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A Harvard scientist illuminates the biological basis for human morality in this groundbreaking book. With the diversity of moral attitudes found across cultures around the globe, it is easy to assume that moral perspectives are socially developed—a matter of nurture rather than nature. But in Moral Minds, Marc Hauser presents compelling evidence to the contrary, and offers a revolutionary new theory: that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct. Hauser argues that certain biologically innate moral principles propel us toward judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Combining his cutting-edge research with the latest findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, Hauser explores the startling implications of his provocative theory vis-à-vis contemporary bioethics, religion, the law, and our everyday lives.
It is a fact that humans destroy the lives of other humans — strangers, friends, lovers, and kin — and have been doing so for a long time. These cases are unsurprising and easily explained: We harm others when it benefits us directly, fighting to win resources or wipe out the competition. In this sense we are no different from any other social animal. The mystery is why seemingly normal people torture, mutilate, and kill others for the fun of it — or for no apparent benefit at all. Why did we, alone among the social animals, develop an appetite for gratuitous cruelty? This is the core problem of evil. It is a problem that has engaged scholars for centuries and is the central topic of t...
This text addresses the problem of how communication systems, including language, have been designed over the course of evolution. It integrates conceptual issues and empirical results from neurobiology, cognitive and developmental psychology, linguistics, evolutionary biology, and ethology.
" ... an essential examination of how animals assemble the basic tool kit that we call the mind: the ability to count, to navigate, to recognize individuals, to communicate, and to socialize."--Jacket.
Based on the approach laid out in the 1950s by Nobel laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen, this book looks at animal communication from the four perspectives of mechanisms, ontogeny, function, and phylogeny.
Publisher Description
The fifty-seven original essays in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. The contributors include cognitive ethologists, behavioral ecologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, behaviorists, philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and modelers, field biologists, and others. The diversity of approaches is both philosophical and methodological, with contributors demonstrating various degrees of acceptance or disdain for such terms as "consciousness" and varying degrees of concern for laboratory experimentation versus naturalistic research. In addition to primates, particularly the nonhuman great apes, the animals ...
Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution. Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmoth...
This book explores afresh the long-standing interest, and emphasis on, the `special' capacities of primates. Some of the recent discoveries of the higher cognitive abilities of other mammals and also birds challenge the concept that primates are special and even the view that the cognitive ability of apes is more advanced than that of nonprimate mammals and birds. It is therefore timely to ask whether primates are, in fact, special and to do so from a broad range of perspectives. Divided into five sections this book deals with topics about higher cognition and how it is manifested in different species, and also considers aspects of brain structure that might be associated with complex behavior.
Deaf Cognition examines the cognitive underpinnings of deaf individuals' learning. Marschark and Hauser have brought together scientists from different disciplines, which rarely interact, to share their ideas and create this book. It contributes to the science of learning by describing and testing theories that might either over or underestimate the role that audition or vision plays in learning and memory, and by shedding light on multiple pathways for learning. International experts in cognitive psychology, brain sciences, cognitive development, and deaf children offer a unique, integrative examination of cognition and learning, with discussions on their implications for deaf education. Ea...