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Primate behavior is complex, and as behavioral complexity increases so too must the complexity of the systems responsible for controlling the behavior. This chapter examines the neuronal systems that are responsible for this control. It begins by examining one of the essential features of such systems. High-level or executive control operates on highly processed information that is increasingly abstracted from the concrete world of specific sensory stimuli and motor responses. It then looks at the evidence that the prefrontal cortex—an area of the brain that has increased dramatically in size over the course of mammalian evolution—enables this abstraction. It considers the various psychological constructs that rely on abstraction, including high-level rule use, strategies, and task sets. It then examines how this high-level control is organized. It shows that studies investigating how humans implement high-level information suggest that there is a hierarchical organization of such information within the prefrontal cortex. The chapter examine whether there is evidence for such an organization in the monkey prefrontal cortex. Finally, it considers how high-level information in the prefrontal cortex interacts with other regions of the brain in order to control behavior.

This chapter suggests a strong correlation between social and cognitive development. The emergentist coalition model (ECM) is a useful tool in reevaluating our concept of the relationship between social cognition and language in typical populations. The model could aid us in gaining a better understanding of how the behaviours interrelate in atypical populations and may point to the new frontier of research in language and neuropsychology. The ECM approach is not limited to the mere search for a single-factor explanation for language development. It motivates consideration of multiple correlated factors when analyzing complex behaviour, and the search for both the biological foundations of language and the role of the interacting factors along the path toward language competence.

This contribution sets the stage for the following selection of articles addressing general aspects of the hierarchy theory of evolution. It does so by reviewing basic principles of hierarchical systems in general and biological nested hierarchies in particular. More specifically, the article provides formal definitions of a hierarchy, levels of organization, and considers the nature of emergence that arises as a consequence of a hierarchical architecture. The overall dynamics of the hierarchical systems is best described by the synergy between intra-level interactions (best approached using the network theory) and the inter-level relationships (interpreted as emergent constraints). These basic properties of hierarchical systems are then used to represent the overarching model of the structure of the organic world, consisting of two interacting systems: the economic (ecological) hierarchy of interactors and the genealogical hierarchy of replicators. This model is at the heart of the hierarchy theory of evolution, providing a novel ontological framework for inferring causality of a great diversity of evolutionary phenomena.