Human evolution boiled down to 4 factors
Review of Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time by Gaia Vince
This is an ambitious and fun book that avoids reducing such a vast subject to some single-factor deterministic model. We are all sick of the nature/nurture dichotomy, i.e. that either our genetic heritage or our life experience is the underlying cause of what we become. It’s obviously a more complex mix, which is the theme of Vince’s book. To be clear, this is not about our individual psychological development, but our evolution as a species.
She portrays human evolution as “driven by four key agents”. First, there is fire, the use of which she argues is about humans “outsourcing” our energy needs, thereby overcoming many biological constraints that limited other primates from developing brains as large as ours. Second, language enables us to store and exchange information on a unique scale in the animal kingdom, a key to social networks that disseminate survival tactics. Third, as we try to imbue our sense of beauty into our private and public lives, we provide meaning to our identities and actions, a kind of “cultural speciation”. Fourth, time – an awareness of the future beyond simply surviving the present – provides the impetus to our attempts to understand the world, culminating in science and technology.
Unfortunately, the only chapter that worked for me was the first, on the impact that the technology of fire had on human development. Essentially, when employing fire for cooking, land clearing and the like, we no longer needed to rely solely on our muscles and biochemistry to take care of our basic needs. For example, cooked food is easier to digest and more nutritional. The energy we save went not just to increasing our brain capacity, but also lessened our dependency on bigger jaw muscles, etc., all of which our hominid cousins never did and so the never entered the virtuous circle that resulted in our reasoning capabilities, our aptitude for verbal communication, and even our ability to shape entire environments. The other chapters elaborate on variations of these themes.
What didn’t work for me with the book was the author’s discursive method, mentioning scientific research and the innumerable branches to which this leads – the details often seem arbitrary to me, more as a way to bulk up the book than necessary substance. There are also too many proofs, the bane of academic writing that seems to have rubbed off on her. Finally, the reason I got the book was to get a better idea about the mysterious transition that took place perhaps 40,000 years ago, when Cro Magnon (the homo sapiens or us) suddenly seemed to emerge as adaptationally superior to the Neanderthal – they had lived a near-identical life style until then and it enabled our ancestors to survive the Ice Age, whereas the Neanderthal all starved. It is speculated that said transition was related to a sudden acquisition of the ability to speak in abstract terms.
Vince’s four key agents are good to know, but like many academic works they seem a bit too crisp to me as explanations of all that followed. Academics like to make such arguments, which I find over-simplifying, even glib.