Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

The Gamble

That human nature is defined by our response to culture

T
HE ENGLISH 4TH
Baron Raglan, Major FitzRoy Richard Somerset of the Queen’s Grenadier Guards, once remarked that “culture is roughly everything we do and monkeys don’t.” This comment nicely summarizes one of the main messages of this book. Human beings have not always been as we know us now—sentient, big-brained, naked, prolix, artistic, wary, scheming, generous, warlike, forgiving, vengeful, religious, and moralistic. Instead, we were launched as recently as 80,000 years ago when our genes undertook a remarkable gamble. Around that time a species of upright apes, close evolutionary relatives to the chimpanzees, began to perfect a new way of life. Nothing in this species’ predecessors would have hinted at what was about to emerge, or that it would have such startling effects. Where previously they had roamed the African savannah for at least a million years, hunting and foraging in small family groups, the new species now came to live in larger tribal societies in which people worked together, customs and systems of beliefs arose, ideas, skills, and technologies were shared, languages evolved, and dance, music, and art appeared. Within a few tens of thousands of years, these tribal groups would spread out to occupy the world as some of them developed the means to live near the sea, others the ability to survive the desert or to inhabit jungles, forests, mountains, or plains. In what was little more than an instant in our long evolutionary history, we had become a single species with a global reach and ways of life as varied as collections of different biological species, and we were soon to become the sole survivor of an evolutionary lineage that had spawned at least six previous human branches.

The world was witnessing the final stages of a shift in the balance of power between our genes and our minds. Human beings had discovered culture. It was not high art and symphonies—those would come—but knowledge, beliefs, and practices acquired from watching, imitating, and learning from others. Today, we take our possession of culture for granted, but it was a development that had to await nearly the entire history of life on Earth. Our world is four and a half thousand million (4.5 billion) years old, and might have been a harsh, rocky place devoid of life for its first 700 million to 1 billion years. Then, from fossil traces buried deep in ancient rocks, we know that life sparked into existence and for the next 3.5 billion years genes ruled, transmitting the instructions that organisms used to survive and reproduce. For most of that time, life consisted of simple one-celled organisms, direct ancestors of today’s bacteria; but these gave way around 1 billion years ago to the first multicellular organisms, simple creatures like today’s sponges. Five hundred million years after that the first animals with arms and legs would rise up out of the sea and walk on land. These land animals would in turn evolve for yet another 500 million years before the evolutionary lineage that we call the
hominins
came on the scene, a mere 7 million years ago.

Even then, it was only when our species arose within this hominin lineage just 160,000–200,000 years ago that a competitor to the rule of genes finally appeared. Our invention of culture around that time created an entirely new sphere of evolving entities. Humans had acquired the ability to learn from others, and to copy, imitate and improve upon their actions. This meant that elements of culture themselves—ideas, languages, beliefs, songs, art, technologies—could act like genes, capable of being transmitted to others and reproduced. But unlike genes, these elements of culture could jump directly from one mind to another, shortcutting the normal genetic routes of transmission. And so our cultures came to define a second great system of inheritance, able to transmit knowledge down the generations. For humans, then, a shared culture granted its members access to a vast store of information, technologies, wisdom, and good luck. The only other example like this in nature is the lowly bacteria. These simple one-celled organisms cannot exchange ideas, but they have acquired a variety of means for exchanging genes among individuals and even among different species, granting them access to a vast store of genetic technology. And, like us, they have shown great inventiveness and versatility, occupying nearly every environment on Earth.

Our cultural inheritance is something we take for granted today, but its invention forever altered the course of evolution and our world. This is because knowledge could accumulate as good ideas were retained, combined, and improved upon, and others were discarded. And, being able to jump from mind to mind granted the elements of culture a pace of change that stood in relation to our genetical evolution something like an animal’s behavior does to the more leisurely movement of a plant. Where you are stuck from birth with a sample of the genes that made your parents, you can sample throughout your life from a sea of evolving ideas. Not surprisingly, then, our cultures quickly came to take over the running of our day-to-day affairs as they outstripped our genes in providing solutions to the problems of our existence. Having culture means we are the only species that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors rather than from the genes they pass to us. Our cultures and not our genes supply the solutions we use to survive and prosper in the society of our birth; they provide the instructions for what we eat, how we live, the gods we believe in, the tools we make and use, the language we speak, the people we cooperate with and marry, and whom we might fight or even kill in a war.

Most of us assume without reflection that it has always been this way, that human beings have always occupied the world, and that somehow we are the natural and rightful rulers of its domains. But we are new on the scene, and even newer around the world, having only ventured permanently out of Africa probably sometime in the last 60,000 to 70,000 years. Even as recently as 80,000 years ago, our species’ continued existence still hung in the balance. An extraordinary degree of similarity in the genes of people from all over the world tells us that we all share a recent common ancestry. In fact, genetic studies now reveal that our ancestors might have dwindled to as few as 10,000 individuals—some say even fewer—making humans as endangered 80,000 years ago as a rhinoceros is today. Then our numbers began to grow and human culture began to flourish, and our species, having come perilously close to extinction, reached a point of no return. Our minds were now firmly in executive control of our fates, and we were showing the adaptability, and producing the artifacts and culture that would propel us out of Africa, and then around the world—specialized stone tools and spear points, carved fishhooks, clothes, shaped blades and instruments, but also sculpted figures, ceremonial burials, musical instruments, and cave art.

The world is now a remarkably different place from what it was throughout the first 99.996 percent of its history. Almost everything around you in your bustling everyday lives is owed to the new evolutionary world in which ideas could accumulate on top of ideas, and most of those ideas were first thought up by someone distant to you in time and space. Having culture is why we watch
3
D television and build soaring cathedrals while our close genetic relatives the chimpanzees sit in the forest as they have for millions of years cracking the same old nuts with the same old stones. Even so, having become the first species to throw off the yoke of its genes, our life in the presence of culture would usher in an irony. It is that we have fallen in thrall to the new sets of instructions our cultures provide. This is because to take advantage of culture meant evolving a new kind of mind. It had to be a cultural blank slate or
tabula rasa
, a compliant or docile mind, designed to be programmed by and embrace the culture into which it happened to be born. A wolf brought up by sheep will remain a wolf and soon turn on its benefactors, but a newborn human must be ready to join any cultural group on Earth, and without knowing which. It might find itself living on the Arctic ice, the Russian steppes, or sailing across Polynesia; it might find itself in the Australian Outback, the deserts of Arabia, on the prairies of North America, or the African savannah, on an island in the Indian Ocean, or fishing along the rich tropical coasts of Papua New Guinea. And so we have had no choice but to evolve to allow our culture to occupy our minds, writing its language and story into our consciousness.

In nearly every other respect for which the great English philosopher John Locke proposed his doctrine of
tabula rasa
, the human brain has been shown to come into the world prepared, and not at all a blank slate. We are primed to learn language, to comprehend shapes and movement, to expect causation, to manipulate numerical quantities, to be afraid of heights, to mimic others, and to favor our relatives. But we are not primed to acquire any particular culture. The one we do inherit is an arbitrary story, an accident of birth, but it is one to which we show a surprising and sometimes alarming devotion. People will risk their health and well-being, their chances to have children, or even their lives for their culture. People will treat others well or badly merely as an accident of their cultural inheritance. If there is a humbling lesson of culture, it is that we do these things even though each of us might have been someone else, with a different internal voice, likes and dislikes, and allegiances. If there is a comparison, it is to ducklings whose parents have been lost and when they hatch from their shells adopt as their parent the first animal that wanders past—even a human. Animal ethologists call this
imprinting
; it is difficult to escape the feeling that we seem to imprint on our cultures, and in a way that is hard to shake off.

Genes are carefully shepherded into our bodies inside small vehicles known as
gametes
—sperm from fathers and eggs from mothers—which are designed to see to it that a body is made that carries a collection of its parents’ genes. Part of the imprint of culture is to get us later in life to act as its shepherds. Each of us who has children will have shepherded pieces of our culture into them, some of it from mothers, some of it from fathers, ensuring that they were French, Korean, English, Melanesian, or American, Italian, Russian, or Chinese, and that they were religious or atheist, but also that they spoke a particular language and held certain beliefs about their nation and the rest of the world. We should be aware that it is at least a curious, and surely a compelling, feature of our species that a child born into the world as nothing more than a “blank” human being might be labeled as a Christian or a Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, or Confucian, and that this label—or some other its culture provides—can influence the course of this child’s life, as if it were a trait inherited on some gene. There are places all over the world where a child born into one of these religions might peer across a fence at children from another whose parents are sworn enemies of its own, and only then because
their
parents labelled them.

The reason for this shepherding is clear. Human culture has been a development of revolutionary social
and
genetic effect, easily the most potent trait the world has ever known for converting new lands and resources into more humans. Our genes’ gamble at handing over control to the new sphere of evolving ideas paid off handsomely. Culture became our species’ strategy for survival, a biological strategy, not just some bit of fun and amusement on the side, and it would trump all the wonderful wings and feathers, shells, claws, poisons, acts of camouflage or deception, odors, feats of running speed, long necks or beaks, powerful jaws, and spectacular colors and displays of the rest of the animal kingdom. It didn’t have to be this way. Our newly liberated minds might have chosen aesthetic reverie, feckless indolence, jumping off cliffs, debilitating drug use, or mindless warfare. But, for the most part, we didn’t. We seem to have followed our ancient genetic instincts for survival, and culture has been remarkably able to oblige.

The question is often asked, What makes us human? Quite apart from its interest to anthropologists and other scholars, it is a question that invades nearly every aspect of our lives, our psychology and behavior. Who are we, and why are we the way we are, so utterly different from other animals? What makes us kind and forgiving, generous and friendly, but also wicked, murderous, and vengeful? Why do we have morality? The usual answers to these questions are that we are made human by virtue of possessing consciousness, or that we have this or that gene, an opposable thumb, or an upright posture and bipedal gait, that we learned to control fire, or that we have empathy, language, or our extraordinary intelligence. For others it is the belief we are made in God’s image and in possession of a soul. And it is true, these traits and beliefs set our species apart. But the argument of this book is that these usual answers are the wrong way around. They are the wrong way around because they fail to recognize that it is only because of culture that we have many of these traits. Here is something we will have to get used to: all of us carry around in our minds something akin to a software “operating system” installed without our consent by our parents and others in our societies. It defines who we are and is our internal voice. It frames our social and cultural identities, and fundamentally influences the course of our lives. No other species has such a system. Only when we understand this, and understand how the traits we acquired in response to this new way of life serve our interests, can we begin to grasp what it means to be human.

And here is why. Evolutionary biology teaches us that in a competitive world, if we know something about the environment an animal lives in, we can make some predictions about what it will be like. If an animal lived its life in trees or flying in the air, hunting for insects or swimming in the water, we could expect it to have acquired certain characteristics to promote its survival and well-being—long arms to swing in trees, wings for flight, an acute nose or hearing to detect insects, or a streamlined shape for swimming. Most animals are adapted to a physical environment such as one of these, and are confined to areas of the Earth where that environment is found. But for the last 160,000 to 200,000 years, humans have roamed the Earth conquering its many environments, chauffeured wherever we travelled by the inventive and cooperative tribal societies that are their cultures. And so, we are entitled to expect that, instead of adapting to the demands of any one physical environment, our genes have evolved to use the new social environment of human society to further their survival and reproduction. These are the adaptations that have wired our minds and bodies for culture.