PSYC 391 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Altricial, Binocular Vision, Cultural Learning

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 391
• Professor: Matthew Gervais

Document Summary

Human nature: humans are a specialized primate, uniquely co-evolved with culture, and ultrasocial. Inter-dependence, self-sacrifice, etc. only performed by humans as a social species. Humans are uniquely adaptable: nonhuman primates live almost exclusively in the tropics, humans live everywhere, in every ecosystem on earth, adaptability in not due to genetics, but rather local cumulative evolution. What selection forces driving evolutionary divergence? changes in global temperatures: climate change world getting colder, with more frequent and extreme, this change in temperatures arguable big factor for changes in culture. Human cultural capacities co-evolved with these physical changes: big brains (encephalization, slow life history (altricial) Homo sapiens are slowest developing among the species (in red and green graph: shorter gut (bc fire, slender build (gracile, self-domestication hypothesis. Reverse-dominance hierarchy (cooperation, altruism, punishes those who are not friendly: evolution of dogs as pets (select friendliest pups) Human socio-cognitive niche: part cognitive niche, part cultural niche, totally ultrasocial.