The Capacity to Learn?

I've been reading Jared Diamond's “The Third Chimpanzee.” Human evolution is one of my favourite subjects – both the evolution of homo sapiens itself, and the subsequent cultural evolution that has shaped human life. (Debates about cultural evolution to follow?) One of the things that leaped out at me when reading “The Third Chimpanzee” was Diamond's statement that one of the primary defining characteristics of the human is innovation. Though chimpanzees use basic stick tools, and teach that skill to their children, it does not occur to them to improve on the stick.

Perhaps they're not able to, you say – perhaps the dexterity isn't there? An example even closer to humans, then. The Neaderthals used very basic stone tools, but over the 100,000 or so years of their existence, they never improved upon them. Stone tools have been found at Neanderthal sites of 100,000 years ago, and the exact same stone tools have been discovered at Neanderthal sites from 40,000 years ago. The human ability to innovate appears as unique as it is instinctive – doesn't it seem normal, natural to you (dear reader), that we should improve on what we have already? The basic genetic makeup of the human being has not changed in the past 40,000 years or so, but the way we live has changed almost beyond belief. There is no other animal for which this is true.

Another thing we humans do is learn. And how much we have to learn! From the very beginning of the species, even before we had things like alphabets and times tables to memorize, children had to acquire a mind-boggling amount of naturalistic knowledge – which plants to eat, which not to eat, and which were useful for medicine, construction, and craft work. Beyond that identification, they had to know when to harvest them, how to harvest them, and how to use them. When you go out and walk around the woods, how many plants can you identify, let alone list the life history, harvesting season, and preparation for? Then there is the knowledge of animals - how to identify the tracks of an animal, and how to tell by those tracks how old the animal is, what sex it is, how long ago it passed that way, and if it was healthy. (If you walk with an experienced Bushman tracker, they can tell you all that and more from a few tracks.) The children must also know the habits, behaviour, and life history of that animal, and how to hunt it or avoid it.

It's automatic, I think, to assume that the humans of 10,000 years ago would be confounded by the complicated modern world we live in now – but when a baby is born today, its potential is exactly the same as it was from the moment that homo sapiens evolved. “If we could carry ourselves back forty thousand years in a time machine,” writes Diamond, “I suspect that we would find Cro-Magnons to be equally modern people, capable of learning to fly a jet plane.” Just think about that for a moment. Also important - I'm sure that they would want to. Curiosity is ingrown; human beings want to learn. They want to know more.

There's a scene in the book Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, that illustrates a similar point – the protagonist, an Australian man, is sitting at the edge of a slum in Bombay with one of his friends, who is a lifelong resident of the slum. They are looking out to sea. “Did you know,” the friend says, “that the chemical balance of the primeval sea, when life first emerged, was almost exactly the same as that of the womb?”* The Australian is surprised. He is amazed that this slum-dweller, who has spent his whole life in a mud-and-plastic-bag hovel on the edge of Bombay, knows about the chemical composition of the primeval sea. Then he kicks himself. We may each of us have different opportunities to learn, but we all have the same potential, the same curiosity.

I kick myself for that kind of prejudice all the time. I've met Xgaiga, a San elder, several times – he's always seemed cheerful but lethargic, and without much to say. But walking through the bush with him during the last plant workshop, he was a different man. Sit him down in a busy office in the city and he'd be utterly ignored – ask him to recite his 7-times-table or write an essay and he's lost - but walking through the bush, he is charismatic, confident, knowledgeable. He darted from plant to plant, rattling off an encyclopaedia's worth of information about each specimen. Suddenly he stopped, scrutinizing some vague marks in the sand. “Small snake. Going west, about 8 this morning.” His audience nodded sagely in agreement.

Similar to the Shantaram moment, I'm always – unfairly – surprised when a co-worker reveals some kind of obscure knowledge. In fact, all it reveals is my own handicaps: How does one GET knowledge, I find myself wondering, without 16,000 miles of library shelves? Or a reliable high-speed internet connection, at the very least? Even the Discovery Channel!?! Where else can you learn stuff, anyway?? Information is so easy-access these days that I tend to forget what a real thirst for knowledge is like – when you want to know, and you can't just look it up. When you have to value, and remember, each new piece of knowledge you get - because there's no Google, no Wikipedia, not even a card catalogue. All knowledge is valuable, and you must hang onto it inside your own head. Nowadays we are drowning in information, and as with anything that comes in excess, we forget its value... I rarely remember things, I just remember how to look them up. Sometimes this seems wonderful; sometimes, terribly sad.

More on retention and transmission of knowledge, and the role of elders, and why the human race even HAS elders.... later.

* I don't have the book here and can't find the quote online, so it's just more-or-less what that passage was about. Sorry.

Info about Neanderthal tools taken from "The Third Chimpanzee." Thanks Jared Diamond, you rule.