Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind

by Mark Pagel

  What Ricardo probably didn’t realize is that he was describing something that modern humans had stumbled upon within their own societies perhaps more than 100,000 years before him when they discovered social learning and cooperation. Ricardo’s law tells us that when people naturally gravitate toward doing what they are best at, and then exchange their goods and services, everyone is better off. Everyone is better off because they will each be “purchasing” what they need from the returns they get from doing what they are best at. If I am good at making stone tools, I can trade them to you in exchange for food you have found. If you are good at shooting poisoned arrows through a blowpipe, you might trade dead birds to someone good at climbing trees for honey. Someone else good at tracking big game might lead hunting parties in exchange for someone making a shelter or a boat. These opportunities are simply not available to any other animal.

  Specialization and cooperative exchange are revealed as the routes of self-interest. If you stubbornly refuse to follow this rule but others do, they will be better off and you will be left behind. Still, Ricardo’s law has a “too good to be true” feel about it, an almost glib account of why our societies produce such riches. And yet there are striking precedents for it in nature. In fact, you inhabit one of them. Multicellular organisms such as ourselves, or elephants, or even clams, had discovered Ricardo’s law of task specialization perhaps 500 million years before humans discovered culture or Ricardo discovered his law. The society of cells that is our bodies ticks over smoothly and efficiently because it is a vast citadel of specialization, resembling a city or town in miniature. Some of our cells build hearts, others make livers, or muscle, eyes, kidneys, or brain cells. Skin cells erect a defensive wall or protective barrier around the body, and other cells form aggressive armies of the immune system. Natural selection had to coordinate exchanges among these parts, and so it built communication networks in the form of nerve cells carrying electrical signals from one part of the body to another, and it produced liquid chemicals called hormones to contact many other cells simultaneously. Tubes carrying blood act as road networks to ferry oxygen and food to the tireless specialized workers, extending all the way out to the fringe territories of fingers and toes.

  This would all be repeated millions of years later when the first social insects—the ants, bees, wasps, and termites—evolved. Their teeming communities of brothers and sisters came to act like a single coordinated body, only more loosely organized. Now, instead of millions of cells packed inside a protective skin and laboring to transmit their genes, millions of brothers and sisters came to labor inside a protective hive or nest on behalf of their mother, the queen. Workers would get assigned to separate castes of foragers, nest repairers, and nannies that looked after the brood. Others would become immune system commandos, capable of defensive but also of offensive actions to protect the nests against invaders or to attack other nests. They acquired airborne communication systems of chemicals called pheromones, and workers acted as blood, carrying food to developing embryos.

  Ricardo’s law can tell us that specialization is a good thing and a simple rule of thumb can tell us how we might make it happen without even knowing it. Win-stay, lose-shift is a strategy that follows the rule “If you find yourself winning, stay put, otherwise move on.” You play this strategy when the gambling machine you are pouring money into comes up all cherries and you try again, or doesn’t for some time and you move to another. You do it when the bar you frequent looking to attract a mate turns out to be a literary bar but you are a sporting type. You do it when the people you are cooperating with turn around and steal from you. Bees follow win-stay, lose-shift when they search for nectar in flowers. In some cichlid fish species, males produce one of two color patterns—red or blue patches on their scales—and females have a preference for one or the other of these. Female cichlids with the preference for red-colored males find it easier to detect them in deeper waters, and vice versa for the females with the blue color preference. If males of both colors are initially randomly distributed at different depths, a policy of win-stay, lose-shift will see the blue ones moving toward shallower waters where they will be more successful, and red ones will move toward deeper waters for the same reason.

  Human couples might unwittingly play win-stay, lose-shift when they sort themselves by height. In most couples, females are shorter than males but not by much, so that if you make a plot of women’s height against men’s height among couples, you get a positive relationship beginning with the short couples in the lower left of the plot and moving up to the tallest couples in the upper right. There are of course exceptions, but the relationship is surprisingly consistent. It is also surprisingly easy to get it to emerge. Imagine women have a preference to find mates taller than themselves. The tallest women will seek to pair up with the tallest men (the tallest women have no choice). Once the tallest males are taken, the tallest of the remaining women will tend to pair up with the tallest of the remaining men, and then the next tallest men and women will pair, and so on, right down to the shortest men and women. The pattern can be helped if men also prefer shorter women, even if they don’t mind too much how much shorter. Next time you are at a large social gathering, look around to see how closely this pairing rule is followed. And it needn’t be limited to height.

  Now, suppose among a group of people there is a range of talents and skills but people find themselves randomly scattered among a set of tasks to be done. Suppose further that those who just happen to have the most suitable skills or temperaments for their task are more successful. These winners stay put while those who are less successful—losers—move on to some new task where they can get better returns for their efforts. Over time, if everyone plays a strategy of win-stay, lose-shift, people will come to be highly sorted such that everyone is doing something they are good at. If we imagine that something like this has been going on for thousands of years of our history, and we are prepared to believe that different tasks really do require different skills, then we would expect a variety of different talents and skills to emerge and be maintained in our societies. If we find this suggestion surprising or even alarming, we need look no further than just about any sports field. Games such as football, soccer, and basketball attract people of different body shapes and sizes. Height is far more important to a basketball player than it is to a soccer player, and bulk and strength are more important to a football player than to a basketball player. Jockeys and rowing coxes are small.

  UNMASKING OUR LATENT ABILITIES

  IT IS true, tall basketball players and short jockeys are not the same as saying that notaries are notaries because they are genetically good at being notaries and only at being notaries, and vice versa for silk workers, or that those who climb trees for honey do so because they are better at it than those who are best at throwing spears. But what if there were some natural number of different dimensions of human existence? Maybe, for example, our societies have always needed people with good analytical skills, particular physical abilities, manual dexterity or hand-eye coordination, musical, artistic or linguistic talents, social skills or features of personality. If so, the mere possibility of sorting combined with Ricardo’s law tells us that societies that encourage specialization will be the most efficient and will therefore return the greatest benefits to their inhabitants. But this also means human societies will have placed the greatest demands on their inhabitants as competition to be good at something will be intense. The demands arise from the fact that Ricardo’s law makes it inevitable that those who are best at what they do have the most to exchange with others. In these circumstances, it will pay you to find what you are best at and do it. If you don’t but others do, you will inevitably compete against people who are better than you at what you want to do.

  A simple but true feature of cultural evolution also tells us to expect that our cultures will have a built-in tendency to evolve in the direction of producing innovations that unmask and then cultivate the talents that nat
urally exist among a group of people. The variety of things around us, and the variety of different things we do, exist because they are the things that, with few exceptions, we are capable of exploiting for our own gains or pleasure: the products of cultural evolution will tend to be adapted to us. For example, until someone produced the first guitar, there would not have been any guitarists, but there would have been soon after as those with the ability to play them did so. If this example seems frivolous, it tells us something important. It tells us that when human culture produces innovations such as guitars, those innovations will tend to attract those who possess the skills best suited to them. There will be exceptions of course, but Ricardo’s law and a policy of win-stay, lose-shift make this almost inevitable. Modern educational and social systems do their best to offer equal opportunities to children, but everyone—and not least schoolchildren themselves—knows that some of us are just better at some things than others (playing guitars among these) and are so right from the beginning. There seems little doubt that technological innovations—and not just limited to musical instruments—reveal latent abilities lying hidden amongst us. Indeed, school music teachers often say the instrument finds its player.

  Among our near relatives the chimpanzees, there are no guitarists and there never will be, at least in nature, because chimpanzee society will never produce guitars. If there are latent abilities among chimpanzees for strumming guitars, we will never see them emerge. But we could imagine a chimpanzee strumming a guitar if one were made available. We know this because chimpanzees don’t naturally paint either, but they can if they are handed a paintbrush. Picasso even owned a painting by a chimpanzee called Congo. Joan Miró is said to have swapped two of his sketches for a Congo painting, and Dalí was reportedly smitten with Congo’s works. Several of Congo’s paintings were auctioned in 2005 alongside a Warhol painting and a small Renoir sculpture, both of which had to be withdrawn for failing to meet their reserve prices. Congo’s work sold for around $25,000. This is either a delightful story or a sign of human frailty, that the art emperors may indeed have no clothes.

  We may not be able to agree on whether Congo’s paintings are art, but this doesn’t matter. Congo produced paintings that others found attractive, despite the fact that chimpanzees do not have any history of using paintbrushes, paints, and easels. It doesn’t matter that Congo might not have had any notion of producing a painting, that he might have been quite happy to knuckle-walk away from his painting at any time, or that if left in front of it long enough he might continue to add paint, indifferent to the folly of covering over work he had previously done. We don’t require of Congo that he deliberately set out to produce a work of art. What matters is that when the right cultural innovation came along, Congo could use it. And this is where we differ so from the other animals, because human culture has been producing the “right” innovations now for tens of thousands—maybe more—of years. Where artists have no particular role to play among the chimpanzees, they do among humans, and this might have meant that genes for artistic abilities have prospered just that little bit more in our past.

  When a complex behavior such as the ability to paint emerges abruptly rather than over long periods of time, we are entitled to expect that it already existed in some form but that the conditions capable of unmasking it had never before arisen. It is precisely this scenario that seems to describe human artistic abilities. In the middle of December in 1994, three friends out spelunking (exploring caves) in the Ardèche region of France felt a waft of air emanating from a part of a cave they had visited before. They dug a passage through some fallen rocks and came upon a spectacular system of limestone caverns, now known as the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave after one of the three friends.

  At first the explorers didn’t notice anything except the beauty of the cave’s spectacular stalagmites and stalactites. But then deeper in the cave, they saw something that hadn’t been seen by human eyes for over 30,000 years. The walls contained startlingly accomplished paintings of rhinoceroses, mammoths, panthers, bears, horses, and owls. A drawing of a bison depicts it with eight instead of four legs as if the artist was trying to convey its motion. A rhinoceros image is repeated several times, each successive image shifted a small amount to the left, almost like a cartoon flip book. The shape of the cave walls is used to give some of the paintings a sense of having three dimensions. There is a negative image of what appears to be a male’s hand, created when one of these prehistoric painters filled his mouth with paint and then blew it at his hand resting against the wall, leaving an unmistakable symbol of robust self-awareness.

  All of these images had remained in utter darkness in the sealed cave since they had been created at least 32,000 and possibly as much as 36,000 years earlier, making them the oldest paintings yet discovered. Nothing would have hinted that they would burst onto the scene like this, and cave paintings are found around the world. It is as if our ability to produce them had lain dormant in our species, merely awaiting an outlet. That outlet might have been little more than the caves and perhaps charcoal to draw with taken from fires, or the availability of some local colorful mineral to mix into paint. There is simply no evidence the Chauvet paintings and others like them are the product of generations of earlier and less talented humans learning step by step how to paint. Instead, around 13,000 years after the Chauvet painters—a period of time about three times longer than all of recorded history—another set of cave artists in the much more famous nearby Lascaux Cave produced paintings that are not substantially different. They are more detailed and colorful, but these differences probably owe more to technological achievements that produced better paints, paintbrushes, and the fire lamps to venture into caves than to any changes to our underlying abilities.

  In fact, the paintings in Lascaux, Chauvet, and other caves are so remarkable that for many years they were thought to be fakes, put there by mischievous modern graffiti artists. But someone noticed that the mammoths painted in one of these caves, the Grotte de Rouffignac, had a small bump on their derrières. No one knew about this bump until a mammoth was found somewhere else in the world virtually intact frozen in ice. It too had one of these small bumps and in the same place. That bump turns out to be a gland called the operculum, and it was probably used for scent marking. Modern elephants don’t have opercula, and so it is unlikely that a modern artist would have known of them. Carbon dating of the paintings now confirms the conclusion of this fortuitous discovery of anatomy. Upon seeing the paintings at Lascaux, Picasso reportedly said, “We have invented nothing.” It had not escaped Picasso’s attention that the paintings were not mere illustrations but often fanciful representations that would anticipate elements of the Cubist style he would introduce to wide acclaim 17,000 years later. Some of them depict horses with large distended bellies and short skinny legs, or aurochs with sweeping horns. One of these fanciful creatures at the Chauvet Cave has the head and body of an auroch and the hips and legs of a human female. Not far away at the Pèche Merle Cave there is a horse covered in polka dots and the figure of a woman with auroch features.

  These works demonstrate not just imagination and symbolism but the fluidity of our minds that Steven Mithen, in The Prehistory of the Mind, suggests underpinned our leap of symbolic thinking. They show that not only could we think symbolically; we could combine different symbols in new and creative ways. Another 17,000 or so years after Lascaux, and again not far away, fourteenth-century fresco painters at the cliffside village of Rocamadour would produce the now familiar, and to modern eyes somewhat stiff and wooden, two-dimensional representations that characterize Byzantine religious art. It is not difficult to imagine that one of the Chauvet or Lascaux painters transposed seventeen to thirty millennia forward to this time could easily have done the same, and would have been tempted to do more. Indeed, when the film director Werner Herzog was allowed to view the Chauvet paintings, he was astonished at their sophistication, saying, “Painting never got any better through the ages, not
in ancient Greek and Roman antiquity, nor during the Renaissance. It’s not like the Flintstones—the work of crude men carrying clubs. This is the modern human soul emerging vigorously, almost in an explosive event.”

  The abrupt appearance of technical skills is not unique to painting. There are now examples of musical instruments, flutes and percussion devices, dating back to around 36,000 years. An ivory carved figurine of a startlingly sexually exaggerated female figure and dated to nearly 40,000 years ago has been found in Germany. It is not some primitive object, but rather a compelling example of what could pass as high figurative art in the modern world. As with cave art, we cannot know if there are far earlier and primitive sculptural forms, but it does seem that sculpting ability in some sense precedes sculpture as a regular or conventional art form; this figure, as with the cave paintings at Chauvet, seems almost to appear out of nowhere. Or not quite out of nowhere: analyses of the sculpted figurine reveal that the artist must have had access to fine scraping and carving tools. But that is of course the point: it was these technologies that unveiled the sculptor’s abilities. And a recent find suggests those abilities might have existed at least as long ago as 75,000 years. Human hands are responsible for a prepared ochre stone about 1.5 inches wide and 3 inches long, found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa and dating to this time. It is geometrically engraved with a cross-hatched design on a face of the stone that had been ground to make it flat. It is a breathtaking view of our species’ symbolic thinking and artistic abilities in a dim and distant past.