It is a persistent feature of humanity to see itself as somehow separate from and above the natural world. Yet we are not. We are inextricably part of the universe and the laws by which it operates.
Among the trillions of galaxies and solar systems we are earth beings, not Martians. As Earthlings humans are not plants but a creature with a brain, a specific type of animal – a mammal and a primate.
Our unique, and amazingly generalisable and creative capabilities, are the result of natural processes. Everything humans do or think is the product of the architecture of our primate brains. We know that from the effects of brain damage.
That primate brain is a collection of specialised modules that evolved to solve specific survival problems such as tracking predators, finding food, navigating social patterns, and understanding the physical world. They evolved to make the most of environments that no longer exist.
Our brains are not general-purpose thinking engines, nor do they harbour a ‘ghost in the machine,’ or a homunculus pulling levers and pushing buttons inside our heads or via remote control. Human brain architecture reflects the basic genetic ingredients and selective forces dominant in our evolutionary history.
Termites and bees evolved the ability to build complex structures housing the entire population and protecting it from the elements, while other social animals move around subject to the elements.
Spiders spin webs, and different spider’s distinct kinds of web. Others use their silk to swing a bolo like a South American cowboy or to trap air to use as an aqualung.
Most cats are solitary in the wild but African lions form prides. Orangutans are solitary, gibbons form pairs, gorilla’s form harems, and chimps and humans something more social.
Different animals have specific ways of perceiving and valuing, and diverse ways of modifying the environment. You could say animals use vastly different means to produce vastly diverse cultures.
Certain senses
American philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. We have limited to no access to certain senses, or to the equipment needed to analyse that sense data. The sense of smell dogs is as beyond our grasp as our reading a book is to theirs.
Animals can use primitive language, such as making different sounds to communicate meaning. Bees have a dance to communicate a new source of food. Animals can learn and transmit new behaviours – for example, a species of crane has learned how to eat invasive poisonous cane toads by annoying it so as to prompt it to excrete its poison and then washing it off in water.
Producing culture is characteristic of animals. It is an important means of survival, and that is why humans have it. Kant, another philosopher, argued that a few crucial concepts are innate.
Our highest thoughts are cognitive byproducts resulting from the normal, everyday operation of evolved human mental systems.
For example, we have two dedicated brain modules for processing language – Wernicke’s (comprehension) and Broca’s (production) areas – connected by the arcuate fasciculus.
We also have a brain area dedicated to processing spatial representation.
However, we have no dedicated structures to produce mathematics and must second the language and spatial modules to manage it. Babies can appreciate numbers up to three, but larger numbers simply become ‘many.’
To use larger numbers precisely we build on our intuitive appreciation of one, two and three and the patterns they form – one together with two makes three, for example.. We must learn to make those inferences and then practise and memorise them. Similarly with space. We have no trouble with three dimensions but four and more are almost impossible to visualise, even though we know that they exist.
Distinct patterns
Religious contemplation, ranging from William James’s Variety of Religious Experience to modern cognitive psychology, has noted the limited number of distinct patterns in the world’s religions.
Other patterns (that are logically possible) never become popular. Pascal Boyer, in his book Religion Explained, put forward the following set of hypotheses about why religious concepts everywhere stick to a limited range of themes.
Firstly, humans evolved a hyperactive agency detection system, a “better safe than sorry” cognitive bias, that attributes unseen movement or noise to a deliberate agent (mistaking a rustling bush for a predator, for instance). He infers that the same machinery causes people to perceive intentionality, spirits, or gods behind natural events.
Secondly, we have the innate capacity to infer the thoughts, beliefs, desires, and intensions of others. He infers that we naturally extend this to imagining the minds of invisible and supernatural beings.
Thirdly, religion co-opts a variety of emotional needs (such as fear of death or desire to explain the weather) but does not necessarily stem from any of them.
Finally, he claims that religious concepts manage to spread successfully because they hijack standard mental categories (like persons, animals, or artifacts) and add one or two counterintuitive violations of those categories (like not being made of matter, being invisible, or living forever.)
His theory is that the attention-grabbing, memory-enhancing feature of this balance makes religious concepts into memes that are more culturally transmissible than those that lack those features.
I must point out that there are alternative theories based on cognitive or evolutionary psychology (all incorporating the first three hypotheses), and Boyer’s theory may be among the mistaken.
Basic brain modules
Try to see this paragraph as another illustration of how more abstract and complex ideas can arise from basic brain modules that evolved to solve other problems.
Still the potential byproducts the basic modules can produce can seem like magic.
Shakespeare could create Hamlet out of a system of a mere twenty-six letters and a handful of rules. Mathematicians constructed their entire field using a handful of intuitive axioms. Running these ‘byproducts’ is effortful, however, so most people are prone to avoiding it. This is analogous to life.
The immense variety of elements, molecules, amino acids, DNA, cells, organisms, and ecosystems is implicit in sub-atomic particles. The chemical and biological equivalent of effort is an input of energy.
I admit that specifying the details of that nature is vulnerable to bias and error. The failed hypotheses within evolutionary psychology are so numerous that I agree with Stephen Jay Gould that it is mostly ‘just so stories’ at this point.
I do however claim that heritability estimates of various capacities, temperaments, attitudes, and beliefs can convincingly falsify proposed hypotheses. For example, they shoot down the popular ‘sociologist’s fallacy’ that variations in (presumed) arbitrary social patterns (like prejudice, child-rearing practices, and socio-economic status) determine and explain variations in capacities and behavioural preferences.
The general point of this essay, and these examples, is to emphasise that humans have a specific nature that came about through a process of evolution, and that our cultural achievements built upon and must reflect that nature.
While it is obviously possible to use and appreciate culture without reference to these biological and evolutionary roots, acknowledging and paying attention to them has the potential to make our cultural tools more effective and provide a source of meaning and purpose that keeps our feet on the ground.
Just how it may do that is a subject of a future essay.
[Image: by yuliavorlova]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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