A Synopsis of Beyond Biology: The Evolution of a Cultural Being
The book sets out to resolve a conundrum that has stymied attempts to develop a scientific understanding of humanity
Humanity is at a crisis point. We all know that. We humans have to make changes. We need to bring our development into line with the workings of the natural world. Mostly that will involve technological and organizational solutions. But a big part of the changes we have to make are intellectual—and yes, emotional. Humans are not like other creatures. The world we create is too complicated to be navigated by instinct. We operate with belief systems. And currently, our belief systems are not up to the task—they are unable to guides us in this increasingly chaotic world.
It is my belief that our thinking needs to be better grounded. That’s why I have turned to evolution. Evolution won’t tell us everything we need to know about ourselves, but it gives us a place to start from–the place we actually started from: the natural world. While this website addresses issues that would seem to be far removed from evolutionary problems, it is my belief that we won’t be able to solve any of the myriad problems we face if we don’t develop a better understanding of what makes us tick.
Those who are interested in digging more deeply into the issues of human evolution and human nature, should read my book “Beyond biology.” However, for those who just want to get the main idea, I have written this synopsis.
The Problem
The question I ask in the book is what are we—are we simply another kind of animal? Or are we a unique kind of being? Is there is something that places us outside the framework of the animal world? if so, what could it be?
Evolutionary scientists almost never ask these questions. They assume that it is not possible for us to be anything other than an animal. We emerged from an animal ancestor and we got to where we are through the same kind of evolutionary process that has made every other animal into what they are. Yes, the argument goes, we are different from other animals, but no more different from them than they are from one another.
Common sense, however, tells us there is something importantly different about us. Indeed, if there were not something truly different we would not be in the fix we are in. Humans are not constrained by the same ecological checks and balances that limit the proliferation of other species. Our out-of-control growth process is taxing the Earth’s ability to sustain life as we know it. Intuitively, most people know there is something very different about us. But surprisingly, no one has been able to specify exactly what that difference might be–nor why we, out of all the different kinds of organisms that populate this planet, should have evolved into something unique.
To say we are different does not mean that we have nothing in common with other animals. Our biology is built on a great ape platform; there is nothing in our organism that does not have its roots in our animal ancestry. But our behavior operates on a different plane. Our motivations cannot be reduced to biological drives, nor are the powers we are able to generate limited by the nature of our organisms. An elephant is powerful, but its strength does not compare with that of a locomotive. How can we describe the kind of being we are? How did we become this way? Are we truly an inseparable part of the natural world? These are the questions I address in the book.
Back to the Beginning
To understand what we are, we must start at the beginning: where we came from and how we got on our unique evolutionary track. In my book, I begin by looking at what we know about our great ape ancestors—the Australopiths. While they were related to contemporary gorillas and chimpanzees, they were distinguished from them in two major ways. The first was anatomical–how they were built. While their upper bodies, like those of the other great apes, were constructed for life in the trees, their hips, legs and feet were designed for moving about on the ground. They were bipedal like us. The other feature that distinguished them was where they lived: they occupied the margins of the East African forests, where the woodlands abutted the savannah.
About 3 million years ago, this marginal region experienced a lengthy drought in which the forest parts of their habitat were decimated and largely replaced by more open grass lands. Normally, forest dwelling animals would either retreat along with the dwindling woodlands, would evolve some new biological means of coping with the changes, or go extinct. Our ancestors took a unique path. Beginning at around 2.6 million year ago, stone tools appear in the fossil carcasses of elephants and other large herbivores. The bones are scarred with the tell-tale marks where these tools had been used to remove the meat. Then, from a slightly later period, we find the remains of a creature that looks very much like its australopith ancestor, but has a brain that is almost 30% larger.
Stone tools, meat-eating, and larger brains: our ancestors were adapting to the changes in their surroundings in a new way. They were responding to the collapse of their old habitat by adding meat to their diet. There is nothing surprising about that. What was different, however, is that while they were adopting a predatory life-style, they did not evolve the biology of a predator. Rather than evolving claws, they kept their great-ape finger nails, and their canine teeth were flat and not serviceable as weapons. Their predatory capacities were based on the heft and sharp edges of their stone tools. And then there are the large brains. The implication is that their new tool-using/predatory behavior placed heavier cognitive demands on them.
What’s going on here? Behaviorally, what jumps out at us is tool using. However, the fact that some other animals are also able to use tools would seem to eliminate this behavior as the source of something new in our ancestor’s evolutionary process. However, not all tool-using capacities are the same. Experiments show that great apes excel at this behavior–not just because of their facile hands, but because of their greater intelligence. Tool using is very complex behavior, in most cases, too complex for the trial-and-error problem-solving methods used by the vast majority of animals. Animals solve problems with the “tools” they are born with, their teeth, claws, strength, etc. To be able to bring something from outside one’s organism into the problem-solving process requires a deeper understanding of the nature of the problem: an ability to model it in terms of cause and effect.
Reliance on tool using would certainly have selected for greater intelligence. At the same time, however, it is hard to imagine how selection for tool-using per se could account for the wealth of complex behaviors that emerged over the course of human evolution: language, social organization, art, imagination, etc. It would seem that something more than tool-using must have been involved. This raises the central problem of human evolution: what kind of natural selection shaped our evolutionary process? What were we adapting to?
Generally, human evolutionists don’t see any over-riding theme to human evolution. They see us adapting to a whole set of different capacities (tool using, hunting, language, social organization, etc.), each of which shaped us in different ways. While these different behaviors did require certain specific enabling features, this kaleidoscopic approach misses the central thread that unified our species’ evolutionary process.
The key lies in looking at tool-using differently. While making and using tools shaped our ancestor’s biology in certain specific ways (hands, arms, coordination, etc.), tool using needs to be looked at within a broader framework. It embodies a general behavioral principle: the ability of a being to acquire a new capacity without changing its biology. When an animal uses a tool, it is gaining a new capacity by making use of the properties of something other than itself. By using the hard, sharp edges of stone, our ancestors were able to acquire predatory capacities without evolving canine teeth or claws. This principle is central to every different kind of human behavior
In the case of technology, this is clear. Technologies are forms we give to natural objects and forces to enable them to be used for human ends. Our unique form of communication operates on the same principle. It makes use of signs and symbols (language), “tools” that allow us to represent and refer to objects and processes outside ourselves. Without these communication tools we would be like other animals–able only to express our internal emotional states.
Our unique communication capacity enables us to create another kind of “tool.” With signs and symbols, we can share goals and plans, information that allows us to coordinate and combine the actions of numbers of individuals. Beside these critically important behaviors, we should recognize that everything we do (dress, personal adornment, art, music, ritual) involves making use of the properties of things that exists outside our organism.
A Unique Evolutionary Process
Human evolution began when our great ape ancestor’s habitat was deteriorating more rapidly than their slow-moving evolutionary processes could keep pace with. As they became increasingly dependent on capacities they could generate rather than those they were born with, natural selection would have made a switch. Rather than working to alter their biology to fit their environment, it would have selected for an enhanced capacity to adapt by non-biological means.
What would it have meant to adapt by non-biological means? The survival of our early ancestors would have depended primarily on the three critical behaviors we alluded to above : tool using, referential communication, and organized cooperation. These three behaviors are the sinews of what social scientists call culture—technology, language, and social organization. While these behaviors differ from one another, they all share the common principle described above: they are ways of generating new capacities without altering a creature’s organism. The ability to 1) make tools, 2) use signs to communicate plans and 3) organize themselves to realize those plans, moved our small, clawless, and canine-less ancestors up the food-chain. They placed our species on a unique evolutionary track. We began to adapt to the requirements of culture rather than to the challenges of any specific environment.
While every facet of culture places its own specific demands on the human organism, the primary requirement of cultural behavior is an intelligence that can process complex causal relations. To be able to use a “tool,” a being must be able to understand a problem in a way that would allow it to imagine how something besides its own physical faculties could be used to solve it. While the great apes have the rudiments of such an intelligence, it would take a crisis to push our ancestor’s cognitive abilities to the level needed for truly effective tool-using behavior. It is telling that the earliest meat-eating, stone tool-using human ancestors we know of, already had evolved a brain that was 30% larger than that of their australopith predecessors.
Intelligence is the primary prerequisite for cultural behavior. That is why humans ended up with the largest brains in the animal world–7 times larger than those of the average mammal: 3 times larger than those of their australopith predecessors.
Sociability
While intelligence was undoubtedly primary, nevertheless, culture placed another critical set of demands on the evolving hominins. Up to this point, I have treated culture as a set of constructs (technological, communicative, and organizational) that rely on certain cognitive skills. There is, however, another important dimension to culture. Cultural behaviors do not exist in isolation: they are embedded in a close-knit community. The ability to function in this community has important emotional requirements.
Our great ape ancestors had also functioned within a community. Theirs, however, was a natural community: it grew spontaneously out of certain social instincts and was structured largely on a “might-makes-right” basis (dominance). While great apes can act together to defend their troop, they lack a referential communication capacity and thus, are unable to truly coordinate their actions. Also, they are herbivorous: they forage in isolation, and resist sharing food.
When our ancestors came down to the floor of the savanna seeking new sources of food, they found themselves in competition with the world’s fiercest predators. To hold their own in this new environment, they would need more than sharpened branches and simple stone hand-tools. They would have to be able to combine their forces effectively. This requirement set in motion another set of selective pressures. Their survival depended on developing a capacity to cooperate. While their cognitive powers and their ability to communicate would be critical for this, they would also have needed a set of social and emotional skills. Team-work requires impulse control, in particular, of aggression. They would also need a willingness to share the results of collective effort. In effect, they would have needed to turn their anarchistic, self-directed great ape troop, into a cooperative community.
While we don’t know the pace at which their social skills developed, there is evidence that by the Homo erectus stage(1.75 mya), the problems of raising large-brained and slow growing infants had already produced some kind of gender division of labor and food sharing. However, it was not until the appearance of Homo sapiens with their fully developed language capacity that all the pieces of sociality would have fallen into place.
Two Different Phases
Human evolution consisted in the reshaping of great ape biology to enable it to better perform cultural behaviors. It is helpful, I believe, to divide this process into two different phases. The first began around 3 million years and consisted in the transformation of our great ape ancestors, the Australopiths, into the first, fully ground-living member of our lineage–Homo erectus. Homo erectus should not be considered fully human: but neither should it be considered as a kind of great ape.
Homo erectus’ evolutionary process had been guided by selection for cultural skills. Its great ape upper body had been transformed: its arms and hands had become designed for grasping and manipulating objects. From the neck down it was basically the same as us. The head and face, however, had a ways to go. Its brain was huge for an animal, but it was still only about half way between a great ape and us. Its culture was quite primitive: simple hand-tools and weapons. We are not sure whether it was able to use fire, and while it almost certainly communicated with signs and mime, it was not able to communicate with vocalizations. It lacked a true language capacity.
At that stage in our evolutionary process, biology and culture were closely connected. Our ancestors’ biology set an upper limit to their cultural development. We are accustomed to think about culture change in terms of “history”– culture changing without any changes in the biology of its creators. That was not the situation with early humans. After Homo erectus had reached its full physical development about 1.75 million years ago, it appears to have stayed the same for some 700,000 years. During that period, its culture, so far as we can tell, remained fundamentally unchanged. We don’t see any significant cultural improvements until a new hominin variety with larger brains comes on the scene. That happened around 800,000 years ago with the appearance of Homo heidelbergensis, whose brain was significantly larger than that of Homo erectus (1250cc as opposed to 1000cc). At that stage, cultural change still depended on biological changes.
Homo heidelbergensis signaled the beginning of the second phase. It was the first hominin to exhibit changes in the great ape vocal apparatus. This indicates that it was using sound, not just visual signs, for communicative purposes. This was a major turning point in human evolution.
As Homo heidelbergensis spread out over the temperate regions of the Old World, it gave rise to a number of different lineages—Neanderthals, Denisovans, our own Homo sapiens clan, etc. By around 300,000 years ago, all of these had evolved very large brains—more or less equal in size to those of contemporary humans (1375-1450cc). While they had fire and made better stone tools, nevertheless, they were still lacking in advanced cultural skills. Something was missing in their biology. Then, around 140,000 years ago, our Homo sapiens lineage began to undergo changes in the shape of its skull.
Every hominin before us Homo sapiens, going all the way back to the ape-like creators of the first stone tools, had narrow and elongated skulls. The changes that began to take place in our lineage around 140,000 years ago, culminated in a skull that was globular–rounded. While our Homo sapiens brains are not significantly larger than those of our “cavemen” cousins (Neanderthals, etc.), the relative size of the different parts of the brain has changed. Most importantly, as these changes took place, our lineage’s cultural skills improved along with them. While our understanding of the brain is not adequate to enable us to fully understand what was going on, I believe the evidence strongly suggests that this was when our Homo sapiens lineage evolved a fully developed, grammatical-language capacity.
Language is the Game Changer
The appearance of a fully developed language capacity was almost certainly the final step in the human evolutionary process. Language endows humans with a unique self-programming capacity. Its appearance signaled the replacement of biological evolution by cultural development.
The key to language lies in the “tool” it makes use of: the symbol. Symbols—words–have no content of their own. Any sound can be used to stand for anything. Dog, perro, canis, gou, inu, kopek, kalb are words that are used by different languages to refer to that little animal over there wagging its tail. Symbols are different from signs. Signs (mime, hand figures, etc.) look like the things they refer to. Symbols are empty. They don’t look like anything. This is their secret. It allows them to be used to represent things that cannot be represented by an image–things that we cannot experience with our senses. What would these be? Abstract thoughts.
Our senses can identify that animal over there as a horse: a member of a category of things that look alike (a species). But our senses cannot tell us that a horse is a mammal, or a vertebrate, etc. The category mammal encompasses lions, whales, mice and bats–animals that our senses tell us are very different from horses. The category mammal is not given to us by the senses. Our senses experience mice, whales, lions and horse, but they never experience a “mammal.” Mammal is not a real, concrete object. It is an abstract construct that brings to light a feature that is common to a wide variety of different creatures—they suckle their young. The symbol plays a critical role in our intellectual faculties. Because we do not experience mammal with our senses, we cannot form an image of it. Without a symbol–the word mammal—we would have no way to represent such an abstract category. Language enables humans to construct abstract models of things–models that reveal an order in nature that transcends the evidence provided by the senses.
Language, however, does more than provide individuals with tools to create abstract models. language should not be looked at simply as a capacity of individual human beings. Language’s roots lie in communication: in social interaction. It does not really exist at the level of the individual: it the property of a community. It provides a community with an instrument to represent, organize, store, and exchange its collective knowledge. It gives rise to a collective consciousness, indeed, a collective intelligence.
The Cultural Community
With language, our Homo sapiens ancestors were able to complete the process of moving from a natural community to a cultural community. The distinguishing feature of a cultural community is that, like every element of culture, it is a construct. There are two main parts to this. The first is that a cultural community is rule governed. Rules are cultural “tools” that enable a community to define the parameters of its members interactions. Soft rules are called norms and are enforced by public sentiment. Hard rules are designated as laws and are enforced by force. The other important feature is institutionalization—the ability to form sub-groups within the larger community that are organized to carry out certain specific functions—military, governmental, economic, religious, etc. Both rules and institutions give humans the ability to alter the shape, size, and functioning of their social systems.
Historical Development
When we put all of this together–language’s ability to incorporate ever increasing amounts of information, the capacity of technology to harness ever-more powerful natural forces, and the ability of people to modify their social systems–it becomes clear that human development is no longer a product of biological processes. Indeed, biological evolution has been replaced by historical development.
This idea is seen as one of the most controversial claims presented in the book. It shouldn’t be. There is no evidence whatsoever that the dramatic cultural changes that have taken place over the last 60,000 years were either produced by, or resulted in, different biological outcomes. The last century in particular has been one of “catch-up:” of more and more peoples assimilating the cultural achievements of others. We are truly one people, endowed with the same cultural, self-programing capacity. The problem some scholars have in letting go of the idea that biological evolution is an inherent part of human life derives from the failure to recognize that we are not simply another animal -–we don’t work by the same rules. While we are living organisms, we have evolved beyond the framework of biology.
The Future
In the book Beyond Biology, I paint a portrait of humanity as a new kind of life-form. Our great ape ancestor’s hands, intelligence, and unique circumstances opened up a new evolutionary pathway. They were able to understand cause and effect and to use the properties of external objects to acquire capacities that were not built into their biology. This gave rise to a evolutionary process that resulted in the emergence of a cultural being—a being that is able to assimilate the properties of external objects and, by so doing, transcend the limitations of biological form.
A cultural being is an intelligent life-form. However, intelligence is only effective when accompanied by knowledge. And knowledge is not a given: it is not something one is born with. It can only be acquired through experience. 60,000 years ago, when the evolution of a fully developed language capacity elevated our Homo sapiens ancestors above the framework of the animal world, they had no knowledge of what they were or how they got here. Without knowledge, intelligence can be a destructive force—and we were born in ignorance.
We are now at a critical point. Our blind and out-of-control growth process has rendered the fabric of the natural order. We have to create the cultural tools—technological, conceptual, and social-organizational—that can reverse the damage that has been done. Perhaps most importantly, we have to improve on our social skills. In order to heal the breach with nature, we will have to heal the breach with one another.