pg x - "there two clearly obersvable characteristics of human culture that mark it as qualitatively unique as well. The first is what has been called cumulative cultural evolution." artifacts that can lead to a "kind of cultural ratchet"

the second is "the creation of social institutions"

pg xiii - "Underlying these two ... are a set of species unique skills and motivations for cooperation."

"we refer to the underlying psychological processes that make these unique forms of cooperation possible as "shared intentionality." Shared intentionality involves, most basically, the ability to create with others joint intentions and joint commitments in cooperative endeavors."

pg xv - "two fundamental cooperative processes are critical for the human cultural ratchet...

first "humans actively teach one another things"

second "humans also have a tendency to imitate others in the the group"

pg xvii - "Our empirical research on cooperation in children and chimpanzees ..

(1) Altruism

(2) Collaboration

pg 3 - "One of the greate debates in Western civilization is whether humans are born cooperative and helpful or whether born cooperative and helpful and society later corrupts them (e.g., Rousseau), or whether they are born selfish and unhelpful and society teaches them better (e.g., Hobbes).

pg 5 - three main types of altruism based on the commodity involved

sharing goods such as food

helpful by aiding others with services

be informative by providing information (including gossip)

costs and benefits of each are different

pg 29 - "Researchers in our lab found something similar with a helping measure: children of this age more often help those who have been helpful to others.

pg 51 - "In the contemporary study of human behavioral evolution, the central problem is altruism, specifically, how it came to be."

pg 53 - "So mutualism might also be the birthplace of human altruism: a protected environment, as it were, to get people started in that direction.

pg 54 - "building human-style collaboration ... we do not face a prisoner's dilemma

rather we see a "stag-hunt in which everyone prefers to collaborate becasue of the reward of doing so brings to each of us and our compatriots."

pg 59 - three important processes for collaboration 1) coordination and communication, 2) tolerance and trust, and 3) norms and institutions

pg 106 - "Normal human ontongeny thus involves, necessarily, a cultural dimension that the ontogeny of other primates does not. Individual human beings must learn how others in their culture do thinks, and more over, how those other expect them to do things.

pg 107 - "Human beings are biologically adapted to grow and develop to maturity within a cultural context"

<!-- what about development in a particular ecological context -->

Forum section with different contributors

Joan B. Silk

pg 111 - "In a time when we have all too much evidence of the harm that humans can do to one another and to the planet, it is ironic that striking developments within the human sciences have highlighted our capacity for cooperation, our concern for the welfare of others, and our altruistic social preferences."

pg 113 - "only humans can orchestrate cooperation in large groups of individuals with imperfectly aligned preferences."

pg 120 - left with the question of "why we are able to coopeate and collaborate. Why do committees function as well as they do? The answer, I think, is that we have altruistic social preferences that motivate us to value the benefits to the group."

Carol S. Dweck

pg 125 - what makes us uniquely human - "not just the usual answer - that humans are incredibly smart --- but also that we are incredibly nice."

pg 126 - Tomasello proposes that - "young children are naturally helpful, informative, and generous..."

pg 128 - "infants learn to expect that others will or will not be helpful toward them. And different kinds of experiences can indeed shape the young child's own altruism toward others."

Brian Skyrms

pg 137 - "In Convention 91969), David Lewis explicitly introduced the notion of common knowledge,"

"For an item to be common knowledge among a group of agents, it is not enough that everyone know it. Everyone must know it (level 1) and everyone must know that everyone knows it (level 2) and so on for every infinite level.

pg 142 - "common knowledge is too strong an assumption for humans." instead "common ground",

"Common ground is stated in terms of mutual belief. ... "only goes up one level in the hierarchy of shared beliefs>"

pg 143 - "I suggest that we move from the high rationality approach of classical game theory to a a low rationality through adaptive dynamics. I have in mind two varieties of adaptive dynamics: evolution and reinforcement learning."

pg 145 - "Cooperation often involves various kinds of feedback mechanisms, but recursive mindreading, higher-order intentions, and mutual belief are only relevant concepts in very special cases."

Eizabeth S. Spelke

pg 155 - "Tomasello argues that the unique features of human cognition are rooted in an evolved, species-specific capacity and motivation for shared intentionality."

pg 156 - "five cognitive systems in young infants: what I call systems of core knowledge. These are systems for representing and reasoning about (1) inanimate, material objects and their motions, (2) intentional agents and their goal-directed actions, (3) places in the navigable environment and their geometric relations to one another, (4) sets of objects or events and their numerical relationships of ordering and arithmetic, and (5) social partners who engage with the infant in reciprocal interactions.

pg 159 - "Infants' object representaions therefore figure in the development of a host of uniquely human abilities.

pg 164 - "the ability to navigate by geometric maps. Three hallmarks of uniquely human cognition -- tool use, natural numbes, and geometry -- appear to be consequences of a uniquely human combinatorial capacity that is linked to natural language.

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<!-- Norton claims that complex and wicked problems can only be solved in the natural language of the population that is suffering from and addressing the problem. -->

pg 165 - "It is possible, however, that the causal arrow points in the opposite direction. Uniquely human forms of shared intentionality may depend upon our uniquely human capacity for combining core representations productively.

pg 167 - "Although young infants (and other animals) view other members of their species both as agents who act on objects and as partners who share their mental states.

"Failures to combine representations of actors and social partners could explain why nonhuman animals and young infants do not treat other people as communicators and collaborators, whos goal-directed actionas can be coordinated with their own through patterns of cooperation and shared attention.

"As Tomasellos's research beautifully reveals, shared intentionality - the triadic relationship of the self both to a social partner and to the objects of goal-directed actions ...