The book sets out to resolve a conundrum that has stymied attempts to develop a scientific understanding of humanity

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, in response to the theories of racial superiority that accompanied the rise of colonialism, cultural anthropology put forth the thesis that human behavior is different from that of other animals. It is not an expression of innate, biological processes, but rather, is learned: acquired by an individual as a member of a community. This is culture. Different levels of cultural development cannot be traced to evolutionary dynamics, but instead, are the products of uniquely human, historical processes.  

During the late 1960s and 1970s, a school of thought emerged that challenged this position. This new school argued that humans, like all other living creatures, are the products of an evolutionary process guided by natural selection. Everything about us has been shaped by biological survival imperatives and as a result, all our behavior can ultimately be traced to evolutionary goals. This is the position of sociobiology, and in one form or another, it dominates the thinking in the field today.

The book begins by accepting cultural anthropology’s premise that human behavior is built on a different foundation than animal behavior. At the same time, it acknowledges that humans are the products of an evolutionary process guided by natural selection.

These two seemingly contradictory facts can be reconciled by conceiving of a different kind of evolutionary process—one in which natural selection could produce a being whose behavior was no longer governed by natural selection. What kind of evolutionary process could do away with itself? could produce a being whose ongoing development no longer depended on an evolutionary process?

The key to resolving this conundrum lies in a new understanding of culture. Our ancestors got on a unique evolutionary track. Rather than adapting to their environment with their biology, they adapted with cultural behaviors: with technology–tools that make use of the properties of natural objects; with new forms of communication made possible by other kinds of “tools”—signs, mime, and eventually symbols; and lastly, they were able to use their communication tools to combine their individual energies into coordinated actions—in effect, producing social “tools.”

         All of these behaviors are ways of generating powers and acquiring capacities that are not built into an individual’s biology. I use the term “tool” to highlight the fact that cultural behavior consists of making use of the properties of something outside the individual organism—natural objects, signs and symbols, and the energies of other people. Culture is an alternative to biological evolution; it enables a creature to acquire new capacities without going through an evolutionary process.

         Humans are unique because, unlike other animals, we did not adapt to our environment with our biology. Instead, we adapted to culture—a way of adapting to an environment without having to change one’s biology. Yet We Did Evolve

         While culture may be an alternative to biological evolution, nevertheless, it has its own biological requirements. Our great ape ancestors began with a biology that had not evolved to perform these kinds of behaviors. It took three million years to turn that great ape into what we are today. The process of evolving a biology that is fully adapted to a cultural way of life is the story of human evolution. That’s what this book is about.

         Human evolution was more than simply a biological event. Culture—which is acquired behavior–can only exist within a social framework. Human biological evolution was inseparably connected to the emergence of a unique, culturally constructed community. The growth of our oversized brains—a product of selection for these new, more complex behaviors—was accompanied by a set of trade-offs: longer pregnancies, extreme infant dependency, and prolonged childhoods, all of which created the need for mutual aid between the sexes–food sharing and a sexual division of labor. The human community is itself a cultural construct—it depends on norms, rules and shared values—all of which are social “tools” that human communities use to organize themselves and facilitate cooperation.

The final step in our evolutionary process took place around 60,000 years ago. This is when the brains of our Homo sapiens lineage completed their divergence from those of our archaic sister lineages (Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc.) and assumed their contemporary, rounded form. The evidence suggests that this is when Homo sapiens evolved a capacity for a fully developed, symbolic language system.

         Language was the true game changer. It enabled humans to construct higher level abstractions. Symbols make possible the development of concepts—mental models that transcend the framework of imagery, e.g., law, custom, love, mammal, plant, etc. But language does much more than that. It gives our mental processes a tangible form–sounds—that makes them available to others. This enables individual experience to be “off loaded;” to become part of a collective body of information that can be processed and passed on by an entire community. Our individual consciousness and states of mind have come to depend upon our historical and social station and not just on our own individual experiences.

         With language, biology and culture became fused. Our brains assimilate language enabling us to think with words, and by using words, we are able to think with abstract concepts. This is when humanity, equipped with a higher intelligence, separated itself from the animal world. Before language, cultural development had depended on biological changes, primarily on the growth of the brain. Language provided humans with an “open-ended” intelligence—a way of accumulating information and improving their models of the world without having to go through biological changes.

         At this point, biological evolution passed over into historical and social development. Natural selection had given birth to a being whose on-going development was no longer guided primarily by evolutionary dynamics.

         Humans, as the title to the book suggests, have moved beyond biology.

As living beings, we will always retain a biological dimension. Our life process, however, has become merged with a cultural world that provides us with powers and capacities that carry us beyond the framework of our biology. We have become a new kind of being– a cultural being. 

However, this is not entirely a success story. Culture mediates our relationship to the natural world. It creates a gap between us and nature, and this gap has given rise to an existential crisis. We were born in ignorance; we awoke to a conceptual capacity without any deep knowledge of ourselves or the world we lived in. Our ability to create cultural forces ran ahead of our understanding of their consequences, and now our very survival depends on our ability to bridge the gap—to develop a deeper understanding of what kind of being we are and what we must do to bring our powers into balance with the rest of nature.

Continued…

The truth is, we don’t really know how to make sense of ourselves—how
we fit into the natural world. When I say we, I don’t mean just you and me. I
mean the global scientific community. The evidence that humans evolved
from a species of great ape is overwhelming. But no one really knows how
to factor that information into our understanding of ourselves.

While the great majority of educated humanity recognizes that we emerged
out of the animal world, no one has been able to produce an evolutionary
model that can explain how we could have become so different from other
animals. Unable to even specify what distinguishes us, evolutionary
scientists deny that such a distinction exists. They attempt to force their
ideas about us into the same molds used to make sense of other animals.

To many, the fact that we don’t know what we are may not seem to be a
problem. Indeed, it could be argued that we are what we are, whether or
not we know what we are. That is a profoundly mistaken idea. We are a
unique kind of being; we are an intelligent life-form. That doesn’t mean we
don’t make stupid mistakes or that we are always rational. It means that
information plays a different role in our survival. We don’t survive, as other
animals do, with the biological resources that nature provides us with.

Human survival depends on our capacity to understand cause and
effect—how things work. It is this intellectual capacity that has enabled us
to make use of nature’s powers and to organize ourselves into vast,
collective complexes. However, our capacity to create technological and
organizational forces ran ahead of our understanding of how these were
impacting our world. We were blind to the ways in which these forces were
degrading the life-sustaining processes of our planet.

An intelligent being survives by what it knows. Our current crisis is not the
expression some inevitable conflict between humanity and the rest of
nature. It is, rather, a reflection of the stage of development we are at.
While our organism is built on a great ape biological platform, we are truly
different from every other animal. Unlike them, we did not emerge fully
formed from our evolutionary process. That puzzling statement embodies a
critically important truth about what we are and the nature of the current
crisis we are facing.

Around 60,000 years ago, the biological phase of our evolutionary
development more or less came to a close. That was when our Homo
sapiens ancestors evolved a fully developed language capacity. Language
holds the key to what we are. With language, intelligence became
separated from knowledge. Intelligence is a capacity an animal is born with;
knowledge is something that is acquired through experience and
communication–learning.

Language enables humans to materialize their thought processes: to
represent ideas with symbols (words). This allows us to share and
collectively process our internal mental states: to re-work our ideas and to
build upon them. With language, humans are able to construct abstract
models of the world—models that elevate our understanding beyond the
information provided by the senses.

Our senses can tell us that creature over there is like certain others—a
lizard. They cannot tell us that it is a reptile—a category that includes
turtles, an animal that our senses tell us is very different from a lizard. Even
less can our senses tell us that it is a vertebrate, a category that includes
such distinctive creatures as fish, amphibians, mammals and birds.
Abstraction allows us to discover an order in nature that transcends the
evidence of the senses.

With language, knowledge not only broke free from the limitations of the
senses, it also broke free from the circle of individual experience. Human
mental capacities were no longer defined by the biology of individual
brains, but rather, become inseparably connected to the pool of knowledge
accumulated by human communities. Language turned knowledge into a
collective, social-historical phenomenon.

The Cultural Bubble

The fact that our knowledge of the world is not the direct product of our own individual experience, but rather, is derived largely from our membership in community, reveals something fundamental about human life. We do not have a direct relationship with nature.

Humans live in a bubble. As I just pointed out, most of what we know about
the world comes to us from our society—our myths, science, histories—the
accumulation of knowledge we have access to. But this bubble is bigger
than knowledge. All our necessities, food and goods, are the products of
the operation of a complex, humanly-constructed economic system. The
way we treat each other, our rights and duties, are regulated by a set of
legal and ethical rules, and are enforced by a network of social institutions.

Our health is ministered to by a scientific establishment and a highly
organized medical care system–and so it goes. Everything we do—from
procreation to art and entertainment, takes place within a social framework
that we have built and that operates by our rules.

This bubble is what anthropologists call culture. It is a construct that stands
between us and the natural world—and it determines how we interact with
that world: how we think about it and what powers we can bring to bear on
it. The problem we face today is that this cultural bubble is driven by
dynamics that are at odds with those that govern the working of the natural
world. If these two can’t be reconciled, it will be our human world that will
perish.

The Awakening

In sum, we are an intelligent being that does not know what it is. This is
what I mean when I say our evolutionary development has not been
completed. With other animals, their evolutionary process could be said to
have come to an end when they have become a distinct species—when the
biology of a community of animals has acquired a form that allows them to
exploit some ecological niche.

We are different. A species that survives by knowledge, whose biology has
evolved not to fit into some specific environment but to accumulate
information—information that enables it to exploit every environment– is
very different. Knowledge has no end point. We are, then, an open-ended
being. Our growth process is never completed. However, while there may
not be a finish line, that does not mean that there are not different stages in
our developmental process. That, I believe, is where we are at today. We
need to complete a critically important part of our birth process: we must
bring the workings of our cultural bubble into line with the laws that govern
the natural world.

There is no ready-made formula for how to move forward. But there are, I
believe, four important elements we must come to terms with.

The first has to do with biological evolution. To understand what we
are, we must first recognize our roots in the animal world—how we
are a part of the stream of life that emerged from the substance of our
planet. At the same time, we must understand how we became so
different from all the others. Both of these are necessary if we are to
understand how we fit into the natural world. Evolution provides the
framework within which the human drama has unfolded.

The second has to do with our cognitive powers. We must deepen
our understanding of our unique intellectual gifts–what they share
and where they differ from those of the animal world. In particular, we
need to understand their shortcomings and vulnerabilities. Our
access to information provided by others is a great source of
strength, but it carries with it a susceptibility to disinformation. While
we have a capacity for objectivity, our perceptions are never entirely
divorced from our wishes, fears, needs, and illusions.

Third, we cannot rescue nature at the expense of our own
development. There is no going backwards. Our role, I have come to
believe, is to bring intelligence into the organization of nature. If we
are to have a future, we will need to build a real partnership between
humanity and the natural world.

And last, we must figure out how to manage our cultural bubble. This
may be the most critical and difficult problem of all. Humanity is going
to have to work together on an unprecedented level if we are to avoid
being a destructive force. That, I believe, will bring us back to the
problem we posed at the beginning of this essay; the need to find a
balance between individual liberty and collective purpose.

These are the issues I would like to pursue on this website.