After reviewing historical aspects of brain evolution, this accessible book provides an enjoyable overview of several general principles of brain evolution, culminating in discussions of mammalian and human brains and a framework for future research.

We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in “social cognitive neuroscience,” although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences.

Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of physical or psychological pain on other living creatures, sometimes indifferently, but often with delight. Though cruelty is an overwhelming presence in the world, there is no neurobiological or psychological explanation for its ubiquity and reward value. This target article attempts to provide such explanations by describing three stages in the development of cruelty. Stage 1 is the development of the predatory adaptation from the Palaeozoic to the ethology of predation in canids, felids, and primates. Stage 2, through palaeontological and anthropological evidence, traces the emergence of the hunting adaptation in the Pliocene, its development in early hominids, and its emotional loading in surviving forager societies. This adaptation provides an explanation for the powerful emotionshigh arousal and strong affectevoked by the pain-blood-death complex. Stage 3 is the emergence of cruelty about 1.5 million years ago as a hominid behavioural repertoire that promoted fitness through the maintenance of personal and social power. The resulting cultural elaborations of cruelty in war, in sacrificial rites, and as entertainment are examined to show the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.

Effective violence prevention must begin with perpetrators, not victims. If the upstream approaches to violence prevention advocated by the public-health model are to be effective, psychologists must be able to provide violence prevention workers with a fine-grained understanding of perpetrator gratifications. This is a distasteful task that will compel researchers to interact with torturers and abusers, and to acknowledge that their gratifications are rooted in a common human past. It is nonetheless an essential step in developing effective strategies for the primary prevention of violence.

The present article examines how people's belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one's afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is “like” to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people's interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive “system” dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment.

The behavioral sciences have come under attack for writings and speech that affront sensitivities. At such times, academic freedom and tenure are invoked to forestall efforts to censure and terminate jobs. We review the history and controversy surrounding academic freedom and tenure, and explore their meaning across different fields, at different institutions, and at different ranks. In a multifactoral experimental survey, 1,004 randomly selected faculty members from top-ranked institutions were asked how colleagues would typically respond when confronted with dilemmas concerning teaching, research, and wrong-doing. Full professors were perceived as being more likely to insist on having the academic freedom to teach unpopular courses, research controversial topics, and whistle-blow wrong-doing than were lower-ranked professors (even associate professors with tenure). Everyone thought that others were more likely to exercise academic freedom than they themselves were, and that promotion to full professor was a better predictor of who would exercise academic freedom than was the awarding of tenure. Few differences emerged related either to gender or type of institution, and behavioral scientists' beliefs were similar to scholars from other fields. In addition, no support was found for glib celebrations of tenure's sanctification of broadly defined academic freedoms. These findings challenge the assumption that tenure can be justified on the basis of fostering academic freedom, suggesting the need for a re-examination of the philosophical foundation and practical implications of tenure in today's academy.

This target article considers the relation of fluid cognitive functioning to general intelligence. A neurobiological model differentiating working memory/executive function cognitive processes of the prefrontal cortex from aspects of psychometrically defined general intelligence is presented. Work examining the rise in mean intelligence-test performance between normative cohorts, the neuropsychology and neuroscience of cognitive function in typically and atypically developing human populations, and stress, brain development, and corticolimbic connectivity in human and nonhuman animal models is reviewed and found to provide evidence of mechanisms through which early experience affects the development of an aspect of cognition closely related to, but distinct from, general intelligence. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of emotion in fluid cognition and on research indicating fluid cognitive deficits associated with early hippocampal pathology and with dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis stress-response system. Findings are seen to be consistent with the idea of an independent fluid cognitive construct and to assist with the interpretation of findings from the study of early compensatory education for children facing psychosocial adversity and from behavior genetic research on intelligence. It is concluded that ongoing development of neurobiologically grounded measures of fluid cognitive skills appropriate for young children will play a key role in understanding early mental development and the adaptive success to which it is related, particularly for young children facing social and economic disadvantage. Specifically, in the evaluation of the efficacy of compensatory education efforts such as Head Start and the readiness for school of children from diverse backgrounds, it is important to distinguish fluid cognition from psychometrically defined general intelligence.

Simulation constraints cannot help in explaining afterlife beliefs in general because belief in an afterlife is a precondition for running a simulation. Instead, an explanation may be found by examining more deeply our common-sense dualistic conception of the mind or soul.

van der Velde's &de Kamps's neural blackboard architecture is similar to “activation trace diagrams” (Clancey 1999), which represent how categories are temporally related as neural activations in parallel-hierarchical compositions. Examination of other comprehension examples suggests that a given syntactic categorization (structure assembly) can be incorporated in different ways within an open composition by different kinds of anchoring relations (delay assemblies). Anchors are categorizations, too, so they cannot be reused until their containing construction is completed (bindings are resolved).

Dispassionate cruelty and the euphoria of hunting or battle should be distinguished from the emotional savoring of victims' suffering. Such savoring, best called negative empathy, is what puzzles motivational theory. Hyperbolic discounting theory suggests that sympathy with people who have unwanted but seductive traits creates a threat to self-control. Cruelty to those people may often be the least effortful way of countering this threat.

Although I find Blair's case for arguing for the distinction between fluid cognitive functions and general intelligence less than compelling, I believe him. However, I also believe that what is required next is a theory of both general intelligence and fluid cognitive functions that articulates the distinction. In the absence of this, more data, particularly of the neuroscience variety, is likely to stall rather than advance progress.

The study by Ceci et al. shows that academic behavior associated with the core principles of intellectual freedom is more shaped by institutional incentives than by organizational culture. From an organizational theoretical point of view, this is quite an unexpected finding, not least because we do believe universities to be fairly strong and explicit cultures that should be successful in socialization.

Mesoudi et al. argue that the current inability to identify the means by which cultural traits are acquired does not debilitate their project to draw clear parallels between cultural and biological evolution. However, I suggest that cultural phenomena may be accounted for by biological processes, unless we can identify a cultural “genotype” that carries information from person to person independently of genes.

Vertical/compatible theoretical integration provides an alternative way of unifying sociocultural anthropology and related disciplines. It involves analyzing theoretical statements for their implicit and explicit assumptions at multiple levels of analysis and then determining whether these assumptions are compatible with consensus in the relevant disciplines (e.g., does the sociological theory include an assumption at odds with consensus psychology?). Incompatibilities indicate a need for further research. This approach is much more likely to salvage the bulk of humanities-oriented anthropology than is that of the authors.

Although the target article is groundbreaking and creatively conceived, there are troubling questions regarding its methodology and conclusions. The sample in the authors' study was drawn from a popular magazine's lists; there is no recognition of the fact that most faculty are now off the tenure track; and comparisons are made with the British system with no supporting data.

Research on religion can advance understanding of social cognition by building connections to sociology, a field in which much cognitively oriented work has been done. Among the schools of sociological thought that address religious cognition are: structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory, phenomenology, and, most recently, exchange theory. The gulf between sociology and cognitive science is an unfortunate historical accident.

In this commentary, I review diverse lines of research conducted at both the macrosocial and microbehavioral level that dispute the view that cruelty is inherently gratifying. Expressions of pain and suffering typically inhibit rather than reinforce cruel conduct in humans. With regard to functional value, cruelty has diverse personal and social effects, not just the alluring benefits attributed to it.

In agreement with Blair, I favor the idea of dissociative patterns in cognitive performance, even more when it comes to development. However, such dissociations are present not only between fluid cognition and general intelligence, but also within fluid cognition itself. Heterogeneity of executive attention, even when indexed with a single paradigm, is further discussed in relation to anterior cingulate cortex.

Striedter's accessible concept-based book is strong on the macroevolution of brains and the developmental principles that underlie how brains evolve on that scale. In the absence of greater attention to microevolution, natural selection, and sexual selection, however, it is incomplete and not fully modern on the evolution side. Greater biological integration is needed.

Blair's account, like the intelligence field in general, treats many distinct constructs as if they were practically interchangeable – this is not self-evident. Paradigm integration and rationalization of redundant nomenclature are important for the continued development of understanding. The prior task is to demonstrate where synonymity of constructs across paradigms occurs, and where it fails. We present arguments why this is the case.

The universal early experience of all humans, which means being totally dependent on caretakers who attempt to inculcate impulse control, should be considered as the psychological framework for the creation of significant supernatural agents. The same early experiences put us at the center of a moral universe, but there is no necessary connection between the two processes. We do not need disgruntled ancestors to make us behave; disgruntled parents will do.