The Ape That Understood The Universe: How The Mind and Culture Evolve

Steve-Stewart Williams, “The Ape That Understood The Universe: How The Mind and Culture Evolve,” Kindle Edition, 2018, 293 pp.

The Ape that Understood the Universe opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our child-rearing patterns, our moral codes, our religions, our languages, and science? This book considers these issues by drawing on ideas from two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, evolved to pass on their genes. At some point, however, humans also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This capacity for culture transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, traveling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which homo sapiens are a tiny, fleeting fragment. 

Through this alien's objective eyes we see that many of the mysteries of humans can be solved using a simple set of Darwinian principles.  Humans are animals and, as such, have been crafted and honed by natural selection.  Human nature is, at bottom, a complex set of strategies for passing on the genes giving rise to it.  For instance, this view explains the most central and deep-seated features of our species and, for example, why men are more interested than women in casual sex and more inclined toward violence; women are choosier than men about their mates and generally more parental; we love our children more deeply than we love anyone; we tend to favor relatives, yet we cooperate extensively with non-relatives.  We seem to respond disproportionately to danger; after all, “the cost of getting killed even once is enormously higher than the cost of responding to a hundred false alarms.” Most significantly, human beings are cultural animals designed to import ideas and behaviors from the people around us.  (Loc 8912…)

My Notes:

Loc 165:  As of 2018, only one-third of Americans accept that humans evolved due to processes like natural selection with no involvement by God or a higher power.  Nearly 20% reject evolution entirely, saying humans have always existed in their present form.  However, since 1996 when Pope John Paul II embraced the theory of evolution, 56% of Catholics have come to accept evolution (albeit an intelligently designed evolution).  Yet only 4% of white evangelical Christians accept evolution.  (I still don’t believe evolution is taught in US schools below the college level).

Loc 177:  Political commitments also matter. A 2012 Gallup Poll found that “58% of Republicans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years,” and only 5% of them believe that humans evolved and God had no part in the process.  What is astonishing, however, are the findings that 41% of Democrats and 39% of Independents believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.  Only 19% of Democrats and Independents believe that humans evolved and God had no part in the process, and there was no significant difference between Republicans (31%) and Democrats (32%) in the belief that humans evolved via God-guided processes.  Many conclude that evolution implies that there is no God, so belief in the theory of evolution leads to atheism; without a belief in God, they maintain, there can be no morality.

Loc 303:  The Founding Father's theory of human nature was well articulated by James Madison in the Federalist Paper Number 51:  “If men were angels, no government would be necessary….”  

Additionally, Abraham Lincoln referenced these angels in his first inaugural address in March of 1861 when he felt “the better angels of our nature…” would once again prevail. 

Loc 604:  The starting point for evolutionary psychology is the idea that human beings are animals, and that like all animals, we’re products of natural selection.  This is true of our minds as well as our bodies.  Natural selection, in this view, doesn’t just explain our most basic drives and abilities, or the things we obviously have in common with other animals.  It also helps to explain many things that psychologists traditionally ascribed solely to learning, socialization, and culture.  (Natural selection is exercised by genes for our bodies and through memes for our culture).

Loc 661ff:  Culture is our real gimmick as a species. It’s not our big brains, our opposable thumbs, or our facility for finding new and improved ways of killing each other. It’s our capacity for culture.  Animals also have cultures, but not like humans.  Ten thousand years ago, the pinnacle of chimpanzee culture was using twigs to extract termites from termite mounds, today it is the same pinnacle. Humans, on the other hand, went from Stone Age technology to Space Age technology in less than 10,000 years.

Loc 679f:  Human culture is cumulative: It advances through the accretion of a thousand little improvements, and then a thousand more. As soon as we evolved the capacity for cumulative culture – as soon as we opened that Pandora’s Box – culture began to evolve in its own right, independently of biology.  To be clear, the claim is not that cultural evolution is a result of natural selection operating on genes. The claim instead is that cultural evolution is a result of natural selection operating on what the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called memes: ideas, beliefs, practices, tools, and anything else that gets passed on via social interaction.

Loc 730: The philosopher Daniel Dennett put it best.  Human beings are gene–meme hybrids: morphs of the sometimes conflicting agendas of our genes and our memes

Loc 773:  Chimpanzees, bonobos, and human beings shared a common ancestor around seven million years ago.  And, all life on Earth traces back to a simple, self-replicating molecule that appeared on the planet around four billion years ago.

Loc 814:  The only genuine intelligent design found in the biological world comes from us, in the shape of our dogs and cows and other organisms that we’ve deliberately modified via selective breeding.  (Notice how the author avoids mentioning humans?)

Loc 1052:  William Hamilton argued that selection favors traits that maximize inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness has two components: direct fitness and indirect fitness.  Direct fitness is the individual’s reproductive success.  Indirect fitness is the individual’s contribution to the reproductive success of kin, weighted for the degree of relatedness between individual and kin members.  Natural selection is all about inclusive fitness, the sum of direct and indirect fitness. Genes are selected if they enhance the inclusive fitness of their bearers.

Loc 1482:  Up to the middle of the twentieth-century, humans were perceived to be blank slates.  Allegedly, dependent on learning behavior because they lacked instinct.  Certainly, to some degree, humans really are blank slates: We rely more on learning than does any other creature.  However, is it realistic to think that everything beyond fixed reflexes and basic drives is purely a product of learning?  Could we just as easily socialize women to be more interested in casual sex and pornography than men?  It’s easy enough to understand the evolutionary functions of fear, lust, and disgust. But what are the functions of mate preferences, sexual possessiveness, and an aversion to incest?

Loc 1644:  Men and women prefer mates who are intelligent and funny. In our ancestral past, these preferences may have created a selection pressure for greater intelligence and a better sense of humor.

Loc 1790-1826:  As Robert Wright observed in his book The Moral Animal, “We live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population.” Or as S. Boyd Eaton put it, modern humans are “Stone Agers in the fast lane.”  

Since the evolutionary biology field first coalesced in the late 1980s, biologists have come to realize that evolutionary change can sometimes happen extremely quickly, particularly since we took up agriculture. There has been a strong selection of genes related to disease resistance, diet, and nervous system functioning.  Some human beings are partially adapted, biologically, to non-African environments. Europeans and East Asians have light skin so they can soak up enough UV radiation from the sun to synthesize vitamin D.  

Loc 1914-1970:  Of the various health hazards associated with our modern diet, obesity is the most conspicuous indicator that we didn’t evolve in the kind of food environment we now occupy. For most of the history of life on Earth, the biggest danger for most animals was eating too little.  Also, a little excess fear is exactly what evolutionary principle predicts: “the cost of getting killed even once is enormously higher than the cost of responding to a hundred false alarms.”  We didn’t evolve in the kind of world we now inhabit, and thus the skills we learn in the classroom – math, writing, and the rest – are not the kind of skills we evolved to master. 

Loc 2305:  evolutionary biologists focused on the role of natural selection. In their view, male and female animals differ from one another because the things that enhance male fitness don’t always enhance female fitness, and vice versa. 

Loc 2590:  Sexual monomorphism is rare in mammals, but it’s common in birds. In roughly 90 percent of birds, males and females form pair bonds and work together to care for their young. Although males can sometimes boost their reproductive output by cheating on their mates, pair-bonding and two-parent care dramatically reduce the gap between males’ maximum offspring number and females’

Loc 3526:  Globally, more than 90 percent of homicides are committed by men. Most victims are men as well: around 70 percent.  Interestingly, the figures for chimpanzees are nearly identical; one chimpicide study found that 92 percent of killers were males and 73 percent of victims.

Loc 6431-6690:  Obligation; debt; favor; bargain; contract; exchange; deal … Our language and our lives are permeated with ideas of reciprocity. And reciprocity is not limited to any one culture.  In everyday life, reciprocity is propped up not by abstract normative principles, but by emotions such as gratitude, guilt, sympathy, and anger. All neurologically normal human beings possess these emotions, and it seems highly unlikely that the emotions are inventions of culture.  Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes, group selection didn’t make us saints; it made us team players, and team players are not always saintly.

Loc 7414-7687:  scholars argue that our “superpower” as a species is not our intelligence; it’s our collective intelligence and capacity for cumulative culture.  Biological evolution can give rise to the eye. But cumulative cultural evolution can give rise to entities every bit as complex as the eye: airplanes and smart phones, legal systems and the Internet. Because of cumulative culture, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel each generation; we have ideas in our heads that are orders of magnitude smarter than we are.  We accept that natural selection operates on culture, and that cultural evolution is cumulative, then we should expect to find design without a designer in the realm of culture, just as we do in the biological realm.  Modern humans evolved and overran the Earth in less than 300,000 years.  This was only possible because, whenever we ventured into new territories, our cultures evolved and adapted to fit our changing needs.

Dawkins, a gifted term-coiner, coined the term meme for this new replicator.  Memes, as we’ve seen, are units of culture: ideas, beliefs, practices, and anything else that can be passed on via social learning. In Dawkins’ view, memes jump from mind to mind, and are subject to natural selection in much the same way that genes are.

Loc 8065-8400: The meme approach to culture is often seen as an alternative to the approaches we’ve looked at already: the adaptive-culture approach and cultural group selection. When it comes to God and music, cultural evolution plausibly did most of the heavy lifting, while biological evolution sat on the side-lines. In other areas, however, biological and cultural evolution may have shared the workload more evenly. Language is a plausible example.

Loc 8409-8570: From religion to music to advanced mathematics, our memes evolved culturally to colonize the brain, just as our remote ancestors evolved biologically to colonize the land.  Natural selection favors selfish memes, and, that selection acting over long periods of time creates an illusion of intelligent design.  (Like Mark Twain said: Wagner's music is much better than it sounds.)

Loc 8575-8700: New memes, from stone tools to cooking to agriculture, create new selection pressures on our species. This leads to biological change.  The dynamic interplay between genes and memes is the focal point of a rapidly growing area of research known as gene–culture coevolutionary theory.

Loc 8726-8811:   Most important is the fact that cooking our food meant that we suddenly had a surplus of energy – a surplus that could be devoted to growing and running an oversized brain. In other words, cooking helped make possible the evolution of human intelligence.  Also, genes for lactose tolerance were a consequence of milk drinking, rather than a cause.  And religion is not a biological adaptation but rather a product of culture.