The book is Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, which is still my favorite non-fiction book of 2017. My review says,
Laland weaved together mathematical models, simulation exercises, experiments, and observations in a way that was much more persuasive than most social science. I recommend that economists read the book in order to stimulate thinking on how to improve our research methods.
You did work “La La Land” into it, right?
Human bodies aren’t optimized for speed (ie cheetahs), or propulsion (ie dolphins), or flying (ie birds), or climbing (ie squirrels), or strength (ie guerrilla). Our bodies are optimized for allocation. We’re the best at simultaneously moving multiple different resources from point A to point B. We can carry different combinations of water, food, tools, weapons and offspring over long distances. Is it a coincidence that we’re also the smartest species?
Being able to physically carry a lot of different things selected for individuals who were the best at being able to mentally carry a lot of different things. Being able to store and process a wider variety of information facilitated better physical carrying decisions.
Kevin Laland carries a lot of different information in his head. But his combination of information hasn’t led him to the conclusion that our intelligence is a function of our body type. I don’t think that he carries enough economics. Then again, I don’t know of any economists who’ve argued that our big brains are the result of deciding what to physically carry. Simply carrying around a lot of economics isn’t adequate to solve the puzzle of human intelligence.
The fact that Laland and economists haven’t figured out the root cause of our intelligence proves that he’s correct about the importance of pooling insights and knowledge. Groups can physically and mentally carry more than individuals can. But this is only useful to the extent that trade is facilitated.
Right now Netflix isn’t a market. There are around 100 million subscribers who don’t have the opportunity to divide their limited fees among Netflix’s unlimited content. They can’t use their money to help Netflix decide what to carry. Do you know of any economists who’ve argued that Netflix should be a market?
Imagine a Netflix that was a market but with academic papers. Subscribers could freely read all the papers, but they’d have the opportunity to divide their limited fees among the unlimited papers. This specific, and substantial, prioritization process would highlight the most valuable papers in each field, which would facilitate the most profitable cross-pollination.
There’s a limit to how much we can physically and mentally carry. We have to prioritize. We should only carry the most valuable stuff. But this is only possible when we know the value of stuff. Hence the importance of markets.
More specifically, human bodies are optimized for endurance and regeneration. Our bodies can recover from wounds that would kill most mammals. Also, we can trek better than most other predators. Our natural hunting style is just following prey to exhaustion — we’re the Terminators of the animal kingdom.
Your description of Laland’s “tournament” reminded me of my attempts many years ago to improve my bridge game. INNOVATE would correspond to adopting a new technique of bidding or play and trying it out on my own. EXPLOIT would be just playing more bridge, trying to win with my existing repertoire of methods. OBSERVE would be kibitzing other players, taking note of the apparent reasons for their differential success. I used all these methods, relying mainly on OBSERVE, but here I made great use of a shortcut: I read accounts by various experts of their own observations regarding successful versus unsuccessful methods, which I considered more efficient than making most of the observations myself.
Generalizing, I suspect this is the most important form of cultural transmission: summary reports by experienced observers of successful methods, saving the neophyte from having to make a lot of observations himself. Of course, this requires language.
Nice review. I do have a couple of reservations. First of all, other species do invent and pass on their new behaviors. Different groups of Orcas, for example, have invented completely different cooperative hunting techniques. The same is true of Chimps.
Different groups exhibit different behavior patterns — patterns that are passed on by learning and imitation rather than genetically. But, of course, with no written or even spoken languages, there are hard limits on culture in non-human species. But it does exist.
And then there’s this:
“Our intelligence, language, cooperation, and technology… are not adaptive responses to extrinsic conditions.”
The problem with that extreme claim is that humans have not had the luxury of ignoring ‘extrinsic conditions’ for long at all. Wealthy humans have been free of the threat of starvation for a few hundred years and most have escaped only withing living memory. All of the items in that list (intelligence, language, cooperation, and technology) have been highly adaptive in the environment. That is arguably not all they have done, but they’re clearly highly adaptive (without them, humans would not have colonized every continent and environment from the tropics to the arctic and make up many times the total biomass of all other wild land mammals combined).
Another definition of culture could be, “The details of the distribution of the set of behaviors and ideas within a particular community that are strongly influenced by the social environment.”
Learning to me implies some level of conscious awareness, but some aspects of culture seem to affect individuals unwittingly (or even self-deceptively / hypocritically) and so more like a reflex.
Consider the “effective social engineering technology” aspect of culture, which is only stable if it has a continuous process of acculturation by which humans are ‘tamed’ and encouraged to conform to the requirements of the social grouping or else suffer negative consequences. That is, through a combination of conscious efforts and subtle, spontaneous mechanisms, ones social environment sets up a system of incentives, social pressures, and motivations that, for most people, most of the time, and often automatically, guide behavioral tendencies and social interactions, by means of conventions, norms, institutions, constructs, ideological narratives, status hierarchies, and other ‘cultural tools’.
This aspect of culture is learned in a sense, and clearly the brain is adapted to being a keen observer of environmental and social cues from which it is constantly reformulating optimal strategies to best pursue its own ends, but culture is also occassionally more like the bumpers that prevent pinballs from leaving the table and bounce them back into the boundaries of the game. The pinball ‘feels and reacts’ to the bumpers sometimes even without the understanding or awareness we associate with learning.