Reflexiones sobre la explicación evolutiva en ciencias cognitivas: El origen de la cognición social humana como estudio de caso

Abstract

Since the original approach to natural selection of Charles Darwin, several disciplines have included evolutionary explanations in their research fields. However, it is common to find in them an integral agreement to the ideas of modern evolutionary synthesis, particularly in biologically oriented human and cognitive sciences. In this work it will be presented a brief discussion about possible shortcomings that evolutionary arguments show when constructing hypothesis about social evolution. In a first moment, it was relevant the proposition of a differential mechanism, acquired as cognitive adaptation, that allowed humans to represent others’ mental states in order to predict their behavior. We will advance in the explanation of social behavior suggesting additional explanatory alternatives that arise from the critics to the ideas of adaptation and genetic inheritance in biological and cognitive sciences. It will be briefly discussed to what extent the studies about cooperative breeding seem to show a relation between parental behavior and the emergence of social skills that human possess since birth, and the rest of great apes only develop depending on complex environmental variables. Developmental systems where morphological inheritances, motor skills and socioecological factors converge would be the ideal explanatory scenario to the reviewed problems.