scholarly journals Human niche, human behaviour, human nature

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 20160136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agustin Fuentes
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Evolutionary Approach ◽  
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Flexible Capacity ◽  
Review Current

The concept of a ‘human nature’ or ‘human natures’ retains a central role in theorizing about the human experience. In Homo sapiens it is clear that we have a suite of capacities generated via our evolutionary past, and present, and a flexible capacity to create and sustain particular kinds of cultures and to be shaped by them. Regardless of whether we label these capacities ‘human natures’ or not, humans occupy a distinctive niche and an evolutionary approach to examining it is critical. At present we are faced with a few different narratives as to exactly what such an evolutionary approach entails. There is a need for a robust and dynamic theoretical toolkit in order to develop a richer, and more nuanced, understanding of the cognitively sophisticated genus Homo and the diverse sorts of niches humans constructed and occupied across the Pleistocene, Holocene, and into the Anthropocene. Here I review current evolutionary approaches to ‘human nature’, arguing that we benefit from re-framing our investigations via the concept of the human niche and in the context of the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). While not a replacement of standard evolutionary approaches, this is an expansion and enhancement of our toolkit. I offer brief examples from human evolution in support of these assertions.

scholarly journals Violence in the prehistoric period of Japan: the spatio-temporal pattern of skeletal evidence for violence in the Jomon period

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 20160028 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hisashi Nakao ◽  
Kohei Tamura ◽  
Yui Arimatsu ◽  
Tomomi Nakagawa ◽  
Naoko Matsumoto ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Temporal Pattern ◽  
Selective Pressure ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Lethal Violence ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Whether man is predisposed to lethal violence, ranging from homicide to warfare, and how that may have impacted human evolution, are among the most controversial topics of debate on human evolution. Although recent studies on the evolution of warfare have been based on various archaeological and ethnographic data, they have reported mixed results: it is unclear whether or not warfare among prehistoric hunter–gatherers was common enough to be a component of human nature and a selective pressure for the evolution of human behaviour. This paper reports the mortality attributable to violence, and the spatio-temporal pattern of violence thus shown among ancient hunter–gatherers using skeletal evidence in prehistoric Japan (the Jomon period: 13 000 cal BC–800 cal BC). Our results suggest that the mortality due to violence was low and spatio-temporally highly restricted in the Jomon period, which implies that violence including warfare in prehistoric Japan was not common.

scholarly journals The Cultural Evolution of Human Nature

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Stanford
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Cultural Evolution ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Cultural Evolutionary ◽  
Ontological Framework

Abstract Recent years have seen the growing promise of cultural evolutionary theory as a new approach to bringing human behaviour fully within the broader evolutionary synthesis. This review of two recent seminal works on this topic argues that cultural evolution now holds the potential to bring together fields as disparate as neuroscience and social anthropology within a unified explanatory and ontological framework.

Brixham Cave and the Antiquity of Man (1965)

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob W. Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Evolution ◽  
Present Knowledge ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Olduvai Gorge ◽  
The Past ◽  
State Of The Science

During the past fifteen years, human palaeontology has been revitalized by a series of discoveries whose interpretation has produced a new excitement in the search for man’s ancestry. New paths of human evolution are replacing those that have become rutted through decades of repetition of the same data and the same theories. The current vigour recalls the new spirit of just a century ago when, during the 1850s and early 1860s, the discoveries of the ‘cave men’ revolutionized the concept of man’s past and created for him a previously unbelievable antiquity. Like those discoveries, the finds of our generation, culminating in the evidence from Olduvai Gorge, have led to a re-examination of the bases of human behaviour and its development. Hallowell’s own stimulating examinations of the nature of the human achievement, of human nature itself, have been instrumental in that redefinition of man’s uniqueness that underlies the contemporary search for the human threshold in the evolutionary past. And with the reawakening of studies of human evolution both physically and behaviourally, it is perhaps of some interest to examine those events of an earlier period, in an earlier state of the science, that provided the foundations of both data and concept upon which our present knowledge and interests have been built. During the past fifteen years, human palaeontology has been revitalized by a series of discoveries whose interpretation has produced a new excitement in the search for man’s ancestry. New paths of human evolution are replacing those that have become rutted through decades of repetition of the same data and the same theories. The current vigour recalls the new spirit of just a century ago when, during the 1850s and early 1860s, the discoveries of the ‘cave men’ revolutionized the concept of man’s past and created for him a previously unbelievable antiquity. Like those discoveries, the finds of our generation, culminating in the evidence from Olduvai Gorge, have led to a re-examination of the bases of human behaviour and its development.

Human Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dupré
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Biological Theory ◽  
Developmental Plasticity ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
Important Concept ◽  
Process Perspective ◽  
Unpredictable Environment

This sketch of an account of human nature begins with the claim that we should see humans as a kind of process, a life cycle, rather than as a kind of substance or thing. A particular advantage of such a process perspective is that it readily accommodates the developmental plasticity that has been an increasingly important concept in recent biological theory. Human behaviour, on this account, should be understood as providing adaptive and flexible responses to an unpredictable environment. It is, therefore, generally misguided to provide a standard account of human nature in terms of behaviour or behavioural dispositions. If there is such a thing as human nature, it is a uniquely refined propensity for novel and unpredictable behaviour.

scholarly journals Between Teleophilia and Teleophobia

Biosemiotics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schaetzle ◽  
Yogi Hendlin
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Biology ◽  
Modern Synthesis ◽  
Theory Building ◽  
Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Evolutionary Processes ◽  
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
New Findings ◽  
Multi Level

AbstractDenis Noble convincingly describes the artifacts of theory building in the Modern Synthesis as having been surpassed by the available evidence, indicating more active and less gene-centric evolutionary processes than previously thought. We diagnosis the failure of theory holders to dutifully update their beliefs according to new findings as a microcosm of the prevailing larger social inability to deal with competing paradigms. For understanding life, Noble suggests that there is no privileged level of semiotic interpretation. Understanding multi-level semiosis along with organism and environment contrapunctally, according to Jakob von Uexküll’s theoretical biology, can contribute to the emerging extended evolutionary synthesis.

Biology and Behaviour in Human Evolution

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis C. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Biological Perspective ◽  
Patterns And Processes ◽  
Reductionist Approach

Of the diverse approaches to understanding patterns and processes in human evolution, a focus on the biology of behaviour using principles derived from the non-human primates may have some utility for archaeologists. This article seeks to outline some biologically-based areas that could prove fruitful in exploring the origins of human behaviour within the archaeological record. It attempts to initiate a dialogue between biologists, even with their limited understanding of the problems facing those working with human origins, and archaeologists, in the hope that this dialogue will move beyond a simple reductionist approach towards the goal of integrating behaviour into a more sophisticated biological perspective.

scholarly journals Evolutionary biology today and the call for an extended synthesis

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 20160145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Futuyma
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Epigenetic Inheritance ◽  
Reaction Norm ◽  
Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis ◽  
Extended Synthesis ◽  
Proximate Causation

Evolutionary theory has been extended almost continually since the evolutionary synthesis (ES), but except for the much greater importance afforded genetic drift, the principal tenets of the ES have been strongly supported. Adaptations are attributable to the sorting of genetic variation by natural selection, which remains the only known cause of increase in fitness. Mutations are not adaptively directed, but as principal authors of the ES recognized, the material (structural) bases of biochemistry and development affect the variety of phenotypic variations that arise by mutation and recombination. Against this historical background, I analyse major propositions in the movement for an ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’. ‘Niche construction' is a new label for a wide variety of well-known phenomena, many of which have been extensively studied, but (as with every topic in evolutionary biology) some aspects may have been understudied. There is no reason to consider it a neglected ‘process’ of evolution. The proposition that phenotypic plasticity may engender new adaptive phenotypes that are later genetically assimilated or accommodated is theoretically plausible; it may be most likely when the new phenotype is not truly novel, but is instead a slight extension of a reaction norm already shaped by natural selection in similar environments. However, evolution in new environments often compensates for maladaptive plastic phenotypic responses. The union of population genetic theory with mechanistic understanding of developmental processes enables more complete understanding by joining ultimate and proximate causation; but the latter does not replace or invalidate the former. Newly discovered molecular phenomena have been easily accommodated in the past by elaborating orthodox evolutionary theory, and it appears that the same holds today for phenomena such as epigenetic inheritance. In several of these areas, empirical evidence is needed to evaluate enthusiastic speculation. Evolutionary theory will continue to be extended, but there is no sign that it requires emendation.

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