The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution

"I think what Joe’s book does beautifully is develop an idea that I touch on in the last chapter of my book, which is that a number of neurons is necessary but not enough to explain our abilities, because all the things that we like to see as our main abilities are culturally transmitted — you have to learn them. We’re not born with all the knowledge or abilities that we have as adults; we’re born with capabilities, and have to transform those capabilities into actual abilities. That’s where cultural transmission comes in. He gives this beautiful example of elephant hordes where the only ones that were able to survive a drought were ones with females old enough to have survived as youngsters a previous drought 30 years before, and they had the memory of where the other water holes were back then – and they pass the knowledge on to the next generation. You need to acquire that type of knowledge through experience but more than that, we have the ability to develop new technologies and new systems to solve problems and also pass those new technologies on through culture. “How you use your brain is at least as transformative as the biology that you were born with.” I like to ask people how much of what they see around them they would be able to build themselves. Take my desk – I could make some very rough, very rudimentary paper, but then even with my PhD and dozens of years of formal training I would not be capable of making a single pencil to write on that rough paper. I think that goes to show the difference between firstly, our biological capabilities, secondly, our abilities that we can turn those capabilities into through learning, but thirdly, all the things that we can come to do but that require cultural transmission of technology. We as a species have that technology, that culture, but each individual person doesn’t hold all that anymore. We’ve come well past the point where a single person could hold all the cultural knowledge of the species. I think it’s a very humbling experience to realise how much of the world we would individually be capable of recreating. That’s where culture and cultural transmission of technology come in in our evolutionary history, which, by the way, makes a very strong case for keeping people educated about science and technology, because the day we lose this knowledge, everything that we hold so dear as the high achievements of the human species, that all goes away. We’ve become so much more than just the number of neurons that we have. Biology gives you the basics, the starting point – but how you use your brain, what you do with the brain that you have, that is at least as transformative as the biology that you were born with."