Surf these sites: Cognition and history: the evolution of intelligence and culture -- A crucial, perhaps defining, feature of human intelligence is our unique capacity to enter into that thing we call culture. Paper (in pdf format) by Henry Plotkin. Cognitive science & literature & composition -- Dedicated to exploring the impact of cognitive science upon the research and teaching of literature and composition. Dan Sperber -- Home page of the French cognitive and social scientist, with biography, bibliography, and texts in English and French. Darwin''s dangerous disciple -- Interview with Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, from Skeptic magazine. Evolution and Philosophy: A Revolution in Philosophy -- Evolutionary theory offers hugely important insights for philosophy. Online papers, discussion, links, polls, and more on fascinating topics like naturalizing ethics, consciousness, rationality, semantic puzzles, the nature of value ... even the meaning of life. Evolution and the social mind -- An interdisciplinary project seeking to establish points of contact between the study of sociocultural phenomena and the emerging model of human cognition in terms of evolved functionally specialized systems. Evolution in cultural and natural systems -- This work distinguishes itself from other models of cultural evolution by its explicit representation and understanding of human groups within environments. Handbook of human symbolic evolution -- Abstracts of a collection of papers edited by Andrew Lock and Charles Peters. Intelligence: evolution & uses. -- Topics include how dreams & religion might have emerged; human limitations & bigotry; the chances of human-level intelligence evolving. [Editor''s note: A good start, but rather shallow.] Origin of language -- Paper by Robin Allott. The emergence of language has been the result of a process of mosaic evolution, with diverse faculties found in animals (particularly in birds) coming together in the human and through a radical change in brain connections giving rise to language integrated with the motor system. Precis of origins of the modern mind -- The central hypothesis in this paper is that there were three major cognitive transformations by which the modern human mind emerged over several million years: 1) mimetic skill and autocueing, 2) lexical invention, 3) externalization of memory. Psychology, culture, and evolution -- Site has three sections: the first is concerned with the evolution of the human capacity to construct signs; the second deals with Cultural-Historical Psychology; the third concerns theories and arguments about the evolution of brain, consciousness, language, and sociality. The International Paleopsychology Project -- A multi-disciplinary group of scientists dedicated to mapping out the evolution of complexity, sociality, perception, and mentation from the first 10-32 second of the Big Bang to the present. The Pleistocene and the origins of human culture: -- Paper in which the authors argue that the specific mechanism by which humans mastered the Pleistocene is our capacity to evolve adaptations to the variation of Plio-Pleistocene environments via cultural traditions.
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