Reflexiones sobre la explicación evolutiva en ciencias cognitivas: El origen de la cognición social humana como estudio de caso

Since the original approach to natural selectionof Charles Darwin, several disciplines have includedevolutionary explanations in their research fields. However,it is common to find in them an integral agreement tothe ideas of modern evolutionary synthesis, particularly inbiologically oriented human and cognitive sciences. In thiswork it will be presented a brief discussion about possibleshortcomings that evolutionary arguments show whenconstructing hypothesis about social evolution. In a firstmoment, it was relevant the proposition of a differentialmechanism, acquired as cognitive adaptation, that allowedhumans to represent others’ mental states in order to predicttheir behavior. We will advance in the explanation ofsocial behavior suggesting additional explanatory alternativesthat arise from the critics to the ideas of adaptationand genetic inheritance in biological and cognitive sciences.It will be briefly discussed to what extent the studiesabout cooperative breeding seem to show a relation betweenparental behavior and the emergence of social skillsthat human possess since birth, and the rest of great apesonly develop depending on complex environmental variables.Developmental systems where morphological inheritances,motor skills and socioecological factors convergewould be the ideal explanatory scenario to the reviewedproblems.