Here is an article for you ^
tell me what you think sometime.
cc
Pathways – Wildlife Corridors of NM
http://pathwayswc.wordpress.com/
Will end there!
Thanks again!
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p.s. These were some paragraphs I just gathered to help me remember …
“But the key point about social learning is that this minor difference between us and the other species forms an unbridgeable gap between us and them. Because, whereas all of the other animals can pick up the odd behavior by having their attention called to something, only humans seem to be able to select, among a range of alternatives, the best one, and then to build on that alternative, and to adapt it, and to improve upon it. “
“Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those. And so, we see a direct comparison between social learning driving idea evolution, by selecting the best ideas –we copy people that we think are successful, we copy good ideas, and we try to improve upon them — and natural selection, driving genetic evolution within societies, or within populations.”
“We like to think we’re a highly inventive, innovative species. But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves.”
“Now, why wouldn’t we want to do that? Why wouldn’t we want to innovate on our own? Well, innovation is difficult. It takes time. It takes energy. Most of the things we try to do, we get wrong. And so, if we can survey, if we can sift among a range of alternatives of people in our population, and choose the best one that’s going at any particular moment, we don’t have to pay the costs of innovation, the time and energy ourselves. And so, we may have had strong selection in our past to be followers, to be copiers, rather than innovators.”
I really didn’t care for his global assumptions and broad characterizations, which boil down to his general worry about us becoming “docile copiers”. He begins the assumptions by talking about human intelligence in regards to creativity and “social intelligence”. First off, these things are very subjective, hard to measure, and all in all, don’t mean that much. A great capacity for intellect is one thing, but the real value of intellect is in its ability to:
1. teach others a less painful way to do things.
2. increase resources
3. have compassionate feeling as a goal.
These criteria of intelligence don’t necessarily require an increase in intelligence, an old way of ancient intelligence may work just fine forever.
I can understand that there is a lot of “easy” knowledge these days in Googling something, I do that a lot, but it only gets you so far, and not nearly as good as reading a good book or brilliant poetry. Let me just launch into a full blown critique here, including referring to what I think is a much better (its a book) take on the subject by E.O. Wilson in his book “Consilience”.
First of all, what he’s calling “cultural evolution” isn’t really evolution at all, not in the genetic sense. Our genes are almost identical to our Pleistocene ancestors. The glacially (literally) slow pace of genetic evolution was matched by cultural norms and codes up until then, when we started progressing much faster in our brains than our genes. Thats when we started putting taboos and social contracts in place, which are so deep in themselves it was hard to tease them apart from the genetic rules. One way to see the horror (to our contemporary minds) of that difference, is to see how much and how quickly, in one human generation, all those 50,000 years of societal norms are swept away when the family unit totally breaks down, as in the case of street children in Brazil, or the drug gangs of Mexico. This just shows how much investment in energy we put in to maintain those social contracts, polite behavior, appropriate behavior, legal behavior. Even so, we still go behind closed doors to practice infanticide, bigamy, incest, murder, and there are even laws against altruism – giving away food or services that “compete” with businesses that are charging money for these things.. There is also difficulty in legal adoption, and big $ all out proportion to reason when it comes to social status. This is all to show how close we still are to those old rules, and how much effort it takes just to maintain our social contracts, forget about being creative or innovative!
Mark P. seems to think we have not thought anything through, but seem to just randomly come up with new ideas. Part of this line of thinking comes from the assumption that people are trying to come up with new ideas, which implies they have a problem they want to solve. There are no “new” problems for the human race, in a way, we’ve already dealt with all the big stuff already, so we just use one of the standard methods and keep going. People don’t really want to see new problems, its easier to say, “that is a solution for which there is no problem”. Its hard to innovate for this reason, there is resistance to change the old methods. So maybe its not so much seeing new solutions or coming up with innovation, but an ability to say, ” this is hard, we are suffering”. (or, “this might be a problem, there might be an easier way”). The other problem with innovation is expense. Other than altruistic motivations, the way to compensate for increased expense is to increase payback (resources). There may be cultural taboos on increasing resources, but (this) also means an increase in status, which is a hard genetic compulsion to resist, so there are equally strong social contracts to combat them (be a good liberal, don’t consume).
So there are some strong negative feedbacks on innovation, not just that we are becoming “docile copiers”. But the real problem with Pagel’s worry is that its such a shallow mental argument. To “get something” by copying it is not so “docile” as he says. To really get anything out of copying can take a lifetime of discipline. There a plenty of things that are very difficult to copy, even when you see them over and over. Try to copy a professional gymnast, or a doctor, or anyone who has acquired a great skill.
When you look at how much these people are “copied”, the word copy becomes trite. It is not “copying” to become a doctor, or acquire a great skill. To reduce human learning to such is just a gross oversimplification.
The consilience of social studies into the other sciences is a long way off though, and it shows how far we have to go in understanding our “human-ness” in a scientific way.
—Peter Callen
2/1/2012
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Our Museum Director’s intention was to stimulate a conversation about how to inspire humans to think creatively. He explained, the day we discussed the article, the role of a museum is to cause a visitor to leave feeling engaged and enlightened and in touch with a sense of inventiveness. Mark Pagel’s “Infinite Stupidity” got us talking about human capacity to be creative, and how important it is to us.
C.C.
Color of Sand 