Becoming Human

A Theory of Ontogeny

De: Michael Tomasello

Narrado por: Charles Constant

A radical reconsideration of how we develop the qualities that make us human, based on decades of cutting-edge experimental work by the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Here, Michael Tomasello proposes a complementary theory of human uniqueness, focused on development. Building on the seminal ideas of Vygotsky, his data-driven model explains how those things that make us most human are constructed during the first years of a child's life.

Tomasello assembles nearly three decades of experimental work with chimpanzees, bonobos, and human children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that starkly differentiate humans from their closest primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity.

Becoming Human places human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory and shows how biology creates the conditions under which culture does its work.

©2019 The President and Fellows of Harvard College (P)2018 Tantor

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Theoretically daring, experimentally ingenious, and astonishingly generative.” (Susan Gelman, University of Michigan)

Interesting, but tedious

Like Frans de Waal and Carl Safina, Michael Tomasello is interested in what makes us uniquely human, and what animals can tell us about that. His topic is cognitive development, and he contrasts that of humans with our closest great ape relatives, with a heavy dose of cross-cultural comparisons to better illuminate what we owe to our evolutionary heritage and what is culturally determined. Tomasello identifies 8 uniquely human cognitive capacities which are adumbrated, but not fully articulated in other great apes, qll of which contribute to what he calls “shared intentionality theory.” In short, humans, but not our closest primate relatives, are able to conceive of a “we” that is composed of, but independent from, “you” and “I,” and that “we” can have a joint goal. I think this is interesting as far as establishing human uniqueness goes, but man is this book a slog to get through. Intensely self-referential, Tomasello writes like a German enlightenment philosophe, lacking either de Waal’s candor or Safina’s sense of poetic lyricism. This is not an approachable book for the curious lay reader, it is treatise directed at an academic audience with a firm knowledge of ethology, philosophy, and developmental psychology. The first chapter and last two chapters are all I would recommend—they cover the core concepts at a fairly accessible level—but the majority of the book is turgid and dull.