Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone

Theory of morphodynamic information processing: Linking sensing to behaviour

The traditional understanding of brain function has predominantly focused on chemical and electrical processes. However, new research in fruit fly (Drosophila) binocular vision reveals ultrafast photomechanical photoreceptor movements significantly enhance information processing, thereby impacting a fly's perception of its environment and behaviour. The coding advantages resulting from these mechanical processes suggest that similar physical motion-based coding strategies may affect neural communication ubiquitously. The theory of neural morphodynamics proposes that rapid biomechanical movements and microstructural changes at the level of neurons and synapses enhance the speed and efficiency of sensory information processing, intrinsic thoughts, and actions by regulating neural information in a phasic manner. We propose that morphodynamic information processing evolved to drive predictive coding, synchronising cognitive processes across neural networks to match the behavioural demands at hand effectively.

Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative

Theories of how humans came to be so ecologically dominant increasingly centre on the adaptive abilities of human culture and its capacity for cumulative change and high-fidelity transmission. Here we revisit this hypothesis by comparing human culture with animal cultures and cases of epigenetic inheritance and parental effects. We first conclude that cumulative change and high transmission fidelity are not unique to human culture as previously thought, and so they are unlikely to explain its adaptive qualities. We then evaluate the evidence for seven alternative explanations: the inheritance of acquired characters, the pathways of inheritance, the non-random generation of variation, the scope of heritable variation, effects on organismal fitness, effects on genetic fitness and effects on evolutionary dynamics. From these, we identify the open-ended scope of human cultural variation as a key, but generally neglected, phenomenon. We end by articulating a hypothesis for the cognitive basis of this open-endedness.

Group Coordination Catalyzes Individual and Cultural Intelligence

A large program of research has aimed to ground large-scale cultural phenomena in processes taking place within individual minds. For example, investigating whether individual agents equipped with the right social learning strategies can enable cumulative cultural evolution given long enough time horizons. However, this approach often omits the critical group-level processes that mediate between individual agents and multi-generational societies. Here, we argue that interacting groups are a necessary and explanatory level of analysis, linking individual and collective intelligence through two characteristic feedback loops. In the first loop, more sophisticated individual-level social learning mechanisms based on Theory of Mind facilitate group-level complementarity, allowing distributed knowledge to be compositionally recombined in groups; these group-level innovations, in turn, ease the cognitive load on individuals. In the second loop, societal-level processes of cumulative culture provide groups with new cognitive technologies, including shared language and conceptual abstractions, which set in motion new group-level processes to further coordinate, recombine, and innovate. Taken together, these cycles establish group-level interaction as a dual engine of intelligence, catalyzing both individual cognition and cumulative culture.