Copy and Pasted from the Dish

Copy-and-pasting Culture

Maria Popova quotes from Mark Pagel's new book, Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind: "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." Popova:

Language, says Pagel, was instrumental in enabling social learning — our ability to acquire evolutionarily beneficial new behaviors by watching and imitating others, which in turn accelerated our species on a trajectory of what anthropologists call "cumulative cultural evolution," a bustling of ideas successively building and improving on others. (How’s that for bio-anthropological evidence that everything is indeed a remix?)

Pagel elaborated in a recent Edge conversation:

We can all think of things that have made a difference in the history of life. The first hand axe, the first spear, the first bow and arrow, and so on. And we can ask ourselves, how many of us have had an idea that would have changed humanity? And I think most of us would say, well, that sets the bar rather high. I haven't had an idea that would change humanity. So let's lower the bar a little bit and say, how many of us have had an idea that maybe just influenced others around us, something that others would want to copy? And I think even then, very few of us can say there have been very many things we've invented that others would want to copy.

This says to us that social evolution may have sculpted us not to be innovators and creators as much as to be copiers, because this extremely efficient process that social learning allows us to do, of sifting among a range of alternatives, means that most of us can get by drawing on the inventions of others.