Steps toward an evolutionary psychology of a culture- dependent species

1 Introduction Humans are at once phylogenetically linked to, and yet fundamentally different from, other primates. Most profound among these differences is the extent of our reliance on culture, by which I mean socially transmitted information shared by at least some members of the learner's group. While recent work reveals the existence of socially transmitted foraging techniques and social behaviors in some nonhuman primates (Fragaszy and Perry, 2003; Whiten et al., 1999), compared to the human case, cultural information plays a minor role in these animals' efforts to negotiate their physical and social environments. Highly altricial and relatively gracile, lacking large teeth, strong jaws, or claws, we are a rather unimposing mammal–our ability to exist, indeed to prosper, in nearly every ecosystem on the planet is primarily due to our capacity to acquire, employ, and elaborate on socially transmitted information. This chapter is based on the premise that these capacities reflect the workings of special-purpose psychological mechanisms that evolved in order to exploit the enormous adaptive potential of socially transmitted information. After reviewing the principal existing approaches to this question, I outline some of the major topics that I believe need to be addressed in developing an evolutionary psychology of our uniquely culture-dependent species. 2 Principal existing perspectives To date, scholars have largely adopted one of three perspectives when exploring the relationship between culture and human evolution; I refer to these, respectively, as the punctuated change model, the psychological anthropology model, and the orthodox evolutionary psychology model. 2.1 The punctuated change model