5 Symbolic Thought and the Evolution of Human Morality

While the cognitive, perceptual, and emotional capacities of humans and apes share much in common (e.g. there is a core set of abilities that makes humans fundamentally different from apes and other animals in kind, not just in degree. There are no documented cases of other animals dancing to rhythmic sounds, intentionally producing art, or spontaneously generating and manipulating meaningful symbols. Although some animals have learned to use what appear to be symbols in a rudimentary fashion 2002), they do not generate them spontaneously in the wild and cannot do so in the fl exible, generative, and recursive manner of humans (Petitto While chimpanzees and bonobos can be trained to associate a meaning with an arbitrary sign, establishing such an association typically takes many trials (Petitto & Seidenberg, 1979). Humans still have associative learning in common with other animals, but in addition humans have one-shot learning of associations among arbitrary categories of things and events. While there are instances of one-shot associative learning in the animal world, such as the Garcia effect, where animals learn to avoid the food last eaten before becoming nauseous (even when the food could not have caused the nausea), cases such as the Garcia effect are the exception that proves the rule. One-shot learning is possible in such special cases because certain animals are hardwired to make particular kinds of one-shot associations, such as between nausea and food. In general, however, animals, unlike humans, are not hardwired for one-shot learning if the learning takes place