Evolving the construction-ready brain

Humans construct their physical worlds in part by designing and constructing new tools, habitations, and in due course diverse buildings and, in some cases, towns and cities (but also change the environment in many other ways) and construct their symbolic worlds by putting words together to tell stories, articulate plans, tell lies, seek truth, and much more (Arbib, 2012, 2021). This talk offers hypotheses that address a key question for anthropogeny: How did biological evolution yield humans with the “construction-ready brains” and bodies that made us capable of the cultural evolution that created the diversity of our mental and physical constructs that we know today? The framework for all this is EvoDevoSocio – the idea that biological evolution yields biological mechanisms for both development and adult function of members of a species, but that social interaction is an important part of that environment, and that in humans cultural evolution has played the crucial role in changing the social, physical and increasingly symbolic and technological environments in which most humans now develop.