I claim that our desire to be special motivates us to suppose that if we were not God created, we must be self-created. I also claim that Stephen J Gould's claims about punctuated equilibrium, the absence of directional selection, and exaptations, when taken together, lead to kind of secular creationism. I introduce the notion of “adaptive effects” and argue that a focus on the actual physiological and psychological mechanisms that produce adaptations provides a way out of the exaptation dilemma.

Studies of conditioning in simple systems are best interpreted in terms of the formation of excitatory links. The mechanisms responsible for such conditioning contribute to the associative learning effects shown by more complex systems. If a dual-system approach is to be avoided, the best hope lies in developing standard associative theory to deal with phenomena said to show propositional learning.

Norenzayan et al. suggest that Big Gods can be replaced by Big Governments. We examine forms of social and self-monitoring and ritual practice that emerged in Classical China, heterarchical societies like those that emerged in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and the contemporary Zapatista movement of Chiapas, and we recommend widening the hypothesis space to include these alternative forms of social organization.

Yarkoni's paper makes an important contribution to psychological research by its insightful analysis of generalizability. We suggest, however, that broadening research practices to include field research and the correlated use of both converging and complementary observations gives reason for optimism.

whether or not trait affiliation correlates with human behaviour needs investigating. one should be careful generalizing neuropsychological mechanisms for affiliation, and generalizing an analysis based on one or two neuropsychological mechanisms and mostly studies on rodents, to complex human social interactions. serotonin is an example of a neurotransmitter playing an important role in cooperation and interacting with the dopaminergic system.

The target article argues that whole groups can act as interactors in an evolutionary process. We believe that Smaldino's discussion would be advanced by a more thorough analysis of the appropriate replicators and lineages for this model. We show that cultural evolution is necessarily a separate process from cultural group selection, and we also illustrate that the two processes may influence each other as demonstrated by an agent-based model of communicating food-processing skills.

Do we acquire culture through other minds, or do we get access to other minds through culture? Music culture is a practice as well as the people involved. Sounding music works as a script guiding action, as do, to varying degrees, many rituals and customs. Collective co-performance of the script enables inter-subjectivity, which arguably contributes to the formation of subcultures. Shared-emotional experiences give material to the narrative of who we are.

In this commentary, we highlight a difficulty for metric navigation arising from recent data with grid and place cells: the integration of piecemeal representations of space in environments with repeated boundaries. Put simply, it is unclear how place and grid cells might provide a global representation of distance when their fields appear to represent repeated boundaries within an environment. One implication of this is that the capacity for spatial inferences may be limited.