Why Human Cognition Is Cultural and Not Genetic

Reviewing the Book ‘Cognitive Gadgets‘ By Cecilia Heyes

The book argues for cultural evolutionary psychology, which tries to bridge evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. With cognitive science as the foundation, it argues that what makes us special is cognitive gadgets. Our cognitive ability is constructed through childhood with social interaction and not as reliant on instincts as much as we think.

It goes over several fields, arguing why the view that our cognitive framework is genetic is misguided. For example, in language, she argues that language learning is socially constructed. This may seem obvious, but she isn’t arguing that learning a specific language is cultural, but rather, the very act of learning itself is, and not genetic. This is what Chomsky argued, now known as universal grammar. But she presents evidence of why we don’t need universal grammar to see how language is learned.

Another example comes from developmental psychology. We think that humans are incredibly wired to imitate, but she argues that a lot of that learning is actually social and not necessarily instinctual. Babies and children imitate because we socially encourage and reward imitation. This is very counter-intuitive and against how we typically think of it, but it was well argued for.

The overall tone of the book is that the cognitive mechanisms that we think are distinctively human, and thus exclusive to adults and passed down by genes, are often just cultural learning. Many of those mechanisms aren’t special new cognitive functions but rather “upgraded” versions of previous functions that aren’t exclusively human at all.

I was very excited about the book based on its premise, but it was a little disappointing. I think it was well-argued but was incredibly tedious. The overall case for the role of culture and social learning was well done, but I always had the feeling that it made it sound like it was a much bigger deal than it was.

Most problematically, the book is surprisingly dense. This was a surprise to me because it’s not really marketed as such but is quite academic. There is technical jargon everywhere, and each school of thought is explained in detail, often way more than necessary. I’m doing a psychology degree, so I have a much better background than most in the field, and despite this a lot of times, it was still difficult to read.

In some cases, I got completely lost, and I had no idea what she was talking about or couldn’t logically follow her arguments. To be fair, I listened to the audiobook, which made this more difficult. But despite this, I’m positive that the book would still be quite difficult if I had read it instead.

There are a few good ideas in the book, and it is very scientifically sound. But nevertheless, I don’t think what is presented is revolutionary unless coming from a genetic deterministic background, which is close to no one nowadays.

If you’re interested in the cognitive ability of humans and how they are culturally transmitted, then this book will be quite valuable. However, it requires a good upfront knowledge of psychology and cognitive science, and it is a rather academic read.

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