Taking Natural History Seriously in Studying the Social Formation of Thinking

Michael Tomasello's [2014] ambitious goal in his new book A Natural History of Human Thinking is to describe the evolution and, to a lesser extent, the development of uniquely human forms of thinking. His approach to this problem is to imagine the evolution of humans from a common ancestor with chimpanzees and to “reconstruct the evolutionary origins of this uniquely human objective-reflective-normative thinking” (p. 4). Titles including the...