Abstract
Evolutionary accounts of the origins of mind reading and empathy have emphasized the reproductive and social value of understanding other human minds. On this view, selective pressures within human communities contributed to our capacity to imagine ourselves in the spatiotemporal and cognitive place of other individuals. I argue that these social accounts of empathy neglect the phenomenon of mind reading between humans and other species. In particular, I argue that the cognitive demands on early human hunters privileged the ability to take on the perspective of potential prey in tracking. These selective pressures on mind reading not only have serious consequences for how we view empathy but may also have had substantive consequences for how we read other human minds.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
In this section, I am indebted to Robert Lurz for a helpful discussion on the environmental and cognitive conditions on what he calls allocentric spatial perspective taking.
- 4.
At least compared with the traditional imagery of Pleistocene hunting—like driving animals over cliffs or raining boulders down on mammoths.
- 5.
See Bramble and Lieberman (2004) for a discussion of the adaptive significance of endurance running (and its physiological basis) in humans.
- 6.
Of course, using modern hunter-gatherers to draw these comparisons is not unproblematic. However, in these cases the comparison seems less fraught than usual. The hunts themselves cover similar landscapes and involve tools that are little different from those employed in prehistoric times. In addition, the fact that persistence hunting has been observed in many unrelated modern hunter-gatherer societies suggests that the strategy was likely common in prehistory as well (see Liebenberg 2006 for a survey of persistence hunting in Australia, the American Southwest, Mexico, several different African locations, and South America).
- 7.
This is not intended to suppose that no other cognitive strategies would prove useful in this context. Early humans would likely have availed themselves of many distinct predation strategies for animals based on the full complement of their observable behaviors.
- 8.
This is, of course, a legitimate empirical question. It may turn out that perspective taking with animals may not prove to be an effective hunting strategy. Hunter gatherers may be inclined to use these techniques, even if they do not increase the likelihood of hunting success.
- 9.
This is supported by modern anthropological observations that “[m]en who fail to hunt, or fail to help in cooperative hunts are generally not invited to participate on future forest treks” (Gurven and Hill 2009). This suggests that effective hunting has significant consequences for one’s ability to provide for one’s family. In a meta-analysis, Gurven notes “Good hunters have been shown to display higher reproductive success almost everywhere the relationship has been investigated” (2006, 81).
- 10.
An early version of this theory was called “the show-off hypothesis” (Hawkes 1991).
- 11.
Both the subject matter of these images and those created from templates of body parts suggest a preponderance of male artists (Guthrie 2004), a point that is relevant to the discussion that follows. Nicholas Humphrey argues that the similarity of cave painting to artistic works by autistic children—which also show more attention to animals than other humans—demonstrates dramatic cognitive difference between the cave painters and modern humans (Humphrey 1998). Given the strong connection between autism and deficits in mind reading of other humans, Humphrey’s theory does not appear to be incompatible with my hypothesis.
- 12.
Liebenberg (2006) notes that there have been no observed cases of persistence hunting involving women and more generally, in a meta-analysis of hunting among hunter-gatherers, men alone hunt in 166 of the 179 societies examined.
- 13.
Space limits me to only one example, but Baron-Cohen develops his case relative to many different lines of inquiry. See Baron-Cohen (2003).
- 14.
This chapter has benefited from countless comments from both readers and audience members. I would like to thank Mary-Catherine Harrison for introducing me to the idea of empathy that is the foundation of this chapter and also Justine Kingsbury for a close and detailed reading of a late draft of the text and Robert Lurz for an enlightening set of conference comments. I would also like to thank John Baker, Peter Carruthers, Alan Gibbard, Nythamar de Oliveira, Ellen Fridland, Lila Hart, and many others for their comments and questions at presentations of this work. I am also grateful to Liz Swann for her valuable suggestions and careful editing of this text.
References
Alden, E. (2004). Why do good hunters have higher reproductive success? Human Nature, 15(4), 343–364.
Baron-Cohen, S. (2003). The essential difference: Men, women and the extreme male brain. London: Penguin.
Baron-Cohen, S. (2009). Why so few women in math and science? In C. Sommers (Ed.), The science on women and science (pp. 7–23). Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. London/New York: Random House/Basic Books.
Bramble, D., & Lieberman, D. (2004). Endurance running and the evolution of homo-erectus. Nature, 432(7015), 345–352.
Carrier, D. (1984). The energetic paradox of human running and hominid evolution. Current Anthropology, 25(4), 483–495.
Carruthers, P. (1996). Simulation and self-knowledge: A defence of the theory-theory. In P. Carruthers & P. K. Smith (Eds.), Theories of theories of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carruthers, P. (2002). The roots of scientific reasoning: Infancy, modularity and the art of tracking. In P. Carruthers, S. Stich, & M. Siegal (Eds.), The cognitive basis of science (pp. 73–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Currie, G. (2011). Empathy for objects. In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and psychological perspectives (pp. 82–98). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Curtis, G. (2006). The cave painters: Probing the mysteries of the world’s first artists. New York: Knopf.
Dunbar, R. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493.
Dunbar, R. (1993). Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16(4), 681–735.
Dunbar, R. (2000). The origin of the human mind. In P. Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (Eds.), Evolution and the human mind (pp. 238–253). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldman, A. (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology and neuroscience of mindreading. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gurven, M., & Hill, K. (2009). Why do men hunt? A re-evaluation of “Man the Hunter” and the sexual division of labor. Current Anthropology, 50(1), 51–74.
Gurven, M., & von Rueden, C. (2006). Hunting, social status and biological fitness. Biodemography and Social Biology, 53(1), 81–99.
Guthrie, R. Dale (2004). The Nature of Paleolithic Art. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Harrison, M. C. (2011). How narrative relationships overcome empathic bias: Elizabeth Gaskell’s empathy across difference. Poetics Today, 32(2), 255–288.
Hawkes, K. (1991). Showing off: Tests of an hypothesis about men’s foraging goals. Ethology and Sociobiology, 12, 29–54.
Holekamp, K. E. (2007). Questioning the social intelligence hypothesis. Trends in Cognitive Science., 11, 65–69.
Holliday, T. (1998). The ecological context of trapping among recent hunter-gatherers: Implications for subsistence in terminal Pleistocene Europe. Current Anthropology, 39, 711–719.
Hrdy, S. (2009). Mothers and others, the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Humphrey, N. K. (1976). The social function of intellect. In P. P. G. Bateson & R. A. Hinde (Eds.), Growing points in ethology (pp. 303–317). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Humphrey, N. K. (1998). Cave art, autism, and the evolution of the human mind. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 8(2), 165–191.
Krantz, G. (1968). Brain size and hunting ability in earliest man. Current Anthropology, 9(5), 450–451.
Liebenberg, L. W. (1990). The art of tracking: The origin of science. Cape Town: David Philip.
Liebenberg, L. W. (2006). Persistence hunting by modern hunter gatherers. Current Anthropology, 47(6), 1017–1025.
Nichols, S. (forthcoming). Mindreading and the philosophy of mind. In J. Prinz (Ed.), The Oxford handbook on philosophy of psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Preston, S., & De Waal, F. (2002). Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25(1), 1–20.
Sellars, W. (1956). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1, 253–329.
Trout, J. D. (2009). The empathy gap: Building bridges to the good life and the good society. New York: Viking/Penguin.
Zahavi, A., & Zahavi, A. (1997). The handicap principle: A missing piece of Darwin’s puzzle. New York: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sarnecki, J. (2013). The Emergence of Empathy in the Context of Cross-Species Mind Reading. In: Swan, L. (eds) Origins of Mind. Biosemiotics, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5419-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5419-5_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5418-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-5419-5
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)