Copy-and-pasting Culture
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 sp...