The evolution of whole-body endothermy occurred independently in dinosaurs and mammals and was associated with some of the most significant neurocognitive shifts in life’s history. These included a 20-fold increase in neurons and the evolution of new brain structures, supporting similar functions in both lineages. We propose the endothermic brain hypothesis, which holds that elaborations […]

Looking back at the emergence of consciousness in early life, one may repurpose the distinction between the ‘easy’ and the ‘hard problem’ [1]. The easy problem is when consciousness sets on in early development. By contrast, the hard problem is how conscious experiences get off the ground. Bayne et al. [2] address the easy problem […]

Abstract When people talk about kinship systems, they often use co-speech gestures and other representations to elaborate. This paper investigates such polysemiotic (spoken, gestured, and drawn) descriptions of kinship relations, to see if they display recurring patterns of conventionalization that capture specific social structures. We present an exploratory hypothesis-generating study of descriptions produced by a […]