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Author's Response
R1.
Introduction
I thank the authors of all 38 commentaries for their thoughtful extensions and critiques of the target article on the study of the evolution of teaching, in humans and other animals. The breadth of responses from anthropology, biology, psychology, and beyond attests to the wide-ranging relevance of research on teaching. Due to the large number of commentaries, I am unfortunately not able to address the entirety of points made in each commentary. Instead, I address the major concerns of each, and structure my response according to levels of explanation, in order to further an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to the study of teaching in humans and other animals.
The range of commentaries highlights ontogenetic, phylogenetic, or proximate psychological explanations of teaching behavior as important research areas not covered in the target article. In some cases, the commentators suggest that the lack of such explanations in the target article renders the proposed framework insufficiently broad to motivate comparative work in disparate disciplines. However, the commentary by Thornton & Raihani anticipates how these foci fit with the proposed framework. They argue that working from a functionalist framework allows for the much-needed distinction between ultimate explanations of teaching behavior and proximate ones - and indeed that the study of cooperation more broadly could be improved by a similar frame of analysis.
The collection of commentaries would benefit from taking this one step further: The ultimate/proximate levels of analysis can be split into dynamic (explaining processes of change) and static (explaining present form), such that there are four categories of explanations available to us - mechanistic, functional, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic (see Table R1; derived from Tinbergen 1963). Whereas the target article discusses existing definitions of teaching based on disciplinary convention, in this response research problems are addressed according to the type of explanation they offer. Note that a key to the enduring usefulness of Tinbergen's levels of analysis is that these levels are consilient: each explanation must be reconcilable with explanations at other levels of analysis. It therefore does not make theoretical or practical sense to argue that one kind of explanation is better or more correct than another - their validity is mutually dependent.
Table 1.
A grid showing Tinbergen's levels of analysis applied to...