Tomasello

If I understand Tomasello's introduction correctly, he seems to be saying that human cognition is what it is because at some point in our evolution, something evolved or was triggered that allowed us to learn from one another socially. The sentence that summed this up the best for me was, "Human beings evolved a new form of social cognition, which enabled some new forms of cultural learning, which enabled some new processes of sociogenesis and cumulative cultural evolution" (7). This was really fascinating to me. We tend to think of evolution as a slow, even process. In our own case, however, we experienced one key change (social cognition) and we were able to evolve in a different way, not just because nature slowly molded us, but because we looked at and learned from each other. 

I have always wondered at the fact that human cognition is so different from that of any other animal, but that we are so closely related to other primates. The reason seems almost circular. There was one small change, according to Tomasello, in our development as homo sapiens and since then the way that we have culturally evolved is determined by the cultural evolution itself. I'm not sure if that even makes sense. Still, it seems important to note that Tomasello plans to combine biology, sociology and history in his book. It seems that so far we have only been able to look at concepts of human though through one of these lenses. Still, it is apparent that humans are affect by them all. Perhaps this will somehow relate back to our discussions on understanding and knowledge. These both may be affected by the nature of our development.