Steven Pinker - O Nicho Cognitivo

Steven Pinker cutuca a onça com vara curta. Mas já falava disso desde 2003 (Pinker, S. (2003) Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche. In Language Evolution [Christiansen, M.H. and Kirby, S., eds] Oxford University Press). Ou melhor:
Basic idea (Pinker & Bloom, 1990):
•Language is an adaptation to the cognitive niche

Teve gente antes, entretanto (veja também os abstracts abaixo):

We achieved it all by becoming knowledge specialists, by entering the “cognitive niche” (Tooby and De Vore, 1987), and developing increasingly sophisticated tools, with which we have radically changed our environment.


Abstract. Apesar de Darwin insistir que a inteligência humana poderia ser completamente explicada pela teoria da evolução, o co-descobridor da seleção natural, Alfred Russel Wallace, afirmou que a inteligência abstrata não tinha utilidade para os humanos ancestrais e só poderia ser explicada pelo projeto inteligente (ID - intelligent design, a turma que substituiu os criacionistas depois que estes perderam completamente o crédito intelectual). O paradoxo aparente de Wallace pode ser dissolvido com duas hipóteses sobre a cognição humana. Uma é que a inteligência é uma adaptação a um estilo de vida que utiliza conhecimento e é socialmente interdependente, o 'nicho cognitivo'. Isto envolve a capacidade de suplantar as defesas fixas evolutivas dos animais e das plantas através de aplicações de raciocínio, incluindo armas, armadilhas e direcionamento coordenado da caça, além da detoxificação de plantas. Tal raciocínio explora teorias intuitivas sobre diferentes aspectos do mundo, como objetos, forças, caminhos, lugares, estados, substâncias e as crenças e desejos das outras pessoas. A teoria explica muitoas características zoologicamente incomuns do Homo sapiens, incluido nossa complexa caixa de ferramentas, nossa grande amplitude de habitas e dietas, infâncias extensas e vidas longas, a hipersocialidade, o complexo acasalamento, a divisão entre culturas e a linguagem (o que multiplica o benefício do conhecimento, porque o know-how é útil não só por seus benefícios práticos, mas também como mercadoria de troca com outros, incrementando a evolução da cooperação). A segunda hipótese é que os humanos possuem a capacidade de abstração metafórica, o que nos permite cooptar faculdades que evoluiram originalmente para solucionar problemas físicos e para a coordenação social, aplicá-las a assuntos abstratos e combiná-las produtivamente. Essas habilidades podem ajudar a explicar o surgimento da cognição abstrata sem forças evolutivas sobrenaturais ou exóticas, e em princípio são testáveis através de análises de sinais estatísticos da seleção no genoma humano.

The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language
Steven Pinker 2010

Outros artigos de interesse:

Gene-Culture Coevolution and the Nature of Human Sociality
Herbert Gintis 2010
Gene-culture coevolution is the application of sociobiology, the general theory of the social organization of biological species, to humans—the only species that transmits culture in a manner that leads to quantitative growth across generations. This is a special case of niche construction, which applies to species that transform their natural environment so as to facilitate social interaction and collective behavior (Odling-Smee et al. 2003).

Language, embodiment, and the cognitive niche
Andy Clark 2006
Embodied agents use bodily actions and environmental interventions to make the world a better place to think in. Where does language fit into this emerging picture of the embodied, ecologically efficient agent? One useful way to approach this question is to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche: a persisting but never stationary material scaffolding whose crucial role in promoting thought and reason remains surprisingly poorly understood. It is the very materiality of this linguistic scaffolding, I suggest, that gives it some key benefits. By materializing thought in words, we create structures that are themselves proper objects of perception, manipulation, and (further) thought.

Higher-Order Niche Construction: An Epistemic Architecture for Extended Cognition
Peter Galison, Peter Godfrey-Smith & Lara K. Davis (?) 2009
The nature of human cognitive boundaries must be addresses in several distinct
manifestations of system boundary, as a biological, sensory-perceptual, behavioral, social, spatial or causal. As Peter Godfrey-Smith has established, the way in which we distinguish niche construction in cognitive evolution – and I would add, further distinguish niche construction with respect to cognitive extension – depends upon “exactly how we think of the notion of environment”, or alternately the demarcation of boundary between organism and environment. Thus, before we analyze the conditions through which a cognitive extension may occur, it is prudent to first assess any given biases regarding the general accepted boundaries of a biological organism.

Evolution and psychology in philosophical perspective
Matteo Mameli 2007
All living organisms are (in one way or another) niche constructors, but human niche construction is particularly powerful. A form of niche construction that is extremely important in humans is cultural transmission. Cultural transmission produces environmental changes by generating technological and behavioural evolution. Moreover, cultural transmission and technological innovations such as books and mass media (which are themselves the products of cultural evolution) are responsible for constant changes in the human cognitive niche, that is, in the kinds and quantities of salient stimuli that our minds have to deal with.

The Hominid Entry into the Cognitive Niche
H. Clark Barrett, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby 2007
As a knowledge-using species, we occupy the cognitive niche, using improvisational intelligence to solve problems that other species might approach solely with highly specialized, rapidly deployed but somewhat inflexible computational and physical specializations (Tooby & DeVore, 1987).

Unravelling Digital Infinity
Chris Knight & Camilla Power 2007
Humans have analog minds in a digital world. More accurately, just a certain part of our world is digital. We are at one with our primate cousins in being immersed in ordinary material and biological reality – Pinker’s ‘analog world’. But unlike them, we have woven for ourselves an additional environment that is digital through and through. This second environment that we all inhabit is sometimes referred to as the ‘cognitive niche in nature’, but the evolutionary psychologists who invented this expression (Tooby and DeVore 1987) did so for their own special reasons. Adherents of the ‘cognitive revolution’ but attempting to weld Chomsky with their own mentalist version of Darwin, they were committed to minimizing the intrinsically social, cultural and institutional nature of the digital representations made available to our brains. The expression ‘cognitive niche’ may have explanatory value, but not if the purpose is to deny the existence of what social anthropologists and archaeologists term ‘symbolic culture.’

The Niche
Barry Smith & Achille C. Varzi 1999
Abstract. The concept of niche (setting, context, habitat, environment) has been little studied by ontologists, in spite of its wide application in a variety of disciplines from evolutionary biology to economics. What follows is a first formal theory of this concept, a theory of the relations between objects and their niches. The theory builds upon existing work on mereology, topology, and the theory of spatial location as tools of formal ontology. It will be illustrated above all by means of simple biological examples, but the concept of niche should be understood as being, like concepts such as part, boundary, and location, a structural concept that is applicable in principle to a wide range of different domains.