Biological evolution influences the development and learning of individuals, and individual learning shapes the evolution of culture; learning, in turn, can be shaped by culture.
Indeed, making sense of the human world requires not only the brain in the body but also a group of brains interacting as part of the human social world. Arbib refers to this as an EvoDevoSocio approach. Biological evolution influences the development and learning of individuals, and individual learning shapes the evolution of culture; learning, in turn, can be shaped by culture. To understand language, the human brain has to be considered a part of those systems. The evolution of language was polycausal, Arbib says. No one switch was thrown: there were lots of switches. And it did not happen all at once but took a great deal of time.