I suggest that we should distinguish between weak and strong group-level traits. It is the latter that are especially problematic for developing models of cultural evolution. Using Campbell's notion of vicarious selection mechanisms, I argue that these mechanisms become intertwined with other group-level traits resulting in selection-transmission thickets that are obstacles to modeling cultural evolution.

The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers proposes that suicide terrorists are psychologically and behaviorally similar to other people who commit suicide, due to a range of individual, social, and situational factors. Some commentators agree, while others are skeptical, given the lack of information about many attackers' lives. However, the book's position is not simply based on individual case studies; it is also supported by other independent assessments, the confirmation of empirical predictions, the paucity of contradictory evidence, and new applications of evolutionary theory. It is undisputed that human beings behave as the author suggests; it is unknown if they behave as the conventional wisdom suggests. Those who argue that suicide terrorists are psychologically normal and altruistically sacrificing their lives for an ideological cause should bear the burden of proof for those claims.

Ackermann et al. mention the “acquisition of species-atypical sounds” in apes without any discussion. In our commentary, we demonstrate that these atypical sounds in chimpanzees not only include laryngeal sounds, but also have a major significance regarding the origins of language, if we consider looking at their context of use, their social properties, their relations with gestures, their lateralization, and their neurofunctional correlates as well.

Huang & Bargh's (H&B's) definition of goals is ambiguous between “specific goals” – the end-state of a token action I am about to perform – and “unspecific goals” – the end-state of an action-type (without specifying how this would be achieved). The analogy with selfish genes pushes the authors towards the former interpretation, but the latter would provide a more robust theoretical framework.

Although the inherence heuristic is a versatile cognitive process that addresses a wide range of psychological phenomena, we propose that ownership information represents an important test case for evaluating both the boundaries of Cimpian & Salomon's (C&S's) model (e.g., is the inherence heuristic meaningfully limited to only inherent factors?) and its effectiveness as a mechanism for explaining psychological essentialism.

The binary exclusion task involves “subtle priming effects” and a measure of awareness that is reliable, relevant, immediate, and sensitive. This task, which meets the criteria outlined in the target article, has been used to demonstrate subconscious processing.

Humans possess great capacity for behavioral and cultural change, but our ability to manage change is still limited. This article has two major objectives: first, to sketch a basic science of intentional change centered on evolution; second, to provide examples of intentional behavioral and cultural change from the applied behavioral sciences, which are largely unknown to the basic sciences community.

All species have evolved mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity that enable them to respond adaptively to their environments. Some mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity count as evolutionary processes in their own right. The human capacity for symbolic thought provides an inheritance system having the same kind of combinatorial diversity as does genetic recombination and antibody formation. Taking these propositions seriously allows an integration of major traditions within the basic behavioral sciences, such as behaviorism, social constructivism, social psychology, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary psychology, which are often isolated and even conceptualized as opposed to one another.

The applied behavioral sciences include well-validated examples of successfully managing behavioral and cultural change at scales ranging from individuals to small groups to large populations. However, these examples are largely unknown beyond their disciplinary boundaries, for lack of a unifying theoretical framework. Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, they are examples of managing evolved mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity, including open-ended processes of variation and selection.

Once the many branches of the basic and applied behavioral sciences become conceptually unified, we are closer to a science of intentional change than one might think.

The faith that “comparative analysis of the behaviour of modern primates, in conjunction with an accurate phylogenetic tree of relatedness, has the power to chart the early history of human cognitive evolution” (Byrne 2000 p. 543) runs afoul of the fact that no other primate besides humans is capable of vocal production learning. This basic enabling adaptation for articulate speech bears crucially on the reconstruction of language origins.

Smaldino's target article draws on and seeks to add to a literature that has partially rejected orthodox, gene-centric evolutionary theory. However, orthodox theory has much to say about group-level traits. The target article does not reference or refute these views, and provides no explicit arguments for this narrow approach. In this commentary we: (i) give two examples of topics that the target article might and probably should have discussed (cultural epidemiology and the psychology of individual differences); and (ii) argue that the orthodox approach has much more to say about the emergence of group-level traits than the target article recognises, or gives credit for.

This commentary highlights the importance of attending to the sociocultural contexts that foster essentialist ideas. It contends that Cimpian & Salomon's (C&S's) model undervalues the extent to which the development of essentialist beliefs is contingent on social experience. The result is a restriction of the model's applicability to real-world instances of essentialism-fuelled prejudice and discrimination.

Self-insight assessment compares outcomes from two model-recovery exercises: a statistical exercise to infer a judge's (implicit) policy and an elicitation exercise whereby the judge describes his or her (explicit) policy. When these policies are mismatched, limited self-insight is not necessarily implied: Shortcomings in either exercise could be implicated, whereby Newell & Shanks' (N&S's) relevance or sensitivity criteria for assessing awareness may not be met. Appropriate self-insight assessment requires that both exercises allow the original processes to be captured.

The connection between selfish genes and selfish goals is not merely metaphorical. Many goals that shape contemporary cognition and behavior are psychological products of evolutionarily fundamental motivational systems and thus are phenotypic manifestations of genes. An evolutionary perspective can add depth and nuance to our understanding of “selfish goals” and their implications for human cognition and behavior.

Following Smaldino's definition, we claim that language is also an emergent group-level trait, and propose two facets (human groups tend to organize in a way to efficiently trigger language and linguistic interactions can render formation of certain social organization) to verify this statement, both of which also provide a general framework to address the future work about group-level traits.

The hypothesis of unconscious influences on complex behavior is observationally equivalent to the dissociability of cognition and metacognition (reportability). The target article convincingly argues that evidence for unconscious influence is limited by the quality of the metacognitive measure used. However, it understates the empirical evidence for unconscious influences and overlooks considerations of cognitive architecture that make cognitive/metacognitive dissociations likely.

Guiding the positive evolution of behavior is an admirable goal. Wilson et al.'s arguments are based largely on studies of problem correction. The methodology is sound, but not the post hoc ergo procter hoc extrapolation. What is required is evidence that it can proactively generate positive change. The evolution of human behavior to date has been affected by many factors that include unmalleable and unpredicted environmental changes.

I applaud Huang & Bargh's (H&B's) theory that places goals at the center of cognition, and I discuss two ingredients missing from that theory. First, I argue that the brains of organisms much simpler than those of humans are already configured for goal achievement in situated interactions. Second, I propose a mechanistic view of the “reconfiguration principle” that links the theory with current views in computational neuroscience.

Early human vocal development is characterized first by emerging control of phonation and later by prosodic and supraglottal articulation. The target article has missed the opportunity to use these facts in the characterization of evolution in language-specific brain mechanisms. Phonation appears to be the initial human-specific brain change for language, and it was presumably a key target of selection in early hominin evolution.

Recent evidence shows that psychological essentialism is neither a universal nor stable feature of human cognition. The extent to which people report essentialist intuitions varies enormously across cultures and education levels, and is also influenced by subtle, normatively irrelevant contextual manipulations. These results challenge the notion that the human mind is “fitted” with a built-in inherence heuristic that produces essentialist intuitions.

Research on the representation of generic knowledge suggests that inherent properties can have either a principled or a causal connection to a kind. The type of connection determines whether the outcome of the storytelling process will include intuitions of inevitability and a normative dimension and whether it will ground causal explanations.

The primate basal ganglia are fundamental to Ackermann et al.'s proposal. However, primates and rodents are models for human cognitive functions involving basal ganglia circuits, and links between striatal function and vocal communication come from songbirds. We suggest that the proposal is better integrated in cognitive and/or motor theories on spoken language origins and with more analogous nonhuman animal models.