Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
Heyes advances a strong and provocative thesis: many cognitive abilities we assume are biological adaptations -- reading, imitation, theory of mind, even the capacity for language learning -- are better understood as culturally transmitted "gadgets" assembled during development from simpler, domain-general mechanisms.
Natural selection provided the starter kit (attention, associative learning, working memory); culture built the specialised tools on top.
The argument challenges both the nativist tradition of Chomsky and Pinker and the more moderate gene-culture coevolution of Henrich and Tomasello.
It is rigorously argued, grounded in experimental evidence, and uncomfortable for anyone who prefers tidy nature-or-nurture dichotomies.
A book that changes how you think about what is innate.
Central argument
Heyes argues that cognitively sophisticated capacities — imitation, theory of mind, language acquisition — are not genetically hardwired instincts shaped by natural selection, but culturally transmitted 'gadgets' assembled during individual development from simpler, domain-general mechanisms such as associative learning, attention, and working memory. The genome provides a minimal biological substrate; the specialised cognitive tools are constructed through cultural inheritance. This directly challenges nativist accounts (Chomsky, Pinker) and also parts ways with gene-culture coevolution theorists like Henrich and Tomasello, who still grant more innate scaffolding to social cognition than Heyes is willing to accept.
Critique
The account's explanatory power depends heavily on the claim that domain-general mechanisms are genuinely sufficient to bootstrap complex cognitive gadgets — but this sufficiency is often asserted more than it is demonstrated in developmental detail. Critics can reasonably ask whether 'associative learning plus cultural input' is doing real explanatory work or simply relocating the mystery: if culture builds the gadgets, what cognitive architecture makes humans uniquely capable of the kind of cultural transmission required in the first place? The risk is a regress that the framework does not fully resolve.
Why it matters for product
If sophisticated cognitive capacities are assembled through structured cultural exposure rather than being innate, it follows that the thinking quality of a product team is less a hiring problem and more an environment and practice design problem — onboarding sequences, decision rituals, critique norms, and shared frameworks are not soft culture but the actual mechanism by which product judgment is developed. For a CPO, this reframes organisational design: the question is not who has innate product sense, but what cultural transmission system the organisation has deliberately built to grow it at scale.