Gianmaria Dani

The definition of tool use has long been debated, especially beyond humans. Recent work argues that the phenomena included within tool use are so broad and varied that there is little hope of using the category for scientific generalizations, explanations, and predictions about the evolution, ecology, and psychology of tool users. One response to this argument has been the development of tooling as a replacement for tool use. In this article, we analyze the tool use and tooling frameworks. Identifying advantages and limitations in each, we offer a synthetic approach that suggests promising avenues for future research.

Proponents of the extended evolutionary synthesis have argued that there are explanatory gaps in evolutionary biology that cannot be bridged by standard evolutionary theory. In this paper, we consider what sort of explanatory gaps they are referring to. We outline three possibilities: data-based gaps, implementation-based gaps, and framework-based gaps. We then examine the purported evolutionary gaps and attempt to classify them using this taxonomy. From there we reconsider the significance of the gaps and what they imply for the proposed need for an extended evolutionary synthesis.