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When you are next in the shower, take a look at your wrinkled fingers. They aren't pretty to look at, but they help make you smart. Pruney fingers are not an accidental side effect of getting soaked as is typically believed, but are, instead, highly efficient rain treads that help us primates grip the world when it is wet (something we've recently been studying in the lab). Read More
Gedanken experiment ...
Merely getting food from a drive-through requires driving, reading, and calculating, three tasks that would be alien to your Pleistocene* ancestors (as would be the "Double-Whipped Skim Banana Machiato Expressiccino with no foam" you ordered). And it was humans who invented cars, writing and math (not to mention coffee) -- that kind of creativity wouldn't be possible if our brains were buckets of pruney-finger-like mechanisms. [From your article]
Let me make a small change at the asterisk. In fact let us consider various substitutions at the asterisk. The "game" here is simply to replace the word "Pleistocene" with various alternatives. The goal of the game is to evaluate the truth of your two sentences in each case.
To standardize, I will fix on certain definitions as they are given in Wikipedia. Pleistocene: 2 588 000 - 12 000 BP [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene ] Note that this is quite a long period of time and our ancestors from 12 000 BP have essentially no genetic difference from us. Those of the early end of the Pleistocene may not even be in the same genus (Homo).
Ok, here are some substitution possibilities: Pliocene, Gelasian, Calabrian, Ionian, Tarantian. The first of these precedes the Pleistocene, so presumably our "Pliocene ancestors" have the same "alien" relationship to your three tasks. The next four are stages from earlier to later which are subdivisions of the Pleistocene (same source in Wikipedia) and hence all also have the "alien" relationship.
So we need to come forward in time. The Holocene brings us up to the present. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene ] Let us follow the implied suggestion in the Wikipedia article to talk about "periods of technological development" [ibid] namely: mesolithic, neolithic, Bronze Age [end of citation--note that paleolithic is redundant to Pleistocene] At what point in this sequence do "our ancestors" become "non-alien" to your three tasks?
None of the preceding? Well let's proceed: Iron Age? Historical time? Which time in history? We count off the centuries AD ... 1st?
Hmmm, no cars yet? ... 10th Still no cars? ... 18th, 19th, 20th, Hmmm, no Starbucks until late in the century?
Hmmm. Somehow I don't think we are seeing brain evolution as determining which of our ancestors understand Starbucks (varying your metaphor for ease of comprehension, I hope). Or driving. Or reading, come to think of it? Calculating seems more tricky given that there are plenty of "indications" of this back into the Pleistocene. What we are seeing is determined by the culture they grew up in, OR DIDN'T.
What is the point of this exercise? It raises the thorny issue of the relationship of culture to biology. Arguably [cf Susan Savage-Rumbaugh] even some of our Pliocene ancestors [chimpanzees? --actually probably diverged even before the Pliocene] might be stretched, if you will, such that your Expressiccino scenario might turn out to NOT be alien to them (depending on taste and what you allow as a "car" and "driving").
The quote you give of mine,
The quote you give of mine, and then argue against, was a "prop" that I later argued against in the piece.
Very good. Let's try again.
How, then, is it that we are doing so many strange non-ape-ish things? We carry out all sorts of behaviors you shouldn't see apes doing not because we apes have been reshaped, but because culture has gone out of its way to shape itself to fit our groovy human self. In particular, culture has shaped itself to be "like nature," thereby best harnessing our ancient inflexible brains for doing something they weren't designed for, like successfully ordering coffee. [From your article after the prop has been kicked away, so to speak]
It is quite possible that I fundamentally AGREE with the point you are making here. But it is written in a way that is too "metaphorical" for my taste. Let me try to be more specific.
What does it mean to personify "culture" and speak of it "shap[ing] itself"? Presumably culture is selected, more specifically the behaviors which make up culture are selected. What is the criterion of selection? This is where "nature" enters the picture. There is a (relatively, in terms of length of time intervals) constant biological system (species) which, according to classical learning theory, is reinforced for some ("cultural") behaviors and not for others. So the "selection" is classically based on the concept of "reinforcement". The things one CAN do are the things "our groovy self" is biologically capable of doing. According to classical behaviorism these things (behaviors) are differentially reinforced. Specifically they are reinforced by the ENVIRONMENT as "successful".
Now, there is a fundamental mismatch of this picture (behavioral reinforcement) and the picture of biological selection (survival, or, more accurately, reproductive success) of the organism wrt TIME FRAMES. Evolution has produced the capacity for reinforcement. Reinforcement selects "successful" behaviors. [NB there is a question of rigor here. The word in quotes can't be literal at this point in the discussion.] This produces culture over longish (but short by biological standards) time frames. In these time frames our behaviors are "harnessing our ancient brains" (classically this refers to what I believe Kant [or at least later scholars of Kant] would have called "innate potential").
But there is another level, that of yet longer, biological time frames. These are the time frames of what E. O. Wilson and colleagues call "biological-cultural coevolution". This is where the particularly thorny issues of theory arise, imho.
One specific point here is the following. The whole of human civilization has arisen, essentially, within the last ten thousand years. [Ok, you can have forty thousand or even eighty thousand if you insist ...] But this is "the blink of an eye" in biological terms. It is possible that the whole question of the survival of Homo sapiens (and even of the system of life on Earth if we consider the really catastrophic scenarios) boils down to a mismatch of time frames between "our groovy brains" and "ordering coffee". I presume this is what you are referring to by the phrase "something they weren't designed" in the passage above.
Now, are we communicating at this point?
I think I agree with most of
I think I agree with most of what you say here. And on the "mismatch" question, I do think that dealing with the huge mismatch in time frames is fundamental to any approach to understanding what we are today, and where we're headed.
Thank you
Thank you for your kind response here. In the future I am going to try to cut you a little more slack in your "loose" use of language. It certainly can't be an easy task to write popular articles on research being done in realtime.
Maybe its just me
...but i've lost the point in how the effect is linked to the cause. Or maybe its just the wording.
Do you have simple "more mortal" explanation for the rest of us
Re-directing evolution
If we wish to expand upon an individual trait of ours, e.g. creativity, and cannot or will not do it by invasive genetic modification, we must alter the current selection criteria for successful reproduction.
For instance, to deliberately increase our creativity, we would need to make it so that individual level of creativity was the primary or sole determining factor in reproductive success. This, n turn, would require some kind of measurement and quantification of creativity, and the deliberate selection of a cutoff point; "below this mark, you are too square to breed".
it might seem inhumane, to deny someone reproductive ability they might otherwise have enjoyed, but none of the ways to deliberately enhance ourselves are all that appealing...
Yay! Eugenic totalitarianism!
I'll presume you're joking. And the point I'm making is that, with fixed Homo sapiens genes, we have nevertheless advanced, because culture has been shaping its artifacts to be just-right for our brains. We thereby get harnessed for unbiological activities like reading, speech comprehension, and music. That is, my point suggests the opposite of your conclusion.
A probably daft question...
... and one that is peripheral to the main thrust of the article. Nonetheless I'm intrigued:
At the beginning of the article you say that:
" Pruney fingers are not an accidental side effect of getting soaked as is typically believed, but are, instead, highly efficient rain treads that help us primates grip the world when it is wet ...
Without wrinkled fingers you would need to possess two categories of behavior, one for dry conditions, and one for wet. That would require more brain space than you can spare. "
Is there any evidence for this? If so could you point me at it - a brief Google failed to dredge up much of value.
Anecdotally, pruning only occurs after prolonged immersion. When I go to the swimming pool with my kids I am unaware that I am having to deploy a new category of behaviour for the first half hour before I prune (and according to the hypothesis as set out, I can't be since I don't have the spare brain power). So what is going on? Invisible, instantaneous micro-pruning?
On the face of it, the "pruning improves grip" hypothesis sounds like a 'just so' story.
The hypothesis is new to my
The hypothesis is new to my lab, and so no paper exists yet. We've acquired considerable evidence at this point, though. I'll have more to say on the research eventually... -Mark
I don't get it
It seems to me pruning is a disadvantage.
Skin and nails become much softer when pruning. I know it's a lot easier to get a cut on the foot or hands after a day at the pool. Granted, pools usually have some annoying textured material coating somewhere in them or around them.
Our bodies are smart. Only
Our bodies are smart. Only because we can't control most of the functions. Humans as a whole, though, leave much to be desired in the department of intelligence.
Late + the party.
I think you ignore the flexibility of the brain.
You can learn to "see" with your tongue, our brains re-wire themselves when we learn to read are just two examples of things out brain would have no basis for in its history other than the need to be flexible.
tongue vs nature-harnessing
Thanks for your comment. The case of the tongue re-used for seeing will never be more than a fifth rate eye. And the case of reading helps makes my point because we don't read because of great flexibility on our brain's part, but, rather, because writing systems have culturally evolved to shape themselves to look like what we're already good at visually processing. I call it Nature-Harnessing, and I talk about it in my most recent book Harnessed, and some in the previous book, Vision Revolution. Here's a piece on this here... http://bit.ly/cLgd2e
Sincerely,
-Mark
But... we can read things in
But... we can read things in languages that have absolutely nothing to do with nature. For example: http://dotsies.org/
comment
Comparative anatomy shows that the brains of most animals have convolutions. The "purpose" for these is an associative physiologic conjecture. The only assumption that may be appreciated from ontogeny is that brain size and surface area exceeded skull size. Thereby, greater connections (brain power) may occur within the confines of space which is ultimately limited by the female pubic symphysis since at birth all neurons are formed though dentrite connectivity continues to develop.
Finger grooves
The "grooves" I mention in the piece are those in pruney fingers, although I do allude to those in the brain, but as a metaphor.
For brain convolutions, I have explained their convolutedness in this earlier paper: http://www.changizi.com/diameter.pdf
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