This target article's handling of theory and data and the range of evidence surveyed for its main contention fall short of normal BBS standards. However, the contention itself is reasonable and can be supported if one rejects the “knowledge” metaphor for linguistic competence and accepts that “syntactic principles” are no more than the way the brain does language.

Bowers et al. counter deep neural networks (DNNs) as good models of human visual perception. From our color perspective we feel their view is based on three misconceptions: A misrepresentation of the state-of-the-art of color perception; the type of model required to move the field forward; and the attribution of shortcomings to DNN research that are already being resolved.

The human capacity for culture is a key determinant of our success as a species. While much work has examined adults’ abilities to create and transmit cultural knowledge, relatively less work has focused on the role of children (approx. 3-17 years) in this important process. In the cases where children are acknowledged, they are largely portrayed as acquirers of cultural knowledge from adults, rather than cultural producers in their own right. In this paper, we bring attention to the important role that children play in cultural adaptation by highlighting the structure, function, and ubiquity of the large body of knowledge produced and transmitted by children, known as peer culture. Supported by evidence from diverse disciplines, we argue that children are independent producers and maintainers of these autonomous cultures, which exist with regularity across diverse societies, and persist despite compounding threats. Critically, we argue peer cultures are a source of community knowledge diversity, encompassing both material and immaterial knowledge related to geography, ecology, subsistence, norms, and language. Through a number of case studies, we further argue that peer culture products and associated practices — including exploration, learning, and the retention of abandoned adult cultural traits — may help populations adapt to changing ecological and social conditions, contribute to community resilience, and even produce new cultural communities. We end by highlighting the pressing need for research to more carefully investigate children's roles as active agents in cultural adaptation.

steels & belpaeme's (s&b's) simulations contain all the right components, but they are put together wrongly. color categories are unrepresentative of categories in general and language is not merely naming. language evolved because it provided a powerful new way to acquire categories (through instruction, rather than just the old way of other species, through trial-and-error experience). it did not evolve so that multiple agents looking at the same objects could let one another know which of the objects they had in mind, co-coining names for them on the fly.

The cognitive gadgets theory proposes to reform evolutionary psychology by replacing the standard nativist and internalist approach to modularity with a cultural constructivist one. However, the resulting “cultural evolutionary psychology” still maintains some controversial aspects of the original neo-Darwinian paradigm. These assumptions are unnecessary to the cognitive gadgets theory and can be eliminated without significant conceptual loss.

Fitouchi et al. illustrate the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality, while leave the emotional foundation unclear. We complement their theory by proposing moral emotions (e.g., guilt and shame) as characteristic emotions underlying puritanical morality. Our proposition is based on the findings that these moral emotions emerge after violations of puritanical norms and promote self-control and cooperation.

May interprets the prevalence of non-emotional moral intuitions as indicating support for rationalism. However, research in developmental psychology indicates that the mechanisms underlying these intuitions are not always rational in nature. Specifically, automatic intuitions can emerge passively, through processes such as evolutionary preparedness and enculturation. Although these intuitions are not always emotional, they are not clearly indicative of reason.

Discerning adaptations from by-products is a defining feature of evolutionary science. Mehr, Krasnow, Bryant, and Hagen posit that music is an adaptation that evolved to function as a credible signal. We counter this claim, as we are not convinced they have dispelled the possibility that music is an elaboration of extant features of language.

The conclusions reached by Leibovich et al. urge the field to regroup and consider new ways of conceptualizing quantitative development. We suggest three potential directions for new research that follow from the authors' extensive review, as well as building on the common ground we can take from decades of research in this area.

We compare the predictions of two important proposals made by De Neys to findings in the anchoring effect literature. Evidence for an anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic supports his proposal that system 1 and system 2 are non-exclusive. The relationship between psychophysical noise and anchoring effects, however, challenges his proposal that epistemic uncertainty determines the involvement of system 2 corrective processes in judgment.

We argue that the exercise of agency is compatible with the presence of what Doris calls “defeaters.” In order to undermine reflectivist theories of agency and support his valuational alternative, Doris must not simply show that defeaters exist but rather establish that some agentive behaviors do express a person's values without involving reflection.

I raise two issues for Machery's discussion and interpretation of the theory-theory. First, I raise an objection against Machery's claim that theory-theorists take theories to be default bodies of knowledge. Second, I argue that theory-theorists' experimental results do not support Machery's contention that default bodies of knowledge include theories used in their own proprietary kind of categorization process.

We are encouraged by the many positive commentaries on our target article. In this response, we recapitulate some of the points raised and identify synergies between them. We have arranged our response based on the tension between data and architecture that arises in the meta-learning framework. We additionally provide a short discussion that touches upon connections to foundation models.

An implicitly dualist or Cartesian materialist theory of consciousness is proposed without citing the many well-known problems with such theories. A function for consciousness is proposed with no reference to the possibility that “consciousness itself” has no function of its own. The theory builds on proposed “subset consensus” and “integration consensus” when in the literature there is no such consensus on these issues.

While we applaud the careful breakdown by Clark and Fischer of the representation of social robots held by the human user, we emphasise that a neurocognitive perspective is crucial to fully capture how people perceive and construe social robots at the behavioural and brain levels.

Recent findings from anticipatory-looking false-belief tests have shown that nonhuman great apes and macaques anticipate that an agent will go to the location where the agent falsely believed an object to be. Phillips et al.'s claim that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief should thus be reconsidered. We propose that both knowledge and belief attributions are evolutionary old.

The definition of cruelty used by the author is broad and ambiguous and does not distinguish between acts of sadism, abuse, and neglect that all lead to the suffering of other beings. Some of the research involving animal cruelty is reviewed with the aim of raising questions about the relevance of the painblooddeath (PBD) complex described by Nell.

In his article, Grossmann argues that, in the context of human cooperative caregiving, heightened fearfulness in children and human sensitivity to fear in others are adaptive traits. I offer and briefly defend a rival hypothesis: Heightened fearfulness among infants and young children is a maladaptive trait that did not get deselected in the process of evolution because human sensitivity to fear in others mitigates its disadvantageous effects to a sufficient extent.