I’ve had this idea for a book rattling around in my skull for a couple of decades now. Basically, it would be an exploration of human culture from an evolutionary standpoint.
Had I pursued academia rather than a career in technology and then journalism, I likely would have already written just such a treatise.
I tell people I have a geology degree because it’s easier that explaining the Integrated Studies Program I pursued for my undergraduate degree. Essentially, it was a build-your-own-degree program Carleton University offered at the time. I combined a major in geology with a focus on paleontology and a minor in history with a focus on world religions and philosophy.
It was a bit of a hard sell. When Carleton instituted the program, they were looking for practical things like combining biological engineering with business. Nevertheless, I managed to convince the committee that the two streams were compatible on the basis of both being history from different perspectives. In retrospect, paleoanthropology was probably an existing degree that would have suited me.
Suffice it to say, I have a lifelong fascination with evolution, particularly of our species and a not-so-rosy outlook for our long-term survival.
Perhaps I will still write that book, but In the meantime a very smart Homo sapiens by the name of Yuval Noah Harari has beaten me to it with an excellent volume titled simply Sapiens.
I am not convinced by all of his premises and conclusions. As one reviewer from the Wall Street Journal put it, “There are always fleas on the lion.”
The book is nothing if not compelling, though, and while we may differ on some details we share some pretty fundamental views about humanity starting with the idea that we are nothing but an exceptionally successful, sometimes to our own detriment, species of animal that has traditionally and wrongly viewed itself as being above nature.
To wit, what has made us the rulers of the domain called Earth, is not divine bequest, but our biological/evolutionary capacity for abstract thinking.
There are currently, and probably have been for most of history, species on this planet capable of social cooperation (as opposed to biological cooperation as seen in ants and bees). Bonobos, not surprisingly because they are our closest living relatives, form deep personal bonds and political alliances that help them collectively up to a certain group size.
In 1992, Robin Dunbar published research that set the upper limit for social cohesiveness of early human bands at 150 people, and even within that group, there is further subdivision into smaller intimate groups of approximately 12. After that, it just becomes too unwieldy for most individuals to maintain relationships and communities tend to subdivide.
If I look at my life, those are probably pretty accurate numbers. Including my involvement with the cricket club, the people at work, friends and acquaintances from other activities and my extended family, my outer circle is probably in the 200 range. The inner circle includes my wife, parents, kids, a handful of close friends and siblings,
Harari argues that our dominance of the planet, which is a truly recent phenomenon, is due to three major revolutions, the cognitive revolution (not to be confused with the intellectual movement of the 1950s and 1960s); the agricultural revolution; and the scientific revolution (usually referred to as the industrial revolution).
Harari and I have a quibble over the definition of revolution. Many anthropologists, including him, believe something extraordinary happened approximately 70,000 years ago that suddenly made us really smart and ignited our migration out of Africa and across the face of the planet, perhaps some kind of genetic mutation or a natural catastrophe that accelerated our abstract thinking ability. I strongly suspect it was much more gradual. It is fairly well accepted the human brain is pretty much identical now to when it emerged approximately 250,000 years ago. Knowledge builds upon itself; it is not a linear process, but a logarithmic one so I do not believe there is any reason to invoke a sudden change.
However it happened, in order to explode the way our population has, we needed to find a way to cooperate in larger and larger numbers. Enter language and our ability to create “common myths” and “fictions,” says Harari, the most important of which are money, religion and empire.
These are, indeed, extremely powerful cooperation generators. Think of the biggest empire still in existence today, perhaps ever, the United States. There are no end of other nations, organizations, political parties and individual people who despise the USA, but few of them would turn down American dollars.
And Americans themselves are as diverse as diverse gets. As Leonard Cohen wrote, “The cradle of the best and of the worst.” The vast majority of them, however, black and white, rich and poor, Christian and Muslim, homosexual and heterosexual, republican and democrat, agree it is currently the best nation on Earth and the best that ever existed. The mythologies of the land of the free and the home of the brave hold 300 million of them together even as they fight among themselves.
There is , of course, no objective way of determining the relative merits of this empire versus that one, agriculture versus hunting and gathering or Islam versus Christianity. Evolution is completely neutral; its only purpose for a given species is gaining advantages for DNA replication. Harari suggests, and I concur, that the proliferation of ideas is analogous to genetic evolution.
Evolution gave us the capacity, through cooperative myth-building, to create the concept of the United States and every other idea that came before it.
Nations, football teams (go Riders), religions and institutions of all kinds are, of course, abstractions. I wouldn’t necessarily call them “fictions” because they do exist if only in the human world of abstract thought.
Similarly, there are currently more than twice as many people (1.2 billion) living in abject poverty, than there were people on the planet 500 years ago. In the year 1500, there were only 500 million of us. Today there are more than seven billion.
I loved reading Sapiens. It covers so many of the things I think about all the time rolled into 416 thought-provoking and entertaining pages. It also contains one of the most perfect paragraphs that I never wrote, but wish I did. I have espoused the same sentiment time and again, but never so concisely and eloquently.
“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition is also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.”
That is not to say I advocate anarchy. We are our abstractions, beliefs and contradictions.
