O papel da ontogenia na evolução da cooperação humana

Michael  Tomasello; Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera

doi:10.21665/2318-3888.v13n25p249

Authors

Michael Tomasello Duke University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1649-088X
Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera Universität Konstanz https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6523-5471

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21665/2318-3888.v13n25p249

Keywords:

Human cooperation. Shared intentionality. Cooperative breeding. Evolution of human ontogeny. Collaborative foraging.

Abstract

To explain the evolutionary emergence of uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation, Tomasello et al. (2012) proposed the interdependence hypothesis. The key adaptive context in this account was the obligate collaborative foraging of early human adults. Hawkes (2014), following Hrdy (2009), provided an alternative account for the emergence of uniquely human cooperative skills in which the key was early human infants’ attempts to solicit care and attention from adults in a cooperative breeding context. Here we attempt to reconcile these two accounts. Our composite account accepts Hrdy’s and Hawkes’s contention that the extremely early emergence of human infants’ cooperative skills suggests an important role for cooperative breeding as adaptive context, perhaps in early Homo. But our account also insists that human cooperation goes well beyond these nascent skills to include such things as the communicative and cultural conventions, norms, and institutions created by later Homo and early modern humans to deal with adult problems of social coordination. As part of this account, we hypothesize how each of the main stages of human ontogeny (infancy, childhood, adolescence) was transformed during evolution both by infants’ cooperative skills “migrating up” in age and by adults’ cooperative skills “migrating down” in age.

Submission: Mar 15, 2025 ⊶ Accepted: Jun 11, 2025

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Author Biographies

Michael Tomasello, Duke University

Foi professor de psicologia e antropologia na Universidade de Emory e codiretor do Instituto Max Planck de Antropologia Evolutiva e do Centro de Pesquisa de Primatas Wolfgang Kohler. Realizou pesquisas pioneiras sobre as origens da cognição social, contribuindo para a psicologia comparada e do desenvolvimento, a linguística e a antropologia. É professor de psicologia e neurociências na Universidade de Duke.

Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera, Universität Konstanz

Cientista visitante no Laboratório de Normatividade da Universidade de Konstanz. Estuda o papel das atitudes metaéticas na evolução da cooperação humana e a intersecção entre filosofia, psicologia e biologia evolutiva. Fez o doutorado na Universidade Nacional Australiana, e foi pesquisador nas universidades de Tóquio e de Berna e nos institutos Max Planck e Konrad Lorenz.

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