It is perhaps widely appreciated in the realm of primatology that until fairly recently, our perspective on gorillas has been an unbalanced one. Our earliest and most comprehensive accounts of gorillas in the wild can be traced almost entirely to studies of the East African gorillas of the Virungamountains,Gorilla gorilla beringei or, as it is now being called by some,Gorilla beringei beringei,...

Beginning Linguistics students are sometimes treated to an array of mock “theories” about the evolution of language, including the “Bow-wow” theory, the “Dingdong” theory and others with equally silly and dismissive names. The 1886 ban on the subject (along with proposals for a universal language) by the Société Linguistique de Paris is well known, and also sometimes thrown up as a proscription...

A model of human language requires a theory of meaningful marks. Humans are the only species who use marks to think. A theory of marks identifies children's scribbles as significant behavior, while hypothesizing the importance of rotational systems to hominid brain evolution. By recognizing the importance of children's scribbles and drawings in developmental terms as well as in evolutionary ter...

Russon, Begun, and the other distinguished contributors to this volume take on one of the most vexing and intriguing questions in science today, namely, the origins and functions of intelligence in great apes and humans. The volume begins and ends with insightful summaries and reviews of what is currently understood about the cognitive abilities of great apes, the likely traits of the last comm...

Emil Wolfgang Menzel, Jr., died April 7th, 2012, and with his passing, the field of psychology and primatology lost a true icon. In many ways, Emil’s pioneering observations and research laid the foundation and set the precedent for many contemporary research topics in psychology and primatology including non-verbal and gestural communication, theory-ofmind (before this was the fashionable term...

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Middle childhood is a crucial phase of human development characterized by a global shift in cognition, motivation, and social behavior. In this article, I review recent work on middle childhood from an evolutionarydevelopmental perspective and show how contributions from a range of disciplines can be synthesized into an integrated model of this life stage. I begin by reviewing the main evolved ...

We analytic philosophers have signally failed our colleagues in cognitive science. We have done that by not sharing central lessons about the nature of concepts, concept-use, and conceptual content that have been entrusted to our care and feeding for more than a century. I take it that analytic philosophy began with the birth of the new logic that Gottlob Frege introduced in his seminal 1879 Be...