octopuses originated in a converged to the vertebrate, ie independent evolutionary process. The result of an evolutionarily very early separation of the lines and therefore a long different brain development shows in the common octopus ( Octopus vulgaris ) a neural network organization similar to the evolutionarily very old vertebrate hippocampus and activity-dependent, synaptic plasticity. This non-analogous similarity is fundamental for learning in both lines.

Octopuses can open clam shells using several methods. In many tests, they do not apply fixed rules, but learn based on the situation. You can differentiate visually and tactilely objects and learn spatially. They show sophisticated and extraordinary abilities to adapt their behavioral repertoire to the prevailing environment and to changing conditions. After several hundred studies on the behavior of octopuses are available, it is concluded that they have a basic concept, both for the assessment of complex sensory information and for the choice of motor output, i.e. the corresponding activity. You therefore have a primary consciousness.

See also

further reading

General

Humans and primates

  • U. Kühnen: Animally cultivated. Human behavior between culture and evolution. Springer Spectrum, 2015, ISBN 978-3-662-45365-0 .
  • Richard W. Byrne: The Thinking Ape: Evolutionary origins of intelligence Oxford University Press, Oxford, England 1995, ISBN 0-19-852188-X .
  • John Eccles : Evolution of Consciousness. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 89, 1992, pp. 7320-7324.
  • Gerd Gigerenzer : Simply Rational: Decision Making in the Real World (Evolution and Cognition). Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • Stanley I. Greenspan, Stuart Shanker: The First Idea: How symbols, language, and intelligence evolved from our early primate ancestors to modern humans. Da Capo Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2004, ISBN 0-7382-0680-6 .
  • Cecilia Heyes , Ludwig Huber (Ed.): The Evolution of Cognition. Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology. MIT Press, 2000, ISBN 0-262-52696-4 .
  • C. Heyes: New thinking: the evolution of human cognition. In: Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences. Volume 367, number 1599, August 2012, pp. 2091-2096, doi: 10.1098 / rstb.2012.0111 . PMID 22734052 , PMC 3385676 (free full text).
  • Ludwig Huber, Anna Wilkinson: Evolution of cognition: A comparative approach. In: Friedrich G. Barth, Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, Hans-Dieter Klein: Sensory Perception. Springer 2012, ISBN 978-3-211-99750-5 .
  • Seymour W. Itzkoff: The Form of Man: The evolutionary origins of human intelligence. Paideia Publishers, Ashfield, Mass. 1983, ISBN 0-913993-00-X .
  • SM Reader, Y. Hager, KN Laland: The evolution of primate general and cultural intelligence. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 366 (1567), 2011, pp. 1017-1027. doi: 10.1098 / rstb.2010.0342
  • Donald Merlin : Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press, 1991.
  • Donald Merlin: Triumph of Consciousness: The Evolution of the Human Mind. Klett-Cotta, 2008, ISBN 978-3-608-94487-7 .
  • Gerhard Roth, Ursula Dicke: Evolution of the brain and intelligence. In: TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences. Vol. 9, No. 5, May 2005, pp. 250-257.
  • SJ Shettleworth : Cognition, Evolution and Behavior. Oxford Press, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-531984-2 .
  • Randolph Nesse , Alan Lloyd: The Evolution of Psychodynamic Mechanisms. In: Jerome Barkow et al. (Ed.): The Adapted Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
  • John R Skoyles , Dorion Sagan : Up from Dragons: The evolution of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill, New York 2002, ISBN 0-07-137825-1 .
  • Bill Thompson, Simon Kirby, Kenny Smith: Culture shapes the evolution of cognition. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 113, 2016, pp. 4530-4535, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1523631113 .
  • Phillip V. Tobias : The Brain in Hominid Evolution. Columbia University Press, New York 1971, ISBN 0-231-03518-7 .
  • Luca Tommasi, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel (Eds.): Evolutionary and Developmental Perspectives on Mind, Brain, and Behavior. MIT Press, 2009. (pdf)

Animals in general

Birds

  • David Edelman, Bernard Baars, Anil Seth: Identifying Hallmarks of Consciousness in Non-Mammalian Species. In: Consciousness and Cognition. 14, 2005, pp. 169-187.
  • Binyamin Hochner, Tal Shomrat, Graziano Fiorito: The Octopus: A Model for a Comparative Analysis of the Evolution of Learning and Memory Mechanisms. In: The Biological Bulletin. 210, 2006, pp. 308-317.
  • Erich Jarvis et al: Avian Brains and a New Understanding of Vertebrate Brain Evolution. In: Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 6, 2005, pp. 151-159.
  • Niels C. Rattenborg, Dolores Martinez-Gonzalez, John A. Lesku: Avian sleep homeostasis: Convergent evolution of complex brains, cognition and sleep functions in mammals and birds. Review. In: Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. Vol. 33, Issue 3, March 2009, pp. 253-270.

Octopuses

  • David Edelman, Bernard Baars, Anil Seth: Identifying Hallmarks of Consciousness in Non-Mammalian Species. In: Consciousness and Cognition. 14, 2005, pp. 169-187.
  • Lauren Hvorecny, Jessica Grudowski, Carrie Blakeslee, Tiffany Simmons, Paula Roy, Jennifer Brooks, Rachel Hanner, Marie Beigel, Miranda Karson, Rachel Nichols, Johanna Holm, Jean Boal: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes Can Conditionally Discriminate. In: Animal Cognition. 10 (4), 2007, pp. 449-459.
  • NS Sutherland: Theories of Shape Discrimination in Octopus. In: Nature. 186, 1960, pp. 840-844.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man. After d. German translation of Heinrich Schmidt 1908. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-596-90145-6 , pp. 80ff.
  2. ↑ Darwin 2009, p. 81.
  3. ↑ Darwin 2009, pp. 81f.
  4. ↑ Darwin 2009, pp. 91f.
  5. ↑ Darwin 2009, pp. 82f.
  6. ↑ Darwin 2009, p. 93.
  7. ↑ Darwin 2009, pp. 93f.
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