8 hours ago
https://iai.tv/articles/humans-evolved-t..._auid=2020
INTRO: Our biology is central to our survival. This is the evolutionary story and one we take to apply to all living beings equally. However, biologist, anthropologist, and UN and WWF consultant, Jonathan Loh, argues that humans are special in a fundamental way. In this article, he proposes the radical new idea that the transmission of cultural characteristics is more important for human survival than biological ones. We pass down our cultural traits using language, which allows us to transcend our ancestry and reach beyond our tribes.
EXCERPTS: Culture isn’t just art, music and literature; it’s much more than that. Ways of dressing, cooking, speaking, religious beliefs, games, ceremonies, and customs are all elements of culture. Cultures are made up of traditions. These include any kind of behavior, practice, technology, knowledge or belief that’s not innate, but learned from others. They’re transmitted socially, not genetically. Some socially learnt behaviors are copied for a while, then forgotten; but others persist. A set of traditions transmitted from generation to generation within a social group constitutes a culture.
Early humans survived by hunting and gathering in highly cooperative groups. Crucial survival skills were transmitted culturally [...] So, here is an interesting parallel between culture and biology.
One definition of life is information that copies itself. It propagates itself through time. More specifically, life is information about how to build bodies that will copy the information. Biological bodies result from the expression of genetic (and epigenetic) information; if the body survives long enough to reproduce, that information is passed on to the next generation.
Cultures are the expression of a completely different kind of information—information that is stored in brains and transmitted to other brains through social learning, not via egg or sperm or cell division. Culture is a property of groups, not individuals. A cultural group is a body built by the expression of cultural information, and that group perpetuates that information beyond the lifetimes of its individual members.
[...] Lamarckism was dismissed because animals generally don’t inherit characteristics acquired by their parents. But the ratchet effect of cumulative cultural evolution does operate like that: innovative ideas or behaviors acquired within an individual’s lifetime can be passed on by social learning.
[...] Over the course of two million years, our brains doubled in size. But it wasn’t superior intelligence that led to the global dominance of humans, and ultimately the Anthropocene age of Homo sapiens; it was the culture that our brains were able to acquire by social learning. As the anthropologist Joseph Henrich put it: culture made us smarter... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: Our biology is central to our survival. This is the evolutionary story and one we take to apply to all living beings equally. However, biologist, anthropologist, and UN and WWF consultant, Jonathan Loh, argues that humans are special in a fundamental way. In this article, he proposes the radical new idea that the transmission of cultural characteristics is more important for human survival than biological ones. We pass down our cultural traits using language, which allows us to transcend our ancestry and reach beyond our tribes.
EXCERPTS: Culture isn’t just art, music and literature; it’s much more than that. Ways of dressing, cooking, speaking, religious beliefs, games, ceremonies, and customs are all elements of culture. Cultures are made up of traditions. These include any kind of behavior, practice, technology, knowledge or belief that’s not innate, but learned from others. They’re transmitted socially, not genetically. Some socially learnt behaviors are copied for a while, then forgotten; but others persist. A set of traditions transmitted from generation to generation within a social group constitutes a culture.
Early humans survived by hunting and gathering in highly cooperative groups. Crucial survival skills were transmitted culturally [...] So, here is an interesting parallel between culture and biology.
One definition of life is information that copies itself. It propagates itself through time. More specifically, life is information about how to build bodies that will copy the information. Biological bodies result from the expression of genetic (and epigenetic) information; if the body survives long enough to reproduce, that information is passed on to the next generation.
Cultures are the expression of a completely different kind of information—information that is stored in brains and transmitted to other brains through social learning, not via egg or sperm or cell division. Culture is a property of groups, not individuals. A cultural group is a body built by the expression of cultural information, and that group perpetuates that information beyond the lifetimes of its individual members.
[...] Lamarckism was dismissed because animals generally don’t inherit characteristics acquired by their parents. But the ratchet effect of cumulative cultural evolution does operate like that: innovative ideas or behaviors acquired within an individual’s lifetime can be passed on by social learning.
[...] Over the course of two million years, our brains doubled in size. But it wasn’t superior intelligence that led to the global dominance of humans, and ultimately the Anthropocene age of Homo sapiens; it was the culture that our brains were able to acquire by social learning. As the anthropologist Joseph Henrich put it: culture made us smarter... (MORE - missing details)