Learning more about the brain and linguistic theories have a big chance of becoming new aspects of my professional development. Sociology with evolution as its component is a field that complete explanation must incorporate. I’m rather omnivorous intellectually and as a teacher I used to ask myself a question raised from wondering about how the learning mechanisms work: where our learning abilities come from? The answer has to be in evolution. To really understand something you must know the mental software that implements it. You must know something about the brain and must know what gave it its structure. It is also natural to ask where that structure came from.
One of a kind
We don’t know how many species there are on Earth. Currently fewer than 2 million are classified but the total number is estimated to range from under 5 million to more than 50 million. And here we are, humans, who rule the world. What is so special about Homo sapiens? Why are we so unusual among all of the other species? How come that we exploited an opportunity for making a living – we outsmarted other plants and animals? All species naturally evolve defence against their predators. Animals desperately run away, develop spines and hard shells or poisons whereas plants can’t defend themselves in their behaviour. Surprisingly, a cauliflower and a tomato has no more desire to be eaten than you do – hence I never understood vegetarians’ ethical arguments. Most plants are naturally full of toxic and bitter-tasting substances that aren’t tolerable for us. We often seem to forget that those we get from the supermarket have been bred for thousands of years so that the bitter substances are bread out of them. Whenever we have a defence in evolution we then have a pressure for offence next. Animals develop bigger shells, their predators develop stronger jaws and teeth and we, humans, not only always win but we are far ahead of our competitors.
Planet of the Apes
We stood up right before our brain started to grow in size so it can’t be that we suddenly decided to walk around on two legs. Evolutionary it’s the other way round and we don't know why the sequence went the way it did. We suspect that by freeing the hands for other uses than locomotion and supporting body weight, it allowed us a new skill i.e. the overhand throw, to carry things and make tools which set up a lifestyle with tools worth having (those aren’t very useful if you’re walking around on your hands all the time). Generally freeing our hands led us to the position of the most dangerous predators Earth has ever seen. This was the crucial step. It’s not a coincidence we developed from primates. Looking at apes and especially great apes, we can see they’re social and they eat meat. Everything that an organism eats is a body part of some other plant or animal. Meat is significant not just because it fuels a hungry brain (nutrition coming from meat) but also simply because hunting or savaging requires collective intelligence that just grazing doesn’t. In other words you don’t really have to be that smart to pull a clump of grass but catching animals that run away or fight you back requires intelligence and skill. If you take two closely related species, one carnivorous and one herbivorous, usually the carnivorous one has a bigger brain and is smarter if you give the animal the equivalent of IQ test.
Cognitive niche
We’re so unique that instead of waiting to evolve to outsmart other species, we do it in real time in our heads. We wonder about how the world works, we build up the models and tools of reasoning, inference and visualisation. This is how we could figure out that before we can enjoy plants or animals we need to first set a particular trap and ambush an animal or try various things on plants like soaking them and cooking them. We are able to do that because we have unfair advantage to do all this in our heads in a matter of seconds, minutes, hours, days whereas the animals and plants can only evolve over generations. A lot of the unusual features of homo-sapiens can be understood in terms of the cognitive niche that is the ability to prosper by outsmarting our food sources.
Language
Language is not a primary factor in cognitive niche because if that was the only thing humans had we wouldn’t have a lot to talk about, however, it is very important and I like to think that language evolved as sort of a triad of adaptions, each of which support the other and makes the other two increasingly valuable. Language allows us to share our experience with other people so that we don’t have to discover everything by trial and error or sit there waiting for some stroke of genius but if someone else discovers something worth remembering their allies learn from it too. That gives us things to talk about, that is our knowledge that came from experience and various survival tricks being the second part of this triangle. And the third part is social relationships. We have to be on speaking terms with other people, we have to be willing to share our knowledge with them and we have to be part of groups that work towards common goal. All those three features are hyper-developed in Homo sapiens. We use far more tools and far more clever tools than any other species and we are the only species that really have the expression of grammatical language.
Humans or animals?
Humans do not like to think of themselves as animals. We are certainly different to all the other species thank to our collective cognition – putting our heads together in order to make life easier for ourselves. However, imagine a child born alone in separation from mankind and somehow kept alive. Once grown would possess basic skills for dealing with physical aspects of its life but would certainly not invent English, tools, letters and numbers on its own – would be no more than an animal. Of course humans are indeed animals simply appearing to be higher-order mammals with very unique features that helped them gain the top position in the animals’ classification.
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