such extraordinary cognitive abilities, such as self-awareness, when many other species use tools, hunt, live in unstable environments, engage in group living and navigate complex social hierarchies, and perform elaborate mating displays (Flinn et al., 2005). The gorilla represents a particularly difficult anomaly for these models; despite documented tool use (Breuer et al., 2005) and social group living (Cipolletta, 2004), gorillas fail to consistently demonstrate mirror self-recognition (Gallup, 1985; Shillito et al., 1998) and the gorilla neocortex is relatively small when compared to other great apes (Dunbar et al., 2009). Given the apparent restriction of self-awareness to the great ape / human clade, it seems likely that a capacity for
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Successful navigation of this environment would require “online” continuous monitoring and a sense of personal agency – the understanding of the self as a causal agent with the ability to affect outcomes. This evolutionary model would explain, from an evolutionary perspective, why self-concept seems to be limited to the great apes. Although there are several extant arboreal primate species, today’s orangutans may provide the most direct example of the ancestral condition Povinelli and Cant have suggested – large, primarily arboreal, orthograde, and often executing complex clambering and brachiating movements. The emergence of bodily self-concept with arboreal existence leads the authors to hypothesize that failure of gorillas to pass the mirror test may instead be the secondary masking of self-concept capacity accompanying a developmental shift following a return to a primarily terrestrial existence; this may also explain why some gorillas may pass the mirror test with early developmental intervention. Notably, humans are an exception to this theory, being entirely terrestrial and demonstrating the greatest capacity for self-concept of the great apes; however, the authors suggest that, in humans, self-concept may have already been …show more content…
Gallup (1998) theorized that self-awareness is essential to social intelligence. One’s own experience can be used as a model to make inferences about the experiences of others, allowing for the developments of both competitive and cooperative social strategies. According to Gallup, this requires self-awareness, its benefits outweighing its theorized high cost of maintenance. The ability to make use of competitive and cooperative social strategies would have conferred a survival advantage and possibly a reproductive one as well (Gallup, 1997; 1998). Specifically, the expansion of self-concept has been theorized to have coincided with the move from jungle living to the savannah as hominids became bipedal, adopted a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and dispersed across the globe (Leary and Buttermore, 2003). In this way, self-awareness would have been expanded through natural and sexual selection. Gallup (1997) also pointed to the secondary loss of the capacity for self-awareness in the gorilla as an example where the selective pressures that favor self-awareness disappeared, noting that in the social structure of gorilla troops there tend to be male-dominated harems in which there is little to no direct competition for copulation. The ability to internally model the states of others would
Successful navigation of this environment would require “online” continuous monitoring and a sense of personal agency – the understanding of the self as a causal agent with the ability to affect outcomes. This evolutionary model would explain, from an evolutionary perspective, why self-concept seems to be limited to the great apes. Although there are several extant arboreal primate species, today’s orangutans may provide the most direct example of the ancestral condition Povinelli and Cant have suggested – large, primarily arboreal, orthograde, and often executing complex clambering and brachiating movements. The emergence of bodily self-concept with arboreal existence leads the authors to hypothesize that failure of gorillas to pass the mirror test may instead be the secondary masking of self-concept capacity accompanying a developmental shift following a return to a primarily terrestrial existence; this may also explain why some gorillas may pass the mirror test with early developmental intervention. Notably, humans are an exception to this theory, being entirely terrestrial and demonstrating the greatest capacity for self-concept of the great apes; however, the authors suggest that, in humans, self-concept may have already been …show more content…
Gallup (1998) theorized that self-awareness is essential to social intelligence. One’s own experience can be used as a model to make inferences about the experiences of others, allowing for the developments of both competitive and cooperative social strategies. According to Gallup, this requires self-awareness, its benefits outweighing its theorized high cost of maintenance. The ability to make use of competitive and cooperative social strategies would have conferred a survival advantage and possibly a reproductive one as well (Gallup, 1997; 1998). Specifically, the expansion of self-concept has been theorized to have coincided with the move from jungle living to the savannah as hominids became bipedal, adopted a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and dispersed across the globe (Leary and Buttermore, 2003). In this way, self-awareness would have been expanded through natural and sexual selection. Gallup (1997) also pointed to the secondary loss of the capacity for self-awareness in the gorilla as an example where the selective pressures that favor self-awareness disappeared, noting that in the social structure of gorilla troops there tend to be male-dominated harems in which there is little to no direct competition for copulation. The ability to internally model the states of others would