Um olhar evolucionista para os mecanismos cognitivos associados às trocas sociais

Consider the source:
The evolution of adaptations for decoupling and metarepresentation Leda Cosmides and John Tooby To appear in:
Metarepresentation (Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science)
Dan Sperber, Editor. NY: Oxford University Press
Copyright 2000 Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
Caution: The print version may differ in minor respects from this draft.
Posted only for scholarly/educational use. Please contact the publisher directly for permission to reprint.

The cognitive niche and local information
Humans are often considered to be so distinct a species that they are placed outside of the natural order entirely, to be approached and analyzed independently of the rest of the living world. However, all species have unusual or differentiating characteristics, and it is the task of an evolutionarily informed natural science to provide a causal account of the nature, organization, origin, and function, if any, of such characteristics, without exaggerating, mystifying, or minimizing them.
Yet, even when contextualized within the extraordinary diversity of the living world, humans continue to stand out, exhibiting a remarkable array of strange and unprecedented behaviors - from space travel to theology - that are not found in other species. What is at the core of these differences? Arguably, one central and distinguishing innovation in human evolution has been the dramatic increase in the use of contingent information for the regulation of improvised behavior that is successfully tailored to local conditions - an adaptive mode that has been labeled the cognitive niche (Tooby and DeVore 1985). If you contrast, for example, the food acquisition practices of a Thompson's gazelle with that of a !Kung San hunter, you will immediately note a marked difference. To the gazelle, what looks to you like relatively undifferentiated grasslands is undoubtedly a rich tapestry of differentiated food patches and cues; nevertheless, the gazelle's decisions are