Book review: Levinson, S. C., The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution LevinsonS. C. (2025). The Interaction Engine: Language in Social Life and Human Evolution. Cambridge University Press. xiv + 199 pp. pp. ISBN 9781009570329, £30.00 (hbk).

Homo coquinus

Human Evolution, Language and Mind - A psychological and archaeological enquiry by William Noble and Iain Davidson, University of New England, Armidale Published by Cambridge University Press, 1996. [RRP in Australia 90.00 in Hardback]. - Volume 9

Leslie C. Aiello is President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (470 Park Avenue South, 8th Floor North, New York, New York 10016, U.S.A.). 1. The numbering system began with the first symposium held at Burg Wartenstein Castle in 1958 (the “International Symposium on Current Anthropology” organized by Sol Tax). During the castle years only those symposia actually held at the castle were numbered. After the sale of the castle in 1980, the symposia held elsewhere continued the numbered sequence. There were 31 nonnumbered symposia held between 1952 and 1986. “Working Memory and the Evolution of Modern Thinking” is the 139th numbered Wenner-Gren Symposium and the 168th symposium in the overall Wenner-Gren symposium series. The symposium was organized by anthropologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick Coolidge and held March 7–14, 2008, at Fortaleza do Guincho, Cascais, Portugal. Its purpose was to investigate the hypothesis that workingmemory capacity evolved over the course of human evolution and that its final enhancement in the recent past enabled the rapid expansion of modern humans at the expense of more archaic hominins. Working memory, the ability to hold information in attention and process it, has been the focus of considerable research in the cognitive sciences but has received relatively little attention among anthropologists. This symposium brought together cognitive scientists involved in the study of working memory with paleoanthropologists studying human evolution to discuss and debate issues around the evolution of working memory and its manifestation in the human evolutionary record. (Participants are shown in fig. 1.) Although there was no general agreement on the nature of working memory, there was consensus on the importance of an explicit cognitive theory such as working memory to generate appropriate tests of cognitive development. For example, all agreed on the importance of expanding the archaeological evidence of modern human cognition from, say, the presence of blades or personal ornamentation to features such as hafting, complex sequences of tool production, remotely operated traps, and colonization of oceanic islands. This symposium builds on earlier Wenner-Gren Symposia that have explored human cognitive and behavioral evolution, including Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution (Gibson and Ingold 1993) and Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction (Enfield and Levinson 2006). The foundation also has a long history of symposia on various aspects of human and primate evolution including, among many others, Social Life of Early Man (Washburn 1961), Background to Evolution in Africa (Bishop and Clark 1967), Earliest Man and Environments in the Lake Rudolf Basin (Coppens et al. 1976), and Phylogeny of the Primates: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Luckett and Szalay 1975).

Annotation: sociometry and peer relationships.

Cooperative Reproduction in Ituri Forest Hunter-Gatherers: Who Cares for Efe Infants?

Humans are perhaps the most social animals. Although some eusocial insects, herd mammals and seabirds live in colonies comprising millions of individuals, no other species lives in such a variety of social groups as Homo sapiens . We live in many different sized societies, from small, nomadic hunter

Since Darwin we have been in possession of two superficially dissonant facts. On one hand, humans are merely one of millions of animal species, all products of common ancestry. On the other, humans enjoy a level of ecological dominance that is spectacularly, qualitatively greater than that of any other animal that ever lived, including our closest relatives. Moreover, this unique ascendancy results from a complex suite of attributes that are each individually also unprecedented, including cognitive virtuosity, complex language, and an expanded ethical sense. Collectively, these facts constitute the human uniqueness problem. In spite of its importance, the superficial complexity of this problem has frustrated attempts to resolve it. Though a vast body of earlier work produced important isolated insights, no earlier theory has proven complete or convincing. I briefly review here a new resolution of the human uniqueness problem.1 This new hypothesis appears to be the necessary theory-of-everything. It ostensibly accounts parsimoniously for every major nonstochastic feature of the human story from the origin of Homo approximately 2.0 to 2.5 million years ago through the present instant. I use secondary, review literature where possible here to improve interdisciplinary accessibility. As well, I apologize to the many investigators whose important work could not be directly referenced because of length constraints.

Reviews of Books

The rekindling popularity of the vinyl record and record collecting provide a counternarrative to the ideals of technological progress and supersession, signalling the paradoxical return of a physical music format in the digital realm where "the fetish of newness is at its most aggressive" (Tischleder and Wasserman 7). In this way, the vinyl record provides a disruptive lens through which to question media history as "a history of obsolescence, where new media displace and redefine older media" and explore how "obsolescence resists becoming obsolete" (Tischleder and Wasserman 2). Magaudda (29) argues that the dematerialisation of music media has reconfigured the role of materiality in media practices and has seen physical formats such as the vinyl record "bite back" as mediators of distinct listening practices and unique material relationships to music. Against the background of on-demand streaming services and retro nostalgia in the digital age (Hogarty), record collecting may be dismissed as a resistant and obsolete collecting practice. However, as this article will explore, record collecting can be characterised as a highly social practice, providing a means to communicate identity and taste, maintain a sense of the past, and orient the social life and personal history of the collector. This article reports on the results of ethnographic research investigating the record collections of some young millennial music fans to locate the position and significance of vinyl records in their social lives as a legacy media format. To do this, I examine three key capacities of vinyl record collections in evoking autobiographical memories, maintaining personal histories and anchoring a sense of the past. The significance of personal record collections and collecting practices was investigated in a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews with a group of self-identified record collectors. The sentiments of the collector in describing their collecting can be found to reveal their acquisitions as transactions within the spheres of commodity culture and the gift economy, articulating the renewed appeal of vinyl records in the digital age. This perspective of the social meanings and media practices surrounding vinyl records in the digital age highlight the formats significance in understanding the complex trajectories of media history.

Despite its current popularity, “emergence” is a concept with a venerable history and an elusive, ambiguous standing in contemporary evolutionary theory. This paper briefly recounts the history of the term and details some of its current usages. Not only are there radically varying interpretations about what emergence means but “reductionist” and “holistic” theorists have very different views about the issue of causation. However, these two seemingly polar positions are not irreconcilable. Reductionism, or detailed analysis of the parts and their interactions, is essential for answering the “how” question in evolution -how does a complex living system work? But holism is equally necessary for answering the “why” question -why did a particular arrangement of parts evolve? In order to answer the “why” question, a broader, multi-leveled paradigm is required. The reductionist approach to explaining emergent complexity has entailed a search for underlying “laws of emergence.” Another alternative is the “Synergism Hypothesis,” which focuses on the “economics” – the functional effects produced by emergent wholes and their selective consequences. This theory, in a nutshell, proposes that the synergistic (co-operative) effects produced by various combinations of parts have played a major causal role in the evolution of biological complexity. It will also be argued that emergent phenomena represent, in effect, a subset of a much larger universe of combined effects in the natural world; there are many different kinds of synergy, but not all synergies represent emergent phenomena.

Reviewed by: Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution Michael Brian Schiffer (bio) Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution. By Nicole Boivin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xviii+269. $85. In Material Cultures, Material Minds, Nicole Boivin invites readers to rethink fundamental relationships between people and material culture. With indifference to disciplinary boundaries, her highly original synthesis shows how the material world “plays and has long played a fundamental role in shaping human thought, society and, over the long term, evolution” (p. 225). A post-processualist archaeologist trained at Cambridge University, Boivin became adept at treating material culture as a symbolic medium. Her specialty, however, is geoarchaeology, the study of soils. Through immersion in this science-heavy specialty and repeated visits to Balathal, a village in India, she came gradually to appreciate that symbolic interpretation leaves out what is material about soils—and material culture generally. This problem, she believes, is endemic in the soft side of the academy, and I agree. To most social scientists and humanists, our material life is relatively invisible. She attributes this to the deeply rooted idealism of Western intellectual culture, which has passed down from Plato the dogma that material things are mere projections of concepts and ideas. Material culture, if treated at all, is regarded as a symbolic system like language, whose underlying grammar or code can be teased out. Consequently, scholars need not confront the diverse physical interactions that take place between people and things, and most ignore artifacts altogether. Citing Joseph Corn’s analysis of articles published in Technology and Culture (which appeared in a 1996 volume edited by W. D. Kingery, Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies), Boivin highlights the irony that even historians of technology seldom deal with actual objects. Boivin aims to restore materiality to material culture, arguing the likelihood [End Page 677] that the “material world . . . evoke[s] experiences that lie beyond the verbal, beyond the conceptual, and beyond even the conscious . . . [artifacts] do not necessarily symbolise anything else: their very power may lie in the fact that they are part of the realm of the sensual, of experience, and of emotion, rather than a world of concepts, codes, and meaning” (pp. 8–9). The emotive performance of material culture has an affinity with David Nye’s notion of “technological sublime,” the ability of grandiose constructions to inspire a sense of wonder, but Boivin insists that any artifact—whether religious icon or clay pot—can have emotive effects. More general still is her insistence that people, depending on their past experiences, may be engaged by artifacts in any sensory mode, from touch to taste. Clearly, the sensuous engagement of people with things—the very materiality of human life—eludes idealist conceptions. Even so, as behavioral archaeologists have demonstrated, a materialist perspective does not preclude a concern with symbolic meanings. Boivin argues that material culture also exercises agency—i.e., plays a causal role—in human affairs. To take the poignant example satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, we note that factory workers’ interactions are caused by the arrival of particular parts on a moving assembly line. Exploring wider implications of artifact agency while questioning social constructivism, Boivin elaborates Langdon Winner’s concept of autonomous technology, which underscores the potential of technologies to reshape society. (She does of course reject simplistic technological determinism.) Applying niche-construction theory from biology, Boivin shows how changes in material culture also affect human biological evolution. Humans create, through material culture, the niches to which they adapt as biological beings. She rehearses the textbook case of how dependence on dairy farming caused genetic change in humans. (Prior to the advent of dairy farming, adults did not drink milk and the production of lactase, needed for digesting milk sugar, diminished greatly. In societies that became dependent on dairy farming, however, adults continued to drink milk, which eventually led to genetic changes that prolonged the production of lactase.) Also, Boivin maintains, our big brain with its extraordinary executive functions evolved under the selective pressures created by tool use. Boivin believes, and I agree...

THE ROLE OF TOKENS - (C.) Rowan Tokens and Social Life in Roman Imperial Italy. Pp. xx + 247, colour ills. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Paper, £29.99, US110). ISBN: 978-1-009-01574-5 (978-1-316-51653-9 hbk). Open access.

Gibson, Kathleen R. and Tim Ingold, eds. Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xii + 483 pp. including index. $69.95 cloth. Wallman, Joel. Aping Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xii + 191 pp. including notes, references, and indices. $44.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 J.C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959). 2 See Richard N. Ostling, “The Search for the Historical Adam,” Christianity Today (June 2011). 3 Denis Alexander, http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/alexander_white_paper.pdf (last accessed Aug 12, 2011). 4 Denis Lamoureux. http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/Lamoureux_Scholarly_Essay.pdf. 5 Ostling, “Search for the Historical Adam,” 24. 6 John R. Schneider, “Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins: An ‘Aesthetic Supralapsarianism,’” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 62:3 (Sept 2010): 197. 7 Schneider, “Recent Genetic Science,” 198. 8 Eric Osborn, Irenaeus of Lyon (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 70–71. 9 Philip Rousseau, “Human Nature and Its Material Setting in Basil of Caesarea's Sermons on the Creation,” The Heythrop Journal 49 (2008): 228. 10 Basil Hexaemeron 1895.9.2. Lactantius (c.240–c.320) likewise did not discount the possibility that some animals could be spontaneously generated. 11 Basil quoted in Rousseau, 229. 12 David N. Livingstone and Mark A. Noll, “B.B. Warfield (1851–1921): A Biblical Inerrantist as Evolutionist,” Isis 91:2 (June 2000): 283. 13 David N. Livingstone, “B.B. Warfield, The Theory of Evolution and Early Fundamentalism,” Evangelical Quarterly 58:1 (Jan 1986): 69. 14 Mark Noll, “Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield on Science, the Bible, Evolution, and Darwinism,” Modern Reformation (May–June 1998): 7. 15 Joseph E. Illick, “The Reception of Darwinism at the Theological Seminary and the College at Princeton, New Jersey: Part II. The College,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 38 (Dec 1960): 115. 16 David N. Livingstone, “The Idea of Design: Vicissitudes of a Key Concept in the Princeton Response to Darwin,” Scottish Journal of Theology 37 (1984): 347. 17 Ibid. 18 Noll, “Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield on Science,” 6–7. 19 Ibid., 8. 20 David N. Livingstone, Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Vancouver: Regent University Press, 1997), 119. 21 Ibid., 118. 22 Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 2. 23 Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 74. 24 Numbers, The Creationists, 74. 25 Ibid., 200 ff. 26 For a brief overview of the narrative approach to scripture see David K. Clark, “Narrative Theology and Apologetics,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 36:4 (1993). For a more indepth discussion of the importance of Scripture as narrative see Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 27 Genesis 2:13. The Septuagint uniformly translates “Cush” as “Aθιoπíα” (Ethiopia). For a discussion of the geography of Eden see John H. Sailhamer, Genesis, Vol. 2, in The Expositor's Bible Commentary, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990), 42. 28 Gordon Wenham, “Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of Eden Story,” in I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1–11 (Sources for Biblical and Theological Study, Vol. 4), ed. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 399. 29 See James Barr, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). 30 Old Testament exegete John Sailhamer explains that “it should not be overlooked that the serpent is said to be one of the ‘wild animals’ (hayyat hassadeh) that the Lord God had made (cf. 1:25; 2:19). The purpose of this statement is to exclude the notion that the serpent was a supernatural being (Procksch, p. 32). ‘The serpent is none other than a serpent’ (Jacob, p. 102).” The word for serpent (Nachash) comes from the root which means to learn by experience, or diligently observe the signs of the world. The serpent is called ('awram)—subtle, shrewd, clever, wise, sensible, prudent, practical. Awram is etymologically related to (awrar)—a curse which stems from the breaking of covenant. 31 Ironically, it is “literalists” such as young earth creationists who abandon biblical literalism to use traditions outside the normative Protestant Canon in order to equate the serpent with Satan. If one is to take a literalist approach to scripture, as defined above, one should resist reading back into the Genesis text the deutero-canonical Wisdom of Solomon's interpretation of the serpent as Satan. It is clear the Genesis author considered the serpent to be a clever representative from the animal world and not a fallen angel. 32 In Genesis 2, verse 15, where God “took man and put him in the Garden of Eden” an uncommon term for “put” (wayyannihehu) is used that is elsewhere reserved for two specific purposes: “God's ‘rest’ or ‘safety,’ which he gives to man in the land (e.g., Gen 19:16; Deut 3:20; 12:10; 25:19), and the ‘dedication’ of something in the presence of the Lord (Exod 16:33–34; Lev 16:23; Num 17:4; Deut 26:4, 10).” Both nuances of this term may be understood to lie behind the author's use in Gen 2:15—“Man was ‘put’ into the garden where he could ‘rest’ and be ‘safe,’ and man was ‘put’ into the garden ‘in God's presence’ where he could have fellowship with God (3:8).” Sailhamer, The Expositors Bible Commentary, 45. 33 This is much closer to Irenaeus' understanding of the Fall than Augustine's. See Robert F. Brown, “On the Necessary Imperfection of Creation: Irenaeus' Adversus Haereses IV, 38.” Scottish Journal of Theology 28:1 (1975): 17–25. This pre-human understanding of the Fall likewise has implications for “the problem of the Fall without the Fall” as detailed by Robert J. Russell. See Robert J. Russell, Cosmology from Alpha to Omega: The Creative Mutual Interaction of Theology and Science (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 10–11. 34 See my discussion of animal morality in Chapter 7 in Joshua M. Moritz, Chosen From Among the Animals: The End of Human Uniqueness and the Election of the Image of God, PhD dissertation (Berkeley: GTU, 2011). For a discussion of animal morality and immorality within scripture see Joshua M. Moritz, “Animals and the Image of God in the Bible and Beyond,” Dialog 48:2 (2009). For the implications of this animal “Fall before the Fall” for the evolutionary theodicy problem see Joshua M. Moritz, “Evolutionary Evil and Dawkins' Black Box: Changing the Parameters of the Problem,” in The Evolution of Evil, ed. G. Bennett, M.J. Hewlett, T.Peters and R.J. Russell (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008), 143–188. 36 Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, revised ed. (Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1972), 70. 37 Phyllis A. Bird, “Theological Anthropology in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Leo G. Perdue (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 264. 38 James Barr, “The Image of God in the Book of Genesis: A Study of Terminology, ” Bulletin of the John. Rylands Library 51 (1968–1969), 13. 39 Horst Dietrich Preuss, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, trans. Leo G. Perdue (Edinburgh: T& T Clark, 1996), 115 40 Kathryn Tanner, “The Difference Theological Anthropology Makes,” Theology Today 50:4 (Jan 1994), 573. 41 Claus Westermann, Creation, trans. John H. Scullion, S.J. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 57–58. 42 Recently I have argued that the meaning of the imago Dei, is, in fact, best understood within the Hebrew framework of historical election. See Joshua M. Moritz, “Evolution, the End of Human Uniqueness, and the Election of the Imago Dei,” Theology and Science 9:3 (Aug 2011): 307–340. 43 The historicity of Adam is explicitly declared by Barth to be irrelevant. Tillich and Bultmann see only existential significance in the Genesis stories. Denis Lamoureux appears to arrive at a similar position. 44 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Contingency and Nature,” in Towards a Theology of Nature, ed. Ted Peters (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 74. 45 See John. H. Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary Ferngren (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and see Joshua M. Moritz, “Rendering unto Science and God: Is NOMA Enough?” Theology and Science. 7:4 (2009): 363–378. 46 For instance, as I was writing article I came across an NPR Morning Edition story entitled “Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve.” http://www.npr.org/2011/08/09/138957812/evangelicals-question-the-existence-of-adam-and-eve. The NPR piece quotes Dennis Venema, an Evangelical Christian biologist who says “it's clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population … And given the genetic variation of people today, scientists can't get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.” While it is true that H.C. Harpending, M.A. Batzer, M. Gurven, L.B. Jorde, A.R. Rogers, and S.T. Sherry, “Genetic Traces of Ancient Demography,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 95 (1998): 1961–1967, and others have argued for an ancestral population around 10,000 individuals, more recent estimates have found that 10,000 is the upper limit of the original human population size and that “the effective size of the ancestor population might have been as low as 700” (or even smaller). L.A. Zhivotovsky, N.A. Rosenberg and M.W. Feldman, “Features of Evolution and Expansion of Modern Humans, Inferred from Genomewide Microsatellite Markers,” American Journal of Human Genetics 72 (2003): 1171–1186. See also A.H. Bittles and M.L. Blacka, “Consanguinity, Human Evolution and Complex Diseases,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 1779–1786. Beyond this is the reality of lateral or horizontal gene transfer (HGT) in humans throughout their evolutionary history—a phenomenon which bypasses the normal processes of genetic mutation and which has dramatically impacted the human genome in ways that we are just now beginning to decipher. With HGT what is at stake is “a fundamental understanding of how life evolved and a deeper knowledge of the functioning of all genomes, including that of humans.” See J.R. Brown, “Ancient Horizontal Gene Transfer,” Nature Reviews Genetics 4:121 (2003): 121–132. This is not to mention the dramatic implications that current research in epigenetics has for our understanding and rethinking of the doctrine of original sin. Heritable non-Darwinian epigenetic processes have been critical in shaping mammalian brain evolution and behavior. See E.B. Keverne and J.P. Curley, “Epigenetics, Brain Evolution and Behaviour,” Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 29:3 (2008): 398–412; and Tamara B. Franklin et. al., “Epigenetic Transmission of the Impact of Early Stress Across Generations,” Biological Psychiatry 68:5 (2010): 408–415. The point here is not that the current data of science establish the existence of Adam and Eve or thereality of biologically inherited original sin, but rather, that because the details ofscience often change quite rapidly, theology must proceed in a philosophically informed manner and keep a discerning eye on the whole of science, while not too quickly embracing or condemning the current state or details of any given theory.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Ottoman Attempts to Catch Up with Europe