Search Results

This chapter looks at how philosopher Kim Sterelny endorses the main contours of Robert Boyd's argument that humans are outliers in their capacity to adapt to many environments. However, Sterelny asks whether Boyd goes too far in reducing the role of “our distinctive human intelligence” in explaining humans' ecological adaptability. Sterelny at least partly defends the “library” or “Big Brain” model that Boyd argues against. Tacit, practical know-how is a form of knowledge. In addition, Sterelny contends that Boyd relies too heavily on a simple and “conformist” or “trusting social learning heuristic.” As a final point, Sterelny wonders whether and how social learning has changed across “domains and across time.”

This chapter explores economist Paul Seabright's argument that there is a “darker dimension to what makes us human,” which Robert Boyd largely leaves aside. Human beings are the most ecologically adaptable and massively cooperative species on the planet. Seabright argues that humans are also the most spectacularly and violently competitive, and the most deviously manipulative of all species. This might seem an incoherent description, but in fact the latter qualities are deeply implicated in the former ones. It is precisely the fact of humans' extraordinary cooperativeness that allows them to create the massive resource gains that provoke their competitiveness and manipulativeness. Indeed, Seabright contends that “a much larger part of the communication that takes place around norms in most societies is about individuals manipulating other individuals” than one would think from Boyd's examples.

This book offers a visionary account of dance as vital art, one that positions dance as a catalyst in the development of human consciousness, compassion, ritual proclivity, and ecological adaptability. It describes three elements that work together to compose a formal yet flexible understanding designed to illuminate existing dance phenomena while catalyzing the creation of new ones. First, to dance is to create and become patterns of sensation and response. Second, to dance is to move in ways that cultivate a sensory awareness of the dancer's participation; that is, to cultivate a sensory awareness of the self as movement-in-the-making. Third, to dance is to participate consciously in a rhythm of bodily becoming by using sensory awareness as a guide in creating and becoming patterns of sensation and response that realize the body's potential to move. When these three criteria are met, the dancing that happens enables the dancer to acquire knowledge that the book terms ecokinetic.