The Evolved Apprentice

Sterelny's central argument is that what makes humans distinctive is not a single cognitive breakthrough but a package: learning in cooperative niches, extended childhood, active teaching, and the coevolution of culture and biology. The "apprentice" model replaces both the nativist story (we are born with special modules) and the blank-slate story (culture does everything) with something more interesting — an evolved capacity for structured social learning that compounds across generations. The book connects directly to Tomasello's work on shared intentionality and cultural cognition but frames it within a broader evolutionary ecology. For anyone interested in how organisations transmit knowledge, how teams learn, or why human cooperation is so unusual in the animal kingdom, this is the evolutionary foundation.