This commentary samples some of the major bodies of counterevidence omitted by Howe et al., including the strong relationship between IQ and academic excellence, the limited effects of early stimulation programs, and the measurement of musical aptitudes. The authors' selective review and analysis of the surveyed literature, especially studies of prodigies and in behavioral genetics, is discussed.

Heyes argues that nonhuman primates are unable to imitate, recognize themselves in mirrors, and take another's perspective, and that none of these capabilities are evidence for theory of mind. First, her evaluation of the evidence, especially for imitation and mirror self-recognition, is inaccurate. Second, she neglects to address the important developmental evidence that these capabilities are necessary precursors in the development of theory of mind.

Although humans are endowed with domain-specific constraints for acquiring informal biology, its construction requires considerable experience with living things and their cultural representations. Less experienced adults may not know what constitutes generic species, and young children may rely on personification rather than category-based inference. Atran's postulate of the living-kind module that promptly produces universal folk taxonomy does not seem tenable.

Byrne & Russon propose that priming can account for the imitation of simple actions, but they fail to explain how the behavior of another can prime the observer's own behavior. They also propose that imitation of complex skills requires a sequence of acts tied together by a program, but they fail to rule out the role of trial-and-error learning and perceptual/motivational mechanisms in such task acquisition.

Atran adds a synthesis of much of the literature on folk-biological classification to important new experimental data relevant to long-standing inferences about the structure of folk taxonomies. What we know about such systems is somewhat overstated, and key issues remain unresolved, especially concerning the centrality of “generic species,” the primacy of “general purpose” taxonomies, and domain specificity.

The question, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” is logically identical to the question, “Does the chimpanzee have a soul?” It is a peculiarity of our culture that we talk about anyone having a mind, and such talk is unhelpful for a science of behavior. The label “killjoy hypothesis” is an ad hominem attack.

Although Howe et al.'s survey shows little evidence for the talent account, it is premature to conclude that individual differences in achievement can be attributed largely to training and early experience. Moreover, such an empiricist account has problematic social implications, especially in cultures in which effort is emphasized. The aptitude account is thus proposed as a third alternative.

Imitation research has been hindered by (1) overly molecular analyses of behaviour that ignore hierarchical structure, and (2) attempts to disqualify observational evidence. Program-level imitation is one of a range of cognitive skills for scheduling efficient novel behaviour, in particular, enabling an individual to purloin the organization of another's behaviour for its own. To do so, the individual must perceive the underlying hierarchical schedule of the fluid action it observes and must understand the local functions of subroutines within the overall goal-directed process. Action-level imitation, copying strings of actions linearly without any such understanding, is less valuable for acquiring complex behaviour and may often have other, social functions. At present, we lack a mechanistic understanding of the abilities underlying program-level imitation that make it possible for the underlying structure of complex actions to be dissected visually and recreated in behaviour.

The idea of the orderly output constraint is compared with recent findings about the representation of vowels in the auditory cortex of an animal model for human speech sound processing (Ohl & Scheich 1997). The comparison allows a critical consideration of the idea of neuronal “feature extractors,” which is of relevance to the noninvariance problem in speech perception.

Rather than dealing with the important issues in the interpretation of behavioural data, Heyes seems only to reiterate lessons well-learned before she first reviewed the topic of primate deception. She also appears to misrepresent a series of published analyses. Despite her emphatic denials, the commonsense view is the best: informed observations and experiments can both provide evidence of theory of mind.

Evaluating the current locus equation under ideal conditions identifies important and unexpected parameter dependencies. Locus equation (LE) utility, either as a valid laboratory tool or possible invariant cue, depends on stringent specification of critical parameters and rigorous empirical testing.

Atran argues that an autonomous ethnobiological information-processing module exists. This module imputes a “deep causal essence” to folk-biological taxa and uses a hierarchy of taxonomic ranks. I argue that Atran's own data suggest that rank is not an essential feature of the ethnobiological module, and that ethnobiological causal essences may be generalized to other domains and vice versa, limiting its autonomy.

Howe et al.'s rejection of traditional discussion of talent is clearly acceptable, but their alternative has a weakness. They stress practice and hard work while referring vaguely to some basic biological substrate. High scores on a valid test of general intelligence provide a cultural-genetic basis for talented performance in a wide variety of specialties, ranging from engineering to the humanities. These choices may be entirely environmentally determined, and the highest levels of achievement do require practice and hard work.

Heyes's proposed study for testing whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind is (1) too strong because it requires that the animals apply mental concepts to the interpretation of both their own experiences and the behaviours of others, and (2) too weak because dispositional rather than representational understanding of “seeing” is sufficient to pass it.

Neurobiologically inspired theories of speech perception such as that proposed by Sussman et al. are useful to the extent that they are able to constrain such theories. If they are simply intended as suggestive analogies, their usefulness is questionable. In such cases it is better to stick with the Gibsonian approach of attempting to isolate invariants in speech and to demonstrate their role for the perceiver in perceptual experiments.

Our recapitulation of the work by Howe et al. is a clear approval of the passages in which the talent concept is critically questioned. On the other hand, Howe et al. must themselves come to terms with most of the accusations they place at the door of talent researchers. The evidence they present to support the experience concept is lacking with respect to current theoretical and methodological standards.

Atran's putative module for folk biology is evaluated with respect to evidence from patients showing category-specific impairments for living kinds. Existing neuropsychological evidence provides no support for the primacy of categorization at the generic species level. We outline reasons for this and emphasize that such claims should be tested using inductive reasoning tasks.

The tautological implications of “innate talents” are outlined. Analogies are drawn between the present review and the nature–nurture controversies of 40 years ago. Ferguson's (1954; 1956) theoretical positions are proposed as a context in which to consider present and future attempts to resolve this long-standing issue.

The arguments for the orderly output constraint concern phylogenetic matters and do not address the ontogeny of combination-specific neurons and the corresponding processing mechanisms. Locus equations are too variable to be strongly predetermined and too inconsistent to be easily learned. Findings on the development of speech perception and underlying auditory processing must be taken into account in the formulation of neural encoding theories.

Heyes's attempt to reinterpret research on primate cognition from the standpoint of radical behaviorism is strong on dialogue and debate but weak on evidence. Recent evidence concerning self-recognition, for example, shows that her arguments about differential recovery from anesthetization and species differences in face touching as alternative accounts of the behavior of primates in the presence of mirrors) are invalid.