Evolutionary Perspectives on Mind, Brain, and Education

Understanding about human origins informs our understanding of what it means to be human. It is reasonable, therefore, to consider that an evolutionary perspective can provide insight into the nature and processes of human learning and education. This article reviews how ideas about evolution have influenced educational thinking in the past. It then considers how understanding of brain development and function is helping to inspire ‘‘new thinking’’ about evolution. The review converges on a range of benefits that may arise from the inclusion of evolutionary concepts within the field of mind, brain, and education. These benefits include scrutiny of evolutionary neuromyth, reconsideration of the cultural and political status of education, insight into notions of individual difference, and help with stimulating and directing research efforts aimed at improving educational outcomes. EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION There is a long history of evolution influencing educational thought. In 1881, Charles Darwinwrote to the American Social Science Association discussing potential childhood studies that ‘‘would probably give a foundation for some improvement in our education of young children’’ (Darwin, 1882). Many contemporaries made their own interpretation of Darwin’s ideas, which also inspired Haeckel (1866) to argue that ontogeny (individual development) recapitulates phylogeny (the development of the species). Long after mainstream science had abandoned recapitulation theory, its influence continuedto trouble education.TheDoman-Delacato theoryof development proposed that efficient neurological functioning required the acquisition of specific motor skills in the correct evolutionary order (Doman, 1968). According to this view, if a particulardevelopmental stage is skipped, suchaswhenachild 1Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol Address correspondence to Paul Howard-Jones, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, 35 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1JA, UK; e-mail: [email protected]. learns to walk before crawling, then this has a detrimental effect on the later development of more complex processes such as language. Treatment might encourage the child to rehearse crawlingmovements, in order to repattern their neural connections and improve their academic progress. Scientific reviews have concluded that the theory is unsupported, contradicted, or without merit (Chapanis, 1982; Cohen, Birch, & Taft, 1970; Cummins, 1988; Robbins & Glass, 1968), and practical approachesbasedupon such ideashavebeen revealed as ineffective (American Association of Pediatrics, 1998). The blossoming of neuroscience in the 1970s raised awareness of how some brain structures appear broadly conserved from species that preceded Homo sapiens. In 1978, neuroscientist Paul Maclean described his ‘‘triune brain hypothesis’’ in the National Society for the Study of Education yearbook (MacLean, 1978). Maclean considered the brain to comprise three formations (three ‘‘brains’’) that reflected our evolutionary past: the reptilian brain (including the brain stem), the paleomammalian brain (limbic system), and the neomammalian brain (including the cerebral hemispheres). Application usually makes the questionable assumption that education can influencewhich brain is dominating (Nummela &Rosengren, 1986). Maclean’s proposal of ‘‘directional evolution,’’ in which brain parts appear in a manner characterizing human notions of progress, is anthropocentric and difficult to justify. Indeed, all vertebrates demonstrate a brain structure with the three distinct divisions of forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. Evolution appears to have proceeded via modifying these three parts rather than constructing each division in an additive and linear manner (Krubitzer & Seelke, 2012). Despite such flaws, Maclean’s theory proliferated in the many ‘‘brain-based’’ learning programmes of the 1980s, cropping up recently in theories of moral education (Narvaez, 2008). Since the mid-1980s, scholarship on the evolution of the human mind has been dominated by a set of concepts known as ‘‘Evolutionary Psychology’’ (EP), and also referred to as the ‘‘Tooby and Cosmides tradition’’ (Panksepp & Panksepp, 2000) or ‘‘Santa Barbara School’’ (Heyes, 2012a). This asserts that the brain comprises a set of computationally distinct modules which support core cognitive domains, each evolved Volume 8—Number 1 © 2014 International Mind, Brain, and Education Society andWiley Periodicals, Inc. 21 Evolutionary Perspectives on MBE to enhance survival or reproductive success during the Pleistocene period. Claims for the existence of brain/mindmodules areoftendebatedwithin cognitiveneuroscience (seeColombo, 2013 for review). These claims have chiefly centered on basic sensory/perceptual andmotor processes,with continuing contention around, for example, whether we possess a genetically ingrained cortical region for face recognition (Cohen & Tong, 2001; Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006). Evolutionary psychologists, however, took things further by suggesting selection (as ingrained genetic adaptations) of various domain-specific abilities including an aptitude for folk psychology (to understand issues such as kinship), folk biology (to identify fauna and florawhen hunting and gathering), and folk physics (to navigate and construct tools). EP perspectives propose these specializations still bias modern human behavior. In the last decade, Geary (2008, 2010) has proposed that the EP approach can provide a set of premises and principles for an evolutionarily informed science of education. Geary suggests a Pleistocene-derived bias in our learning processes that results in a widening gap between accumulating cultural knowledge(referredtoas ‘‘biologicallysecondaryknowledge’’) and the forms of folk knowledge and abilities that emerge with children’s self-initiated activities (‘‘biologically primary knowledge’’). Geary sees education as addressing this gap, that is, by ensuring that a core set of biologically secondary skills and knowledge is common to all society. The EP approach, he argues, helps explain why children often find secondary types of learning (e.g., reading) more difficult than primary types of learning (e.g., speaking), and emphasizes the importance of effortful learning in educational contexts. Others have taken Geary’s ideas and applied them to working memory (Paas & Sweller, 2012), learning (Schuler, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2012), problem-solving (Retnowati, Ayres, & Sweller, 2010), and child development (King & Bjorklund, 2010). This application of EP to education has been criticized for lacking power and falsifiability (Halpern, 2008), and for its lack of biological evidence (Ellis, 2008). Initial concerns about EP itself focused on using the archeological record to generate testable psychological hypotheses about modern behavior. This, it has been argued, may create evolutionary ‘‘just so’’ stories whose criteria for acceptance are too loose, with the option of substituting adaptive stories until one fits, without due consideration of entirely different kinds of explanation (Buller, 2005; Gould & Lewontin, 1994). New voices of criticism have arisen from the neuroscience community, where some consider EP to be ‘‘potentially idle speculation’’ until a broader consideration of evolution of the mind/brain is included (Panksepp & Panksepp, 2000, p. 113). The plastic nature of the cortex (as evidenced by the neural function of damaged regions emerging again in adjacent regions), does not easily support the concept of genetically governed modules dedicated to very specific types of environmental knowledge such as folk biology and folk physics. Gene activity, interacting with environmental and behavioral influence, biases the localization of function to particular regions and to develop in particular ways, but there is scant evidence to suggest that the specificity of this genetic bias extends to determining EP-typemodules for flora, kinship, and so on. Modern brain/mind patterns that are apparently intrinsic may result from socially and culturally acquired environmental and behavioral influences during an individual’s development. These arguments echo a more established modularity debate within cognitive neuroscience. For example, the well-researched ‘‘theory of mind’’ (TOM) module (Frith, Morton, & Leslie, 1991) remains contested by those adhering to a more neuroconstructivist perspective of development (Westermann et al., 2007). However, the specificity and Pleistocene focus of EP modularity is more contentious than the hypothesized existence of a TOM module, with evidence of ancestral precursors of TOM behavior amongst other members of the primate family (Buttelmann, Schutte, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2012; Call & Tomasello, 2008). Modularity arguments aside, and assuming a Pleistocene-related bias in present-day behavior could be proven, would its magnitude be of educational significance? It seems unlikely such bias would compare in size with that arising from our motivational and emotional systems,whose influence onmemory iswell documented (e.g., Shohamy&Adcock, 2010). Therefore, until there is convincing evidence of their efficacy in education, EP concepts may have difficulty contributing central premises and principles to an evolutionary perspective on education that is comfortably aligned with contemporary neuroscience. In contrast to EP, a more foundational approach to including neuroscience perspectives in evolutionary thinking has focused on similarities in brain, behavior, and various basic psychological features across species (e.g., Herculano-Houzel, 2012; Heyes, 2012a; Panksepp, Moskal, Panksepp, & Kroes, 2002). An important argument characterizing this approach is that the identification of uniquely human features of brain development and function can only be confirmed by excluding their occurrence in other related species. This can provide a basis for considering how the human brain diverged from these other species over deep time, including other primates that are both extant and, using fossil-based estimates of metrics such as brain size, now extinct. Understanding of our unique genetically based characteristics can be combined with archeological evidence and insight to suggest when such changes occurred and relate these to contemporaneous behavioral changes in the history of our rise to top predator. The hope here is that such an interrelation of the evidence across disciplines may help create a narrative of human evolution in terms of brain and mind that provides insights into the neural and mental processes underlying our potential as a species, and helps illuminate the role of education in realizing this potential. 22 Volume 8—Number 1 Paul A. Howard-Jones The rest of this article adopts this foundational approach by reviewing what is special about the human brain and considering how it has evolved across deep time. It will then focus on the ‘‘new thinking’’ regarding the genetic and cultural acquisition in prehistory of uniquely-human symbolic abilities (spoken language, literacy, and numeracy) and explore how these insightsmay impact on the emerging field ofmind, brain, and education. WHATMAKES OUR BRAIN SO SPECIAL? The human brain is often celebrated as amazing, but how muchmore amazing is it than those of other species?Our brain mass is several times smaller than that of African and Asian elephants (Shoshani, Kupsky, &Marchant, 2006) and a range of differentwhales (Marino, 1998).Ourbrainsdo, just, have the largest amount of cortex as a percentage of whole brain mass (around 76%), but with chimpanzees (Stephan, Frahm, & Baron, 1981), horses, and short-finned whales (Hofman, 1985) achieving 73, 75, and 73%, our lead is hardly commensurate with the status we assign to our cognitive abilities. Cortical folding, or gyrification, has long been considered a means to accommodate an increasing cortical surface within the same confined space (Welker, 1990) and might be another way in which humans distinguish themselves from other primates. However, gyrification has been shown to follow order-specific rules,withno significantdifference ingyrification as a function of brain size between extant hominids andoldworldmonkeys, such as the baboon and mandrill (Zilles, Palomero-Gallagher, & Amunts, 2013). A case for our supremacy might justifiably use more sophisticated measures. Brain size does not scale up like other body parts, so perhaps we should take account of the absolute size of an animal.Over a range of animals, a power law emerges when brain size is mapped against body size, with deviation from this trend termed the encephalization quotient (EQ). Such deviation might suggest extra neural processing capacitybeyond that required formonitoring andcoordinating a larger body and so EQ has been used to represent an external measure of animal intelligence. Based on EQ, the human brain has around7 timesgreaterbrain:bodymass ratio thanexpected for a mammal, and threefold greater than expected even for a primate. However, a study of the relation between EQ and cognitive ability across nonhuman primates shows little predictive power between EQ and intelligence and suggests brain size is, after all, a better predictor in this context (Deaner, Isler, Burkart, & van Schaik, 2007). The work of Hurculano-Houzel and her colleagues reveals an order-specific relationship between neuron density and brain size (Herculano-Houzel, 2012; Herculano-Houzel et al., 2011; Sarko, Catania, Leitch, Kaas, & Herculano-Houzel, 2009). Relative to other mammals, primates accommodate neurons more efficiently with size across species, such that a new species can acquire a 10-fold increase in neuron number through only a 10-fold increase in brain size if it is a primate, compared with a 50-fold increase in brain size required for a rodent (Herculano-Houzel, 2012). The human brain resembles a scaled-up version of other extant primate brains (HerculanoHouzel, 2009) with a larger cortex and consequently the greatest population of neurons of all animals (estimated by Herculano-Houzel at 86 billion1 compared with, for example, a gorilla’s 33 billion neurons). So, despite our sense of primacy, the human brain does not appear biologically extraordinary in relation to those of other species (Herculano-Houzel, 2012), with our chief biological advantage arising from our enlarged brain being a primate brain. This advantage may not have been unique to H. sapiens. The interpretation of brain architecture from a fossilized skull is very limited, but it can provide a reasonable estimate of the size of the living brain that once occupied it (Holloway, Sherwood, Hof, & Rilling, 2009). Application of the primate neuronal equation to the fossil record suggests archaic Homo members such as heidelbergensis and neanderthalensis had reached capacities of 76–90 billion neurons,which arewithin the range of variation found in modern humans (Herculano-Houzel & Kaas, 2011). Across mammalian orders, it also seems that, even when the cortex expands and dominates brain volume, the ratio of neurons in the cortex (associated with higher order cognition) to those in the cerebellum (associated with sensorimotor coordination) remains roughly constant. This is important because the neocortex ratio (size of cortex to rest of the brain) has also been used to suggest a radical difference between ourselves and other primates. Yet, increasing this ratio may not reflect a change in distribution of neurons or suggest a shift toward higher level processing (HerculanoHouzel, 2011). AN EVOLUTIONARY NARRATIVE