225 | Michael Tomasello on The Social Origins of Cognition and Agency

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2023

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Human beings have developed wondrous capacities to take in information about the world, mull it over, think about a suite of future implications, and decide on a course of action based on those deliberations. These abilities developed over evolutionary history for a variety of reasons and under a number of different pressures. But one crucially important aspect of their development is their social function. According to Michael Tomasello, we developed agency and cognition and even morality in order to better communicate and cooperate with our fellow humans.

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Michael Tomasello received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Georgia. He is currently the James Bonk Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience and Director of the Developmental Psychology Program at Duke University. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his awards are the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the Wiley Prize in Psychology, and the Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science. His newest book is The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Binescape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. You are of course
0:05.2	listening to a podcast at this very moment and there's a lot of podcasts out there in the world.
0:10.8	You might have noticed doing very different things, different kinds of approaches, different kinds
0:14.6	of subject matter. Here is something common to all of the podcasts that I know about. They are
0:20.4	produced by human beings. There are no non-human animals that have their own podcasts, at least not
0:27.0	without help from regular old human beings. There's something special about human beings,
0:32.6	something that makes us different from other animals. I say that with great caution because of
0:37.5	course there's an enormous amount that is common between human beings and other animals. You have
0:43.6	to say other animals because we are animals. We are part of that heritage. We share enormous
0:48.8	amounts of DNA and functionality with other animals, especially the great apes, the our closest
0:56.0	genetic relatives. But also we are different in some ways. I think it's easy to overemphasize either
1:03.8	the similarities or the differences. There's a spectrum but we're at one end of the spectrum.
1:09.4	Rather than just saying we're the same or we're different, the interesting thing is to see exactly
1:16.3	how we are and compare it to exactly how other animals are and tease out both the similarities
1:22.3	and the differences. So one of the leading researchers in this area is Michael Tomasello. Today's guest
1:28.0	he is a psychologist. Probably if you had to pick something that's what you would call him.
1:32.8	But if you look at his academic appointments at Duke where he is located, he's in the psychology
1:38.4	and neuroscience department also in the evolutionary anthropology department and also in the philosophy
1:44.4	department. So he is spanning these different areas. And one of the great things about Michael's
1:50.1	work is that it's very empirical. He's doing experiments and he's doing experiments comparatively
1:57.2	between great apes and human beings, especially young human beings. You might expect to have the
2:03.9	most in common with our primate relatives. And he has a theory. He has lots of theories. He has
	...

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