The declaration of interdependence Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex, nurse a fawn, whatever. There is no real need to do much else. Now imagine you are a human being. Deer should therefore have more free time than human beings, yet it is people, not deer, who find the time to read, write, invent, sing and surf the net.
Where does all this free time come from? It comes from exchange and specialisation and from the resulting division of labour.
A deer must gather its own food. A human being gets somebody else to do it for him, while he or she is doing something for them — and both win time that way. Self-sufficiency is therefore not the route to prosperity. Imagine if you had to be completely self- sufficient not just pretending, like Thoreau. Every day you must get up in the morning and supply yourself entirely from your own resources. How would you spend your day? The top four priorities would be food, fuel, clothing and shelter.
Dig the garden, feed the pig, fetch water from the brook, gather wood from the forest, wash some potatoes, light a fire no matches , cook lunch, repair the roof, fetch fresh bracken for clean bedding, whittle a needle, spin some thread, sew leather for shoes, wash in the stream, fashion a pot out of clay, catch and cook a chicken for dinner.
No candle or book for reading. No time for smelting metal, drilling oil, or travel. If you wish to have even the most minimal improvement in your life — say metal tools, toothpaste or lighting — you are going to have to get some of your chores done by somebody else, because there just is not time to do them yourself.
That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet, though you have no slaves, today when you got out of bed you knew that somebody would provide you with food, fibre and fuel in a most convenient form. If you are on an average wage you knew that it would take you a matter of tens of minutes to earn the cash to pay for your food, some more tens of minutes to earn the cash to buy whatever new clothing you need and maybe an hour or two to earn the cash to pay for the gas, electricity and oil you might need today.
Earning the rent or mortgage payment that ensures you have a roof over your head might take rather more time. But still, by lunchtime, you could relax in the knowledge that food, fuel, fibre and shelter were taken care of for the day. So it was time to earn something more interesting: the satellite television subscription, the mobile phone bill, the holiday deposit, the cost of new toys for the children, the income tax.
He needed only a few raw materials: iron, copper, nickel, plastic and mica an insulating mineral around which the heating elements are wrapped. But even to get these he found almost impossible. Iron is made from iron ore, which he could probably mine, but how was he to build a sufficiently hot furnace without electric bellows?
He cheated and used a microwave oven. Plastic is made from oil, which he could not easily drill for himself, let alone refine.
More to the point, the project took months, cost a lot of money and resulted in an inferior product. To Thwaites this illustrated his helplessness as a consumer so divorced from self-sufficiency. It also illustrates the magic of specialisation and exchange: thousands of people, none of them motivated by the desire to do Thwaites a favour, have come together to make it possible for him to acquire a toaster for a trivial sum of money.
It took twenty artisans a total of manhours to achieve it and even then they had to get 8 per cent of the materials from outside the mile radius. If they worked for another year, they could get it all from within the limit, argued Cobb. To put it plainly, local sourcing multiplied the cost of a cheap suit roughly a hundred-fold. In the two hours since I got out of bed I have showered in water heated by North Sea gas, shaved using an American razor running on electricity made from British coal, eaten a slice of bread made from French wheat, spread with New Zealand butter and Spanish marmalade, then brewed a cup of tea using leaves grown in Sri Lanka, dressed myself in clothes of Indian cotton and Australian wool, with shoes of Chinese leather and Malaysian rubber, and read a newspaper made from Finnish wood pulp and Chinese ink.
I am now sitting at a desk typing on a Thai plastic keyboard which perhaps began life in an Arab oil well in order to move electrons through a Korean silicon chip and some wires of Chilean copper to display text on a computer designed and manufactured by an American firm. I have consumed goods and services from dozens of countries already this morning. Actually, I am guessing at the nationalities of some of these items, because it is almost impossible to define some of them as coming from any country, so diverse are their sources.
More to the point, I have also consumed minuscule fractions of the productive labour of many dozens of people. Somebody had to drill the gas well, install the plumbing, design the razor, grow the cotton, write the software. They were all, though they did not know it, working for me. In exchange for some fraction of my spending, each supplied me with some fraction of their work. The Sun King had dinner each night alone.
He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering people to prepare each meal. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace.
So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. And yet consider this.
The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella. You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing.
You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick- trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations.
You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts.
My point is that you have far, far more than servants at your immediate beck and call. The multiplication of labour You are not just consuming the labour and resources of others. A thousand entrepreneurs and scientists devised the intricate dance of photons and electrons by which your television works.
The cotton you wear was spun and woven by machines of a type whose original inventors are long- dead heroes of the industrial revolution. The bread you eat was first cross-bred by a Neolithic Mesopotamian and baked in a way that was first invented by a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer.
Their knowledge is enduringly embodied in machines, recipes and programmes from which you benefit. For you get the benefit of their labours, too, whether they are dead or alive.
It is a curious fact that in return for this cornucopia of service, you produce only one thing. That is to say, having consumed the labour and embodied discoveries of thousands of people, you then produce and sell whatever it is you do at work — haircuts, ball bearings, insurance advice, nursing, dog walking. Each produces one thing. But they each consume hundreds, thousands, of things. Make one thing, use lots. The self-sufficient gardener, or his self- sufficient peasant or hunter-gatherer predecessor who is, I shall argue, partly a myth in any case , is in contrast defined by his multiple production and simple consumption.
He makes not just one thing, but many — his food, his shelter, his clothing, his entertainment. Because he only consumes what he produces, he cannot consume very much. Not for him the avocado, Tarantino or Manolo Blahnik. He is his own brand. In the year , if you were the average consumer you would have spent your after-tax income in roughly the following way: 20 per cent on a roof over your head 18 per cent on cars, planes, fuel and all other forms of transport 16 per cent on household stuff: chairs, refrigerators, telephones, electricity, water 14 per cent on food, drink, restaurants etc 6 per cent on health care 5 per cent on movies, music and all entertainment 4 per cent on clothing of all kinds 2 per cent on education 1 per cent on soap, lipstick, haircuts, and such like 11 per cent on life insurance and pensions i.
I am not trying to make you feel guilty: I am trying to tease out what it is that makes you well off. It is having the hard work of living made easy by markets and machines and other people. There is probably nothing to stop you fetching free water from the nearest river in your home town, but you would rather pay something from your earnings to get it delivered clean and convenient from your tap.
So this is what poverty means. You are poor to the extent that you cannot afford to sell your time for sufficient price to buy the services you need, and rich to the extent that you can afford to buy not just the services you need but also those you crave. Prosperity, or growth, has been synonymous with moving from self-sufficiency to interdependence, transforming the family from a unit of laborious, slow and diverse production to a unit of easy, fast and diverse consumption paid for by a burst of specialised production.
The longer food has spent travelling to your plate, the more oil has been burnt and the more peace has been shattered along the way. But why single out food? Should we not protest against T- shirt miles, too, and laptop miles? After all, fruit and vegetables account for more than 20 per cent of all exports from poor countries, whereas most laptops come from rich countries, so singling out food imports for special discrimination means singling out poor countries for sanctions.
Getting food from the farmer to the shop causes just 4 per cent of all its lifetime emissions. Ten times as much carbon is emitted in refrigerating British food as in air-freighting it from abroad, and fifty times as much is emitted by the customer travelling to the shops.
In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is. Suppose your local laptop manufacturer tells you that he already has three orders and then he is off on his holiday so he cannot make you one before the winter. You will have to wait. You will have to go hungry. Instead, you benefit from a global laptop and wheat market in which somebody somewhere has something to sell you so there are rarely shortages, only modest price fluctuations.
For example, the price of wheat approximately trebled in —8, just as it did in Europe in — At the earlier date, Europe was less densely populated, farming was entirely organic and food miles were short. Yet in , nobody ate a baby or pulled a corpse from a gibbet for food. Right up until the railways came, it was cheaper for people to turn into refugees than to pay the exorbitant costs of importing food into a hungry district.
Interdependence spreads risk. The decline in agricultural employment caused consternation among early economists. Two centuries later the decline in industrial employment in the late twentieth century caused a similar consternation among economists, who saw services as a frivolous distraction from the important business of manufacturing.
They were just as wrong. There is no such thing as unproductive employment, so long as people are prepared to buy the service you are offering. Today, 1 per cent works in agriculture and 24 per cent in industry, leaving 75 per cent to offer movies, restaurant meals, insurance broking and aromatherapy. Arcadia redux Yet, surely, long ago, before trade, technology and farming, human beings lived simple, organic lives in harmony with nature.
Take a snapshot of the life of hunter-gathering human beings in their heyday, say at 15, years ago well after the taming of the dog and the extermination of the woolly rhinoceros but just before the colonisation of the Americas. People had spear throwers, bows and arrows, boats, needles, adzes, nets. They painted exquisite art on rocks, decorated their bodies, traded foods, shells, raw materials and ideas.
They sang songs, danced rituals, told stories, prepared herbal remedies for illnesses. They lived into old age far more frequently than their ancestors had done. They had a way of life that was sufficiently adaptable to work in almost any habitat or climate. Where every other species needed its niche, the hunter-gatherer could make a niche out of anything: seaside or desert, arctic or tropical, forest or steppe.
A Rousseauesque idyll? The hunter-gatherers certainly looked like noble savages: tall, fit, healthy, and having replaced stabbing spears with thrown ones with fewer broken bones than Neanderthals. They ate plenty of protein, not much fat and ample vitamins. In Europe, with the help of increasing cold, they had largely wiped out the lions and hyenas that had both competed with and preyed upon their predecessors, so they had little to fear from wild animals. Or was it? There was a serpent in the hunter-gatherer Eden — a savage in the noble savage.
Maybe it was not a lifelong camping holiday after all. For violence was a chronic and ever-present threat. It had to be, because — in the absence of serious carnivore predation upon human beings — war kept the population density below the levels that brought on starvation. Here is the data. From the! Kung in the Kalahari to the Inuit in the Arctic, two-thirds of modern hunter-gatherers have proved to be in a state of almost constant tribal warfare, and 87 per cent to experience annual war.
War is a big word for dawn raids, skirmishes and lots of posturing, but because these happen so often, death rates are high — usually around 30 per cent of adult males dying from homicide. The warfare death rate of 0. At a cemetery uncovered at Jebel Sahaba, in Egypt, dating from 14, years ago, twenty-four of the fifty-nine bodies had died from unhealed wounds caused by spears, darts and arrows.
Forty of these bodies were women or children. Women and children generally do not take part in warfare — but they are frequently the object of the fighting. To be abducted as a sexual prize and see your children killed was almost certainly not a rare female fate in hunter- gatherer society.
It was not just warfare that limited population growth. Hunter-gatherers are often vulnerable to famines. Even when food is abundant, it might take so much travelling and trouble to collect enough food that women would not maintain a sufficient surplus to keep themselves fully fertile for more than a few prime years.
Infanticide was a common resort in bad times. Nor was disease ever far away: gangrene, tetanus and many kinds of parasite would have been big killers. Did I mention slavery? Common in the Pacific north-west. Wife beating? Routine in Tierra del Fuego. When you meet one of those people who go so far as to say they would rather have lived in some supposedly more delightful past age, just remind them of the toilet facilities of the Pleistocene, the transport options of Roman emperors or the lice of Versailles.
The call of the new None the less, you do not have to be starry-eyed about the Stone Age to find aspects of modern consumer society obscenely wasteful. Because, he answers, human beings evolved to strive to signal social status and sexual worth. What this implies is that far from being merely materialist, human consumption is already driven by a sort of pseudo-spiritualism that seeks love, heroism and admiration.
Yet this thirst for status then encourages people to devise recipes that rearrange the atoms, electrons or photons of the world in such a way as to make useful combinations for other people. Ambition is transmuted into opportunity. It was allegedly a young Chinese imperial concubine in BC who thought up the following recipe for rearranging beta pleated sheets of glycine-rich polypeptides into fine fabrics: take a moth caterpillar, feed it mulberry leaves for a month, let it spin a cocoon, heat it to kill it, put the cocoon in water to unstick the silk threads, carefully draw out the single kilometre-long thread from which the cocoon is made by reeling it on to a wheel, spin the thread and weave a fabric.
Then dye, cut and sew, advertise and sell for cash. Rough guide on quantities: it takes about ten pounds of mulberry leaves to make silkworm cocoons to make one necktie.
The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity.
Innovation changes the world but only because it aids the elaboration of the division of labour and encourages the division of time. Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment. The rational optimist invites you to stand back and look at your species differently, to see the grand enterprise of humanity that has progressed — with frequent setbacks — for , years. And then, when you have seen that, consider whether that enterprise is finished or if, as the optimist claims, it still has centuries and millennia to run.
If, in fact, it might be about to accelerate to an unprecedented rate. If prosperity is exchange and specialisation — more like the multiplication of labour than the division of labour — then when and how did that habit begin? Why is it such a peculiar attribute of the human species? Chapter Two The collective brain: exchange and specialisation after , years ago He steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor.
When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked mid-winter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks.
Each took up a block of flint and began to fashion it into a hand axe, skilfully using hammers of stone, bone or antler to chip off flakes until all that remained was a symmetrical, sharp-edged, teardrop-shaped object in size and thickness somewhere between an iPhone and a computer mouse.
The debris they left that day is still there, leaving eerie shadows of their own legs as they sat and worked. You can tell that they were right-handed. Notice: each person made his own tools. They are thin, symmetrical and razor-sharp along the edge, ideal for slicing through thick hide, severing the ligaments of joints and scraping meat from bones.
The Acheulean biface is the stereotype of the Stone Age tool, the iconic flattened teardrop of the Palaeolithic. Because the species that made it has long been extinct we may never quite know how it was used. But one thing we do know. The creatures that made this thing were very content with it. By the time of the Boxgrove horse butchers, their ancestors had been making it to roughly the same design — hand-sized, sharp, double-sided, rounded — for about a million years. Their descendants would continue to make it for hundreds of thousands more years.
Not only that; they made roughly the same tools in south and north Africa and everywhere in between. They took the design with them to the Near East and to the far north-west of Europe though not to East Asia and still it did not change.
A million years across three continents making the same one tool. During those million years their brains grew in size by about one-third. The bodies and brains of the creatures that made Acheulean hand axes changed faster than their tools.
To us, this is an absurd state of affairs. How could people have been so unimaginative, so slavish, as to make the same technology for so long?
How could there have been so little innovation, regional variation, progress, or even regress? Actually, this is not quite true, but the detailed truth reinforces the problem rather than resolves it.
There is a single twitch of progress in biface hand-axe history: around , years ago, the design suddenly becomes a little more symmetrical. This coincides with the appearance of a new species of hominid which replaces its ancestor throughout Eurasia and Africa. Called Homo heidelbergensis, this creature has a much bigger brain, possibly 25 per cent bigger than late Homo erectus.
Yet not only did it go on making hand axes and very little else; the hand-axe design sank back into stagnation for another half a million years. We are used to thinking that technology and innovation go together, yet here is strong evidence that when human beings became tool makers, they did not experience anything remotely resembling cultural progress. They just did what they did very well. They did not change. Bizarre as this may sound, in evolutionary terms it is quite normal.
Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range.
Natural selection is a conservative force. It spends more of its time keeping species the same than changing them. Only towards the edge of its range, on an isolated island, or in a remote valley or on a lonely hill top, does natural selection occasionally cause part of a species to morph into something different.
That different sport sometimes then spreads to conquer a broader ecological empire, perhaps even returning to replace the ancestral species — to topple the dynasty from which it sprang. But there is little progressive alteration of the organism. Evolutionary change happens largely by the replacement of species by daughter species, not by the changing of habits in species. What is surprising about the human story is not the mind-bogglingly tedious stasis of the Acheulean hand axe, but that the stasis came to an end.
The Boxgrove hominids of , years ago who were members of Homo heidelbergensis had their ecological niche. They had a way of getting food and shelter in their preferred habitat, of seducing mates and rearing babies. They walked on two feet, had huge brains, made spears and hand axes, taught each other traditions, perhaps spoke or signalled to each other grammatically, almost certainly lit fires and cooked their food, and undoubtedly killed big animals.
If the sun shone, the herds of game were plentiful, the spears were sharp and diseases kept at bay, they may have sometimes thrived and populated new land. At other times, when food was scarce, the local population just died out. They could not change their ways much; it was not in their natures.
Once they had spread all across Africa and Eurasia, their populations never really grew. On average death rates matched birth rates. Starvation, hyenas, exposure, fights and accidents claimed most of their lives before they were elderly enough to get chronically ill.
Crucially, they did not expand or shift their niche. They remained trapped within it. For Palaeolithic hominids, hand-axe making was like walking, something you grew good at through practice and never thought about again. It was almost a bodily function. It was no doubt passed on partly by imitation and learning, but unlike modern cultural traditions it showed little regional and local variation.
It was instinct, as inherent to the human behavioural repertoire as a certain design of nest is to a certain species of bird. A song thrush lines its nest with mud, a European robin lines its nest with hair and a chaffinch lines its nest with feathers — they always have and they always will.
Indeed, the analogy with a bodily function is quite appropriate. There is now little doubt that hominids spent much of those million and a half years eating a lot of fresh meat. Some time after two million years ago, ape-men had become more carnivorous. With their feeble teeth and with finger nails where they should have had claws, they needed sharp tools to cut the skins of their kills.
Because of their sharp tools they could tackle even the pachydermatous rhinos and elephants. Biface axes were like external canine teeth. The rich meat diet also enabled erectus hominids to grow a larger brain, an organ that burns energy at nine times the rate of the rest of the body.
Meat enabled them to cut down on the huge gut that their ancestors had found necessary to digest raw vegetation and raw meat, and thus to grow a bigger brain instead. Fire and cooking in turn then released the brain to grow bigger still by making food more digestible with an even smaller gut — once cooked, starch gelatinises and protein denatures, releasing far more calories for less input of energy.
As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size. Erectus hominids, in other words, had almost everything we might call human: two legs, two hands, a big brain, opposable thumbs, fire, cooking, tools, technology, cooperation, long childhoods, kindly demeanour.
And yet there was no sign of cultural take-off, little progress in technology, little expansion of range or niche. Homo dynamicus Then there appeared upon the earth a new kind of hominid, which refused to play by the rules. Without any changes in its body, and without any succession of species, it just kept changing its habits.
For the first time its technology changed faster than its anatomy. This was an evolutionary novelty, and you are it. When this new animal appeared is hard to discern, and its entrance was low-key. Some anthropologists argue that in east Africa and Ethiopia the toolkit was showing signs of change as early as , years ago. They were also using red ochre, perhaps for decoration, implying thoroughly modern symbolic minds. This was during the ice age before last, when Africa was mostly a desert.
And yet apparently nothing much came of this experiment. Consistent evidence of smart behaviour and a fancy toolkit peters out again. Genetic evidence suggests human beings were still rare even in Africa, eking out a precarious existence in pockets of savannah woodland when it was dry, or possibly on the margins of lakes and seas.
In the Eemian interglacial period of ,—, years ago, the climate grew warmer and much wetter and sea level rose. Some skulls from what is now Israel suggest that a few slender-headed Africans did begin to colonise the Middle East towards the end of the Eemian, before a combination of cold weather and Neanderthals drove them back again.
It was during this mild spell that a fancy new toolkit first appeared in caves in what is now Morocco: flakes, toothed scrapers and retouched points. One of the most extraordinary clues comes in the form of a simple estuarine snail shell called Nassarius.
This little winkle keeps popping up in archaeological sites, with unnatural holes in its shells. The oldest certain Nassarius find is at Grottes des Pigeons near Taforalt in Morocco, where forty-seven perforated shells, some smeared with red ochre, date from certainly more than 82, years ago and perhaps as much as , years ago. Similar shells, harder to date, have been found at Oued Djebanna in Algeria and Skhul in Israel, and perforated shells of the same genus but a different species are found at Blombos cave in South Africa from about 72, years ago along with the earliest bone awls.
These shells were surely beads, probably worn on a string. Not only do they hint at a very modern attitude to personal ornament, symbolism or perhaps even money; they also speak eloquently of trade. Taforalt is 25 miles and Oued Djebanna miles from the nearest coast. The beads probably travelled hand to hand by exchange. Likewise, there are hints from east Africa and Ethiopia that the volcanic glass known as obsidian may have begun to move over long distances around this time too, or even earlier, presumably by trade, but the dates and sources are still uncertain.
Just across the strait of Gibraltar from where these bead-wearing, flake-making people lived were the ancestors of Neanderthals, whose brains were just as big but who showed no signs of making beads or flake tools, let alone doing long-distance trade. There was clearly something different about the Africans. Over the next few tens of millennia there were sporadic improvements, but no great explosion.
There may have been a collapse of human populations. Only well after 80, years ago, so genetic evidence attests, does something big start to happen again.
This time the evidence comes from genomes, not artefacts. According to DNA scripture, it was then that one quite small group of people began to populate the entire African continent, starting either in East or South Africa and spreading north and rather more slowly west. Their genes, marked by the L3 mitochondrial type, suddenly expanded and displaced most others in Africa, except the ancestors of the Khoisan and pygmy people.
Yet even now there was no hint of what was to come, no clue that this was anything but another evolutionary avatar of a precariously successful predatory ape. The new African form, with its fancy tools, ochre paint and shell-bead ornaments, might have displaced its neighbours, but it would now settle down to enjoy its million years in the sun before gracefully giving way to something new.
This time, however, some of the L3 people promptly spilled out of Africa and exploded into global dominion. The rest, as they say, is history. Starting to barter Anthropologists advance two theories to explain the appearance in Africa of these new technologies and people.
The first is that it was driven by climate. The volatility of the African weather, sucking human beings into deserts in wet decades and pushing them out again in dry ones, would have placed a premium on adaptability, which in turn selected for new capabilities.
The trouble with this theory is first that climate had been volatile for a very long time without producing a technologically adept ape, and second that it applies to lots of other African species too: if human beings, why not elephants and hyenas?
There is no evidence from the whole of the rest of biology that desperate survival during unpredictable weather selects intelligence or cultural flexibility. Rather the reverse: living in large social groups on a plentiful diet both encourages and allows brain growth. The second theory is that a fortuitous genetic mutation triggered a change in human behaviour by subtly altering the way human brains were built. This made people fully capable of imagination, planning, or some other higher function for the first time, which in turn gave them the capacity to make better tools and devise better ways of making a living.
For a while, it even looked as if two candidate mutations of the right age had appeared — in the gene called FOXP2, which is essential to speech and language in both people and songbirds. Adding these two mutations to mice does indeed seem to change the flexibility of wiring in their brain in a way that may be necessary for the rapid flicker of tongue and lung that is called speech, and perhaps coincidentally the mutations even change the way mice pups squeak without changing almost anything else about them.
But recent evidence confirms that Neanderthals share the very same two mutations, which suggests that the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern people, living about , years ago, may have already been using pretty sophisticated language.
If language is the key to cultural evolution, and Neanderthals had language, then why did the Neanderthal toolkit show so little cultural change? Moreover, genes would undoubtedly have changed during the human revolution after , years ago, but more in response to new habits than as causes of them. At an earlier date, cooking selected mutations for smaller guts and mouths, rather than vice versa. At a later date, milk drinking selected for mutations for retaining lactose digestion into adulthood in people of western European and East African descent.
The cultural horse comes before the genetic cart. The appeal to a genetic change driving evolution gets gene-culture co-evolution backwards: it is a top-down explanation for a bottom-up process. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.
Loved each and every part of this book. I was in Berlin. My hotel room was about 50 meters away from Checkpoint Charlie the central point of the cold war. The New Rational Manager. The book primarily focuses on the benefits of the innate human tendency to trade goods and services. Ridley argues that this trait, together with the specialization linked to it, is the source of modern human civilization, and that, as people increasingly specialize in their skill sets, we will have increased trade and more prosperity.
Bill Gates praised the book for critiquing opposition to international aid, but criticised the book for under-representing global catastrophic risks.
0コメント