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    Comments on Kim Sterelny’s Essay (2011) "From Hominins to Humans"
    Comments on Kim Sterelny’s Essay (2011) "From Hominins to Humans"
    Comments on Kim Sterelny’s Essay (2011) "From Hominins to Humans"
    Ebook29 pages15 minutes

    Comments on Kim Sterelny’s Essay (2011) "From Hominins to Humans"

    By Razie Mah

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    About this ebook

    The full title of Kim Sterelny’s 2011 essay is “From hominins to humans: how sapiens became behaviorally modern”. The article addresses the so-called “sapien’s paradox”.
    What is the sapien’s paradox?
    Anatomically modern humans appear in the fossil record over 100,000 years ago. However, fully modern behaviors are not in evidence until much later. In particular, the Upper Paleolithic of Europe starts around 50,000 years ago, showing fully modern behaviors.
    Current anthropological speculation fails to explain the uneven progress of our human ancestors towards modern competence.
    Sterelny presents a conceptual model of behavioral modernity based on niche construction. The niche involves cultural information. The adaptation concerns the reliable transmission of information. Reliable transmission allows more cultural information to accumulate. In this way, the adaptation constructs the niche.
    The goal of these comments is to frame Sterelny’s argument using the category-based nested form, particularly, the interscope. Such comments cohere to the foundational hypothesis found in The Human Niche.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRazie Mah
    Release dateAug 3, 2019
    ISBN9781942824787
    Comments on Kim Sterelny’s Essay (2011) "From Hominins to Humans"
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    Razie Mah

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      Comments on Kim Sterelny’s Essay (2011) "From Hominins to Humans" - Razie Mah

      Comments on Kim Sterelny’s Essay (2011) From Hominins to Humans

      By Razie Mah

      Published for Smashwords.com

      2019

      Notes on Text

      This work comments on an article by Kim Sterelny in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (volume 366, 2011, pages 809-822). The full title is From hominins to humans: how sapiens became behaviorally modern.

      These comments re-articulate the author’s argument from the relational framework found in The Human Niche.

      ‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

      Prerequisites: A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form, A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction

      Recommended: Comments on Clive Gamble, John Gowlett and Robin Dunbar’s Book (2014) Thinking Big, Speculations on Thomism and Evolution and (a course on) The Human Niche.

      Table of Contents

      The Sapiens Paradox

      An Egg-centric Metaphor

      Construction and the Human Niche

      Behavioral Modernity and Accumulating Cognitive Capital

      The Sapiens Paradox

      0001 Kim Sterelny contributes to a theme issue on human niche construction.

      Niche construction occurs when an adaptation alters the actuality underlying its niche. The actuality underlying a niche is present (in the broadest sense of the word) across generations. In niche construction, the adaptation alters that actuality in a predictable manner.

      Typically, the term adaptation associates

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