Evolution of distinctively human cognition explored in new book

LAWRENCE — What separates us from all the other living things on this planet? The answer is cognition … supposedly.

But what human cognition is (and isn’t) has never been explicitly, universally defined.

“For it to be distinctively human cognition, it will have to be the kind of thing only humans show — though not all humans need to show it,” said Armin Schulz, professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas.

His new book titled “It’s Only Human: The Evolution of Distinctively Human Cognition” explores what makes such cognition unique, suggesting its evolution is built on a feedback loop of innate representations, forms of cultural learning and technology. It’s published by Oxford University Press.

“The book tries to provide an explanation of how humans came to think in the ways that we do,” Schulz said. “Who are we thought-wise? What kind of thinkers are we? Why do we get to be the way that we are?”

Many examples have been proposed over the centuries when seeking to define human cognition. The most customary is the fact humans are the lone literate species.

“Only humans read and write. There’s no nonhuman animal that reads and writes,” Schulz said. “But the reality is that most humans don’t read and write. There are still very few literate cultures, and these took forever to develop. So it’s weird to say, ‘Oh, literacy is this typically human thing.’ That’s true in one way — but it’s also quite exceptional as far as human thought is concerned.”

The same goes for language. Yet nonhuman animals communicate in all sorts of ways.

“I want to explain why it is that humans do something that maybe we find in nonhuman animals, too, but dial it up a little bit. It’s not entirely unheard of in the nonhuman world; it just may be more strongly pronounced or has a different signature,” he said.

Schulz said his research contains equal parts anthropology, biology, economics and philosophy. The book utilizes these approaches to scrutinize what he considers are the key elements that set humans on a “slightly different trajectory” from other species. These include:

• Innate expectations about the world
• Tools
• Social learning.

“For instance, we have an ability to focus our concentration on a very wide array of tasks,” he said. “That’s quite cool because lots of animals can only focus on certain tasks at a time. But I can earn a Ph.D. in philosophy over a period of years while doing other completely separate things, and there’s no direct reward — like, I don’t get fed for this. We humans can do that kind of thing.”

He said the key isn’t to focus on any one of these three aspects. Rather, it’s the combination of them that helps define human cognition. He views the framework for this analysis as a feedback loop.

“Our cognition process is more comparable to a guitar amplifier. To get the sound, it’s not a matter of turning one knob. It’s a matter of turning the gain and then dialing in enough treble and enough master volume — then that’s the sound,” he said.

“All these things interact with each other to produce an outcome which is actually quite different from where you started.”

Growing up in Mainz, Germany, Schulz eventually studied philosophy and economics in London. While in graduate school, he became captivated by the foundations of decision-making. But the theoretical models he analyzed felt quite abstract to him.

His first book, “Efficient Cognition: The Evolution of Representational Decision Making” (MIT Press, 2018), explores how organisms interact with the environment. His next, “Structure, Evidence, and Heuristic: Evolutionary Biology, Economics, and the Philosophy of Their Relationship” (Routledge, 2020), offers the first systematic treatment of the philosophy of science underlying evolutionary economics.

“The more ‘meta aspect’ that ties my books together is a certain way of approaching the problems, which is trying to do justice to the complexity of these issues. What all my books are trying to do is to say, ‘You know, it’s just not that simple.’ There’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and you must do justice to all sides of the debate,” said Schulz, who’s been at KU since 2014.

“With the latest book, it’s not just culture, it’s not just tools, it’s not just language. There’s not merely one thing that makes us human.”