Overview

"In the last decade, ""evolutionary psychology"" has come to refer exclusively to research on human mentality and behaviour, motivated by a nativist interpretation of how evolution operates. This book encompasses the behaviour and mentality of nonhuman as well as human animals and a full range of evolutionary approaches. Rather than a collection by and for the like-minded, it is a debate about how evolutionary processes have shaped cognition. The debate is divided into five sections: Orientations, on the phylogenetic, ecological and psychological/comparative approaches to the evolution of cognition; Categorization, on how various animals parse their environments, how they represent objects and events and the relations among them; Causality, on whether and in what ways nonhuman animals represent cause and effect relationships; Consciousness, on whether it makes sense to talk about the evolution of consciousness and whether the phenomenon can be investigated empirically in nonhuman animals; and Culture, on the cognitive requirements for nongenetic transmission of information and the evolutionary consequences of such cultural exchange."

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9780262082860

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This important collection of essays represents most major currents of present thought in animal cognition: from the modularity of the mind to cultural evolution, from the search for episodic memory in animals to the properties of causal reasoning in humans, from honeybees to ravens. A crucial reference in this dynamic and rapidly evolving field. --Alex Kacelnik, Professor of Behavioural Ecology, Department of Zoology, Oxford University

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