Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind by Kevin N. Laland

Author:Kevin N. Laland
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2016-12-11T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION

The pace of change experienced by the members of our evolutionary lineage has accelerated over recent times, and continues to accelerate.1 Like all species on Earth, humans possess an evolutionary history that stretches back at least 3.6 billion years to the beginning of life. For the vast majority of the many millions of living species aside from us, that history of adaptive change has been written solely in terms of biological evolution, and for at least 99.9% of our history we too adapted to the world in this manner. However, for around the last two to four million years and perhaps longer, our history has also been crafted through gene-culture coevolution. The contribution of gene-culture dynamics to our adaptive evolution was almost certainly modest at first, but grew in influence over time as our cultural capacity was enhanced, and our control of the environment increased. Eventually, culture began to take over altogether, carrying us into an entirely new realm.

We are probably alone among the planet’s residents in having experienced three ages of adaptive evolution. First, there was the age in which biological evolution dominated, in which we adapted to the circumstances of life in a manner no different from every other creature. Second came the age when gene-culture coevolution was in the ascendency. Through cultural activities, our ancestors set challenges to which they adapted biologically. In doing so, they released the brake that the relatively slow rate of independent environmental change imposes on other species. The results are higher rates of morphological evolution in humans compared to other mammals,2 with human genetic evolution reported as accelerating more than a hundredfold over the last 40,000 years.3 Now we live in the third age, where cultural evolution dominates. Cultural practices provide humanity with adaptive challenges, but these are then solved through further cultural activity, before biological evolution gets moving. Our culture hasn’t stopped biological evolution—that would be impossible—but it has left it trailing in its wake.

Through cultural evolution, our species is utterly transforming the planet, and at breakneck speed. For hominins to evolve from a chimpanzee-like creature to Homo sapiens took approximately 6 million years, but in the last 10 to 12 thousand years of cultural evolution, humanity has been to the moon, split the atom, built cities, compiled encyclopedic knowledge, and composed symphonies. A frighteningly high proportion of other species are simply unable to cope with the express-train transformations of their environment that human beings have imposed; as a consequence, they will almost certainly go extinct before being able to adapt through natural selection. Our impact on the planet is now so devastating that scientists have marked it as a new geological epoch called the “Anthropocene.”4 We, on the other hand, adapt with no problem at all, because we uniquely possess a culture that enables it.

Culture provided our ancestors with food-procurement and survival tricks, such as how to gain access to nutrient-rich foods, and how to build a fire or make a cutting tool. As new inventions arose, hominin populations were able to exploit their environments more efficiently.

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