Abstract
The anthropoid primates are known for their intense sociality and large brain size. The idea that these might be causally related has given rise to a large body of work testing the 'social brain hypothesis'. Here, the emphasis has been placed on the political demands of social life, and the cognitive skills that would enable animals to track the machinations of other minds in metarepresentational ways. It seems to us that this position risks losing touch with the fact that brains primarily evolved to enable the control of action, which in turn leads us to downplay or neglect the importance of the physical body in a material world full of bodies and other objects. As an alternative, we offer a view of primate brain and social evolution that is grounded in the body and action, rather than minds and metarepresentation. This article is part of the theme issue 'Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory'.
Highlights
The anthropoid primates are known for their intense sociality and large brain size
We offer a view of primate brain and social evolution that is grounded in the body and action, rather than minds and metarepresentation
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, another social brain hypothesis (SBH) was on offer [17,18,19]; one that was less concerned with functional explanations for why large brains have evolved in the primate order, and was instead focused on the question of whether regions of the primate brain were specialized for sensing and responding to particular kinds of bodily social stimuli—facial expression, eyes gaze, head and body orientation and biological motion [17,18,19]
Summary
The social brain hypothesis (SBH) is well established as an explanation for the link between large brains and intense sociality among the anthropoid primates [1,2,3,4,5]. We wish to make a case for reincorporating a more 2 Brother’s-like view into theories of primate brain evolution for three inter-related reasons: (i) recent comparative analyses have called into question the link between group size and neocortex size in the terms put forward by the SBH [29,30,31], as well as demonstrating the importance of non-cortical areas, the cerebellum, in primate brain evolution [32,33]; (ii) there is growing recognition that brains evolved first and foremost to control bodies, such that cognition is better conceived of as a set of processes that mediate the adaptive control of bodies in dynamic, unpredictable environments—so-called ‘4E cognition’ [34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41]—and a move away from the traditional ‘disembodied’ view of cognition as a purely brain-based process involving the elaboration, manipulation and transformation of mental representations of the outside world; and (iii) the concept of ‘neural reuse’ [42,43], which suggests that much local neural structure is evolutionarily (and developmentally) conserved, but combined and recombined in different ways across different organisms and species to serve a diverse array of purposes. We return to the topic of the cerebellum below in our consideration of human uniqueness
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