O projeto de Tomasello envolve mostrar como diferenças naturais entre humanos e outros animais permitem que o ser humano se desenvolva como um animal cultural, dotado de linguagem. E para isso, para descrever os resultados dessa psicologia evolutiva, onde pressões evolutivas causariam predisposições a serem selecionadas, nada melhor que comparar infantes com macacos, que tanto nos aparentam, não apenas fisicamente, mas cognitivamente, especialmente em relação a crianças de até 3 anos. E o que essas crianças desenvolvem de tão especial, e que pode ser defendido como independente da cultura? A predisposição à cooperação, a se colocar no lugar do outro, a ter intencionalidade coletiva, a construir uma visão moral e uma visada de um ponto de vista objetivo (da comunidade). Assim o livro, pacientemente, relatando experimentos comparativos e hipóteses, vai nos convencendo de algo que sooa simples, ao final: como nossa predisposição para a cooperação, desde bebês, vai permitindo comportamentos e desenvolvimentos cognitivos afinados ao social, de modo a permitirem a aculturação (a inclusão nas diferentes culturas), em um patamar completamente diferente do dos macacos. ( )

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Tomasello’s scope is large. He ties the development of human cognition and human sociality together, resulting in synthesizing insights about social norms & moral identity. This in not only a comparative psychology book, but an important work on ethics too. Truly a tour de force, and the first theory I’ve come across that convincingly brings cognition, evolution and ethics together – not in a normative way, but by describing the pathways of how these things arise, starting with newborn babies.

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At first, I was a bit suspicious of Tomasello’s claims: I have read quite a lot of Frans de Waal and the likes, and my intellectual stance the last decade or so had been to not overestimate human uniqueness – not in language skills, not in cognition, etc. I considered differences between humans and other animals basically a matter of degree.

To a certain extent this obviously still holds, but one of the merits of Tomasello is that he uses large sets of experimental data that clearly show there are two things that are unique in humans: “shared intentionality” and “collective intentionality”. Basically, the fact that we humans do things together, know that we do things together and have elaborate insights in other humans’ mental states that influence our own mental states. So it’s not only cooperation itself that is important, but the fact that it is a form of recursive cooperation.

Language obviously is important for all of this, and so this is not only an ethics book, but one that should interest linguists too. The same goes for the cultural transmission of knowledge: instructed learning basically doesn’t exist in the rest of the animal kingdom, so yes, pedagogy too.

Rather than try to summarize Tomasello’s theory, in the remainder of this review I’ll do two things: first I’ll list an extensive amount of the information I found particularly interesting – take a look I’d say, it’s the juice of this review – and I end with a short bit on the book as a book: a few words on my reading experience, not the theory itself, so that interested readers better know what to expect.

Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig ( )