Steve Stuart Williams. The Ape that Understood the Universe.

In a paragraph 

Human nature can be explained by evolutionary psychology and cultural evolution theory.  On a gene’s eye view of evolution, we are gene machines.  Memetics provides the best framework to understand cultural evolution.

Key points

• Human nature can now be understood by using two related frameworks – evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory.
  
  

• We can now answer the questions an alien scientist would raise about ‘the strangest animal.’
  
  

• Culture is our real gimmick as a species. Humans are as dependent on culture as we are on oxygen; without it, we’re as naked and vulnerable as a crab without a shell.
  
  

• Sexual selection caused much of the beauty in nature, and possibly our art, music and humour. Geoffrey Miller. Luxury behaviours for reproduction not survival.
  
  

• Inclusive fitness, direct and indirect components. Hamilton.
  
  

• Gene’s eye view of evolution. Dawkins: natural selection acts on replicators. Neo-Darwinian synthesis. Humans are gene machines, or gene-meme hybrids.
  
  

• Body and mind were fashioned by the same Darwinian forces. The mind is a gene-propagating mechanism.
  
  

• Proximate and ultimate explanations.
  
  

• Evolutionary mismatch. In many ways, humans are in the same boat as the hedgehog. Multiple environments of evolutionary adaptedness or EEA. Some more recent evolution – to some extent we are agricultural animals.
  
  

• Our appetites evolved in a food landscape quite unlike the one we inhabit today. Supernormal stimuli: human-made products that activate our senses far more powerfully than any natural stimulus. Doctors tell us the solution is to take lots of exercise and switch to foods that don’t taste very good. Unsurprisingly, most people find this advice difficult to follow. Pleasure hacks.  Other mismatches: inappropriate fears, breast cancer, classroom reluctance, ADHD.
  
  

• Everyone knows that men and women are different… except social scientists.
  
  

• Trivers parental investment theory. Humans lie between highly dimorphic gorillas and peacocks and monomorphic gibbons and love birds.
  
  

• While men were busy breeding better-looking women, women were breeding men with a hunger for status and resources. The female body is a peacock’s tail, the male body a big pair of antlers. Women’s looks important perhaps as fertility linked to youth. The popularity of beards rises and falls over time in a way that the popularity of women’s breasts and youthful appearance does not.
  
  

• Gay men have more sexual partners as they are not constrained by female reluctance.
  
  

• We chose mates as we chose foods – by built-in preferences put in place by natural selection. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as shaped by natural selection. Symmetry. Waist-to-hip ratio.
  
  

• Companionate love is a less exhilarating form of love than romantic love, but in many ways, it’s more real.
  
  

• Pair-bonding is our primary mating system, at least in as much as that it’s the most common. But polygyny and casual mating are not aberrations; they’re central elements of the human reproductive repertoire.
  
  

• Blood is thicker. First, second, third degree relatives.  Favour healthy child for Reproductive Potential.  Cinderella Effect.
  
  

• An altruistic act is one that benefits the recipient of the act but inflicts a cost on the actor. A cooperative act is one that benefits both parties. Kin altruism. Coefficient of relatedness. 
  
  

• Reciprocal altruism.   Cooperation over time.  Defences against free riders.
  
  

• Altruism as a Peacock’s Tail. Geoffrey Miller ‘The Mating Mind.’  Kindness liked.  We have selectively bred ourselves into a nicer, more extravagantly generous species.
  
  

• Memetics focuses on how cultural products benefit the cultural products themselves.
  
  

• Although we’re clearly smarter than chimps, we’re nowhere near as much smarter as an alien scientist might surmise from comparing our cultural achievements (e.g., putting people on the moon) with theirs (e.g., using rocks to crack open nuts or sticks to fish for termites). As individuals, we’re probably closer to the nut-cracking, termite-fishing end of the spectrum. If you doubt this, imagine being marooned in the jungle with no relevant knowledge.
  
  

• Our Clever Trick is plagiarism. We’ve evolved to do a little bit of innovating but a lot of mimicking. Unfairly maligned, copying and conforming often work best.
  
  

• In The Selfish Gene and later works, Dawkins outlined a view he calls universal Darwinism. The core idea is that natural selection operates not just on genes, but on any replicator.
  
  

• Human history suddenly appears as a vast conflict between competing “species” of memes. Leftist memes and conservative memes wrestle each other for control of the democratic state. It’s almost as if the ideas themselves were fighting each other through whichever humans they happened to infest. Memeplexes.
  
  

• Science is a system of selectively breeding accurate memes.
  
  

• Gene–culture coevolutionary theory. Our clever brains and our clever cultures coevolved.
  
  

• Violence is natural but bad, medicine unnatural but good.
  
  

• Memetic theory of religion is that religions spread because they are good at spreading. Will we cast off our superstitions by exposing them to rational scrutiny, or will our superstitions evolve into more virulent forms, like bacteria in response to antibiotics?
  
  

Comments

A book that is both impressive and lively – impressive in the material explained while being lively and fun in its writing.  This is not a ‘pop’ book, despite the title and the opening pages, but a thoughtful setting out of an evolutionary understanding of human nature. 

The book starts by showing what a strange animal humans would seem to an alien scientist, and claims that our nature is best explained by a combination of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory.  It is then explained why evolution is best understood from a gene’s eye view, and much of the book is about how human sexuality and altruism evolved. The last part of the book explains the importance of cumulative cultural evolution, which, it is argued, is best understood as a memetic process.   

I loved the book for its density of important ideas, its engaging writing and its clear explanations. 
  

Links 

Book on Amazon.

Author’s website

Author’s substack

EXTRACTS 

Foreword

In the realistic vision, human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures.

1 The Alien’s Challenge

This book is about the strangest animal in the world – the animal that’s reading these words and the animal that wrote them: the human animal. Because we’re so used to being human, and to living with humans, we sometimes don’t notice what a peculiar creature we are. As a corrective, I want to begin by looking at our species from a new perspective. This perspective might initially seem somewhat alien to you… but so it should because that’s the perspective we’ll be using. We’ll be looking at our species through the eyes of a hypothetical, hyperintelligent alien 

This fragile planet recently suffered a plague of technology-wielding humans.

Human beings are so extreme and bizarre that some Betelgeuseans were initially unwilling to accept that they genuinely existed.

Despite their many, many flaws, human beings are among the most cooperative and altruistic carbon-based life forms in this neck of the galaxy.

Infested with Ideas

How did a mere ape come to understand the vast universe of which it is but a tiny, fleeting fragment?

History presents us with an endless parade of conflicting ideas about human nature and the human condition.  Logic dictates that not all of these ideas can be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. At the most, one can be. But none of them has been held by more than a fraction of the world’s population. Thus, over the course of human history, most human beings must have held false beliefs about the nature of human nature and the causes of their own behavior.

Still, we may find ourselves at a unique moment in history: a moment in which it’s possible for the first time to sketch out an explanation for human behavior and human culture that has at least a reasonable chance of being accurate. That’s the aim of this book. Given that so many have failed before me–the bulk of humankind, to be precise–this might seem like a somewhat over-ambitious aim, if not a delusional one. But the answers I’ll give are not mine alone. They’re based on the cumulative efforts of thousands of philosophers, scientists, and psychologists working over many centuries. These thinkers and tinkerers haven’t just been spinning their wheels. They’ve made some real progress. Since the mid-twentieth century in particular, science has made enormous strides toward answering our deepest questions about human nature – much more than most people realize. My job is to piece together some of the best answers, and to try to solve the mysteries highlighted in the Alien’s Report.

The guiding assumption of the book is that the alien’s questions can be answered using two broad theoretical frameworks, both of which are children of evolutionary theory. The first uses evolutionary theory to shed light on the human mind and behavior.  The second uses evolutionary principles to shed light on human culture. The approaches go by various different names, but I’ll refer to them as evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory, respectively.

The only genes that have staying power are those that help to build “gene machines”

These tendencies are not merely products of learning or culture. They’re woven into the very fabric of human nature.

Culture is our real gimmick as a species.

Humans are as dependent on culture as we are on oxygen; without it, we’re as naked and vulnerable as a crab without a shell.

Most people living today have a vastly more accurate view of the universe than these Ancient Greek philosophers.

Culture is a semi-autonomous evolving system, made out of ideas.

Cultural evolution is a result of natural selection operating on what the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called memes.

Human beings, argued Dennett, are gene–meme hybrids.

2 Darwin Comes to Mind

We’re carnivores that sympathize with our food.

The Greatest Idea Anyone Ever Had

A trip to the zoo is literally a family reunion. In fact, even a trip to the fridge is a family reunion of sorts.

Just as a mere trickle of water, given sufficient time, can carve the Grand Canyon out of solid rock, so too natural selection, given sufficient time, can fashion new biological structures out of old.

Natural selection creates an illusion of intelligent design, or what Richard Dawkins calls design without a designer.

What’s so wrong with the species-survival hypothesis? Simple: Natural selection works almost entirely within species.

Nature isn’t just a bloodbath; it’s also a vast, unending orgy.

The peacock’s tail is not a survival organ; it’s a reproductive organ.

Sexual selection occurs when a trait is selected not because it promotes an organism’s survival, but because it promotes its reproductive success.

Most of the beauty and colour in nature comes from sexual selection: the scent and appearance of flowering plants; the rainbow plumage and melodious songs of many songbirds–and, according to some, the art, music, and humor of Homo sapiens.

Selection, argued Hamilton, favors traits that maximize inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness has two components: direct fitness and indirect fitness.

The gene’s-eye view of evolution–my pick for the most important advance in our thinking about evolution since Darwin.

The gene’s-eye view, like most good ideas, is the product of many minds working over many decades. But it was Richard Dawkins who most lucidly laid out this view of life and the arguments for it. Natural selection, argued Dawkins, acts on replicators. A replicator is any entity that makes copies of itself.

Selfish genes can sometimes give rise to altruistic individuals.

Evolution is about the survival of the fittest genes. Genes are selected if they get themselves copied faster than rival alleles. Adaptations are designed to pass on the genes giving rise to them. And organisms are not survival machines, baby-making machines, grandchild-making machines, or even inclusive fitness machines. Organisms – from worms to groundhogs to humans – are gene machines: biomachines designed to propagate their hereditary material.

You – whatever you choose to do with your life – are still a machine designed to propagate your genes. All of us are. It’s what the priests, the sages and philosophers searched for in vain: the ultimate explanation for our existence.

But to cover our bases, here’s an optional, modified version of Hypothesis #6, which leaves the door open to group selection.

The gene machine approach provides, I hope, a useful tool for understanding modern evolutionary theory, or what’s often called the neo-Darwinian synthesis. I freely admit that it bypasses a lot of complexity. Organisms are gene machines only to the extent that they’re shaped by their genes, and only to the extent that the genes in question got there via natural selection rather than random genetic drift. Some genes rise to prominence not because they’re useful, but because they happen to be linked to other genes that are. And the scope of selection is limited by developmental biases and constraints.

The mandate of evolutionary psychology: to take theories from evolutionary biology and use them to illuminate our understanding of the human mind and behavior.

At a very general level, this is an easy enough assignment. Evolutionary theory tells us that organisms are machines designed to propagate their genes. This implies that, to the extent that the mind is shaped by natural selection, the mind must be a mechanism designed to propagate its owner’s genes. This idea–that the mind is a gene-propagating mechanism–represents a rather spectacular break from traditional, everyday views of the mind. But it’s also somewhat vague. To really get to grips with the evolutionary approach to psychology, we need to zoom in on the details.

In short, body and mind were fashioned by the same Darwinian forces.

Just as the eye is exquisitely designed to enable vision, so too our psychological adaptations are exquisitely designed to execute their evolved functions. Consider disgust.

Humans come factory-equipped with a proneness to certain fears, coupled with a capacity to learn new ones.

Proximate explanations and ultimate explanations. A proximate explanation is one that focuses on the immediate causes of behavior. An example would be “People have sex because they enjoy it.” An ultimate explanation is one that focuses on the evolutionary function of behavior: the effects for which the behavior was selected. An example would be “People have sex because sex results in the production of offspring.”

Our basic drives and motivations led our ancestors to act in ways that typically propagated their genes in the environment in which our species evolved.

“Sexual selection,” Geoffrey Miller writes, “transformed a small, efficient ape-style brain into a huge, energy hungry handicap spewing out luxury behaviors like conversation, music, and art.”

From this perspective, our minds are less survival devices than they are sexually selected entertainment systems.

Behaviors such as art, humor, and creative displays of intelligence evolved in a context of mutual mate choice

Evolutionary mismatch. The mismatch in question is between the hedgehog’s present environment and the environment in which it evolved. In many ways, humans are in the same boat as the hedgehog.

Our environment of evolutionary adaptedness or EEA?

Life for our ancestors was like a camping trip that lasted a lifetime.

Rapid recent evolution. These populations aren’t simply mismatched hunter-gatherers. To some extent, they’re agricultural animals.

The EEA for the visual system, for instance–a world of objects emitting or reflecting light–long predates the Pleistocene and still exists today. In contrast, the EEA for light skin in high-latitude populations came after the African exodus, and the EEA for lifelong milk drinking came after the relevant populations took up dairy farming. For all these examples, the selection pressures shaping the adaptations were not limited to the Pleistocene, the savannah, or the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The idea that every adaptation has its own EEA captures this effortlessly; the original conception struggles.

Modern humans are a fish out of water. We’re living anachronisms. And that’s why a lot of what we do makes about as much adaptive sense as a hedgehog rolling into a ball in the face of oncoming traffic.

Our appetites evolved in a food landscape quite unlike the one we inhabit today.

Supernormal stimuli: human-made products that activate our senses far more powerfully than any natural stimulus

Doctors tell us the solution is to take lots of exercise and switch to foods that don’t taste very good. Unsurprisingly, most people find this advice difficult to follow.

The mystery isn’t that we worry too much; the mystery is that the rank order of our worries is jumbled up.

The skills we learn in the classroom – math, writing, and the rest – are not the kind of skills we evolved to master. Here, as elsewhere, culture goes against the grain of human nature. How do we know? Because children don’t like school!

Until recently, most women had only a hundred or so menstrual cycles in their lifetimes. Things are very different today. Women hit puberty earlier, have fewer pregnancies, and spend a smaller fraction of their lives nursing their young. They therefore have many more menstrual cycles than their ancestors: as many as four hundred. This is more than their reproductive systems are designed for, and it exposes them to unnaturally high levels of ovarian hormones and unnaturally frequent hormonal fluctuations. This in turn increases women’s risk of breast cancer–as well as conditions such as anemia and endometriosis. These maladies were almost unheard of until recently. Like obesity, they’re essentially diseases of modernity, or what are sometimes referred to as mismatch diseases. As Daniel Lieberman notes in his book The Story of the Human Body, other possible mismatch diseases include acne, allergies, asthma, cavities, flat feet, heart disease, hemorrhoids, high blood pressure, impacted wisdom teeth, lower back pain, osteoporosis, short-sightedness, and type-2 diabetes.

Postpartum depression.

Another possible disease of modernity is ADHD.  ADHD is more a mismatch problem than a brain problem.

Female nipples are an adaptation, male nipples a by-product of that adaptation.

According to Pinker, art, music, and fiction are directly analogous to strawberry cheesecake. They’re not adaptations; they’re technologies we’ve developed to artificially stimulate our brains in ways we find enjoyable. They’re hacks!

3 The SeXX/XY Animal

“Everyone knows that men and women are different… except social scientists.”

Whereas social scientists focused exclusively on sex differences in humans, evolutionary biologists focused on sexual dimorphism in nonhuman animals.

Robert Trivers, a colorful character who’s sometimes described as the Albert Einstein of sociobiology. Among Trivers’ seminal contributions was his parental investment theory.

Most offspring for a man? 888 – a Moroccan emperor named Ismail the Bloodthirsty, who reigned from 1672 to 1727. For women? 69 –  a nineteenth-century Russian peasant called Valentina Vassilyev.

In the extreme case (and let me remind you that humans are nowhere near this extreme), the males would evolve to prioritize quantity of mates, whereas the females would evolve to prioritize quality.

Whatever the females want, the males evolve to provide it.

Males, in other words, would evolve into bigger, badder fighting machines.

Among jacanas, for instance, the males man the nests, look after the eggs, and care for the chicks. Similarly, among Gulf pipefish, the males incubate the eggs in a specialized brood pouch. As a result, the females in these species can potentially produce more offspring. Like an anti-gravity machine, this flips all the normal selective forces in the opposite direction, producing male-like females and female-like males–just as parental investment theory would predict.

Gorillas are polygynous; successful males maintain a harem of females. As a result, the maximum number of offspring that a male can produce is much higher than that of a female, and the males fight to be among the few with a harem. Gorillas are therefore highly sexually dimorphic: The males dwarf the females. Gibbons, in contrast, are socially monogamous: They live in isolated family groups with one adult male and one adult female, and the males have little scope to spread their seed. As a result, the maximum number of offspring that a male can produce isn’t much higher than that of a female, and gibbons are sexually monomorphic:

Sexual monomorphism is rare in mammals, but it’s common in birds. Mutual mate choice.

Are human beings highly dimorphic creatures like peacocks and gorillas, or are we more like gibbons and love birds?

While men and women overlap in height, they overlap even more in their desire for casual sex. Generalizing the point, humans are dimorphic, but the level of dimorphism for most traits is relatively modest.

Women’s looks are more important in the mating game than men’s – the exact opposite of what we find in peacocks and most other animals.

Gay men have more sexual partners than straight men, whereas lesbians have fewer partners than straight women.

Ridiculously handsome men are more likely than run-of-the-mill men to rack up large numbers of sexual partners.

When we look at the sexual antics of the preposterously powerful, we find the standard sex difference writ large.

Intercourse is often treated as a resource that women possess and men pursue.

The desire for casual sex is just one component of men’s mating psychology.

rather than being a product of culture, the sex difference in attitudes to casual sex often emerges in spite of culture.

Women’s fertility is more tightly coupled to youthfulness than men’s. Consider the world records for the oldest man and the oldest woman to have children. The oldest man was ninety-six. The oldest woman was sixty-six

The youthfulness preference isn’t unique to humans, but it is rare, especially among the primates.

Men’s preference isn’t for a younger woman per se; it’s for a woman at or around the peak of fertility. Thus, teenage boys tend to find women who are somewhat older than themselves more physically attractive

Women find traits that predict wealth and status more alluring than do men: traits such as confidence, competence, and raw, unbridled ambition.

While men were busy breeding better-looking women, women were breeding men with a hunger for status and resources.

The female body is a peacock’s tail, the male body a big pair of antlers.

Males defined as producing smaller sex cells than females.

Can we really believe, though, that the sociobiological theories apply right across the animal kingdom, from bacteria to bugs to bonobos, but don’t apply to one upright, uptight primate? That is a radical position. Where’s the radical evidence to back it up?

Basic sex differences are as deep-seated as handedness and sexual orientation, we should think twice about interventions designed to force males and females into the same mold.

4 The Dating, Mating, Baby-Making Animal

How do we make this most momentous of decisions? Easy: For the most part, we do it in the same way that we choose our food. We act on built-in preferences – preferences put in place by natural selection.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the beholder’s eye has been shaped by natural selection, and thus doesn’t vary greatly from age to age or from culture to culture.

Beauty, from a Darwinian vantage point, is a certificate of good health, and courtship a process of shopping around for the best genes for our future offspring. In a sense, mate choice is a form of eugenics, and always has been.

Symmetry is a crucial ingredient in attractiveness.

The preference for facial femininity is therefore functional rather than frivolous.  It fixes men’s roaming eyes on those women most likely to bear them children.

Waist-to-hip ratio or WHR, with 0.7 preferred.

The popularity of beards rises and falls over time in a way that the popularity of women’s breasts and youthful appearance does not.

Deleterious recessives.  Animals steer clear of incest through dispersal and disgust.

Companionate love is a less exhilarating form of love than romantic love, but in many ways, it’s more real.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.

In small groups, selection may have favored a tendency to latch onto mates and potential mates with a vice-like grip, at least until other, more suitable options appeared.

Jealousy motivates mate guarding.

Men tend to be more upset than women about sexual infidelity, whereas women tend to be more upset than men about emotional infidelity.

Although the selection pressures shaping jealousy were different for women and men, the emotion of jealousy itself – the proximate mechanism shaped by these selection pressures – is largely the same for both.

The non-paternity rate is near 1 percent.

When we describe babies as cute, we’re not actually talking about a property of babies; we’re talking about a property of ourselves.

The parenting paradox: We’re convinced that having kids will make us happy, but often it does the reverse.

The Cinderella effect in some cases is shockingly large. In several nations, for instance, Daly and Wilson discovered that children were around a hundred times more likely to be killed by a stepparent than by a biological parent.

Women – and to some extent men – may have preferred suitors who helped them to care for their pre-existing young.

The Cinderella effect is real, but humans are a surprisingly stepparental species nonetheless.

Reproductive potential

Parents respond more favourably to healthy babies than to unhealthy ones.

Doing the right thing means going against natural selection, and trying to right nature’s wrongs. Evolutionary theory explains much that is bad about the world; it doesn’t imply that the bad things are actually good, and it doesn’t provide a template for how we ought to live our lives.

Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.

Pair-bonding is our primary mating system, at least in as much as that it’s the most common. But polygyny and casual mating are not aberrations; they’re central elements of the human reproductive repertoire.

5 The Altruistic Animal

One of the most important building blocks of Hamilton’s theory: the coefficient of relatedness,

First-degree relatives (offspring, parents, full siblings): r = .5. Second-degree relatives (grandparents, grandchildren, half-siblings, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles): r = .25.

Relatedness is a measure of the probability that two individuals share a given gene over and above the population frequency. Relatedness is an index of the probability that altruism will pay off for the genes giving rise to it.

Hamilton’s rule states that altruism can be selected when… br > c.  A gene promoting altruism can be selected when the reproductive cost of altruism to the altruist is less than the reproductive benefit to the recipient, but with the benefit to the recipient scaled back in proportion to the degree of relatedness.

Long-term mates often treat each other, in effect, as honorary kin.

We’re freakishly kind to non-relatives.

An altruistic act is one that benefits the recipient of the act but inflicts a cost on the actor. A cooperative act, in contrast, is one that benefits both parties.

Life is a messy mix of war and cooperation,

A lot of apparent altruism, argues Trivers, is really cooperation smeared across time.

The problem of cheating. If there were ever a population of reciprocators, they’d be vulnerable to invasion by free riders.

Human beings, Trivers argues, have a set of emotions and preferences that lead us to establish mutually profitable reciprocal relationships, all the while avoiding getting too severely short-changed by the free riders of the world. First and foremost, we dislike it when people take more than they give.

Emotions such as anger, gratitude, guilt, and sympathy lead us to forge reciprocal alliances (in plain English, “friendships”) and to defend ourselves against cheats and free riders.

Tit-for-Tat prevailed because it was nice, because it defended itself against cheats, and because it was always willing to forgive a reformed cheater.

Altruism as a Peacock’s Tail.  Geoffrey Miller has been the main cheerleader for this idea. In his book The Mating Mind, Miller expounds on the link between moral virtue and sexual success.  David Buss discovered that one of the traits that men and women all over the world most desire in a long-term mate is kindness. More recently, Pat Barclay and colleagues found that altruists tend to have more sexual partners than the chronically self-interested, and that altruism is particularly good at elevating men’s sexual success. Since the preference for altruism first evolved, we humans have selectively bred ourselves into a nicer, more extravagantly generous species. Big-game hunting is not primarily about calories; it’s primarily about showing off.

Group selection didn’t make us saints; it made us team players, and team players are not always saintly.

People in modern societies may sometimes help one another even when reciprocity and reputational effects are out of the question–not because we evolved specifically to do this, but just because we didn’t evolve not to.

Groupishness is not necessarily a product of group selection.  Either group selection is something over and above inclusive fitness, in which case it’s probably had little effect on us, or it’s equivalent to inclusive fitness, in which case it’s just an awkward reframing.

6 The Cultural Animal

Memetics focuses on how cultural products benefit the cultural products themselves.

As with the 39 chimp memes, these 24 orang memes seem to be true cultural traditions.

Although we’re clearly smarter than chimps, we’re nowhere near as much smarter as an alien scientist might surmise from comparing our cultural achievements (e.g., putting people on the moon) with theirs (e.g., using rocks to crack open nuts or sticks to fish for termites). As individuals, we’re probably closer to the nut-cracking, termite-fishing end of the spectrum. If you doubt this, imagine being marooned in the jungle with no relevant knowledge.

Cumulative cultural evolution.  The cultural ratchet.

These days, we use the Indian-Arabic system, which makes calculation much easier. It literally makes us smarter.

The Myth of the Heroic Inventor.

Our Clever Trick is plagiarism! We’ve evolved to do a little bit of innovating but a lot of mimicking.

People have an evolved tendency to latch onto fitness-enhancing memes.

Humans have a suite of inherited learning biases, which strongly steer us toward adaptive memes. The biases fall into two main camps: content biases and context biases. The content biases relate to the subject matter of our memes. People seem to be especially attentive to evolutionarily relevant stimuli, including food, fire, dangerous animals, violence, disease, kinship, sex, infidelity, babies, friendship, free riders, status, and group membership.

As with imitation, we often look down our noses at conformity, despite conforming constantly. Your best bet would be to conform to the majority, rather than relying on individual learning.

The fact that the capacity for culture was adaptive doesn’t mean that every instance of culture must be.

Cultural group selection theory.

How did the “monogamy-only” meme come to prosper in the West, despite the fact that, to some extent, it clashes with human nature?

Watched people are nice people

In The Selfish Gene and later works, Dawkins outlined a view he calls universal Darwinism. The core idea is that natural selection operates not just on genes, but on any replicator.

Human history suddenly appears as a vast conflict between competing “species” of memes. Leftist memes and conservative memes wrestle each other for control of the democratic state. It’s almost as if the ideas themselves were fighting each other through whichever humans they happened to infest.

Science is a system of selectively breeding accurate memes.

Gene–culture coevolutionary theory. New tools ratcheted up the selection pressure for dexterous hands. Fire took over some of the work that was formerly done by our teeth. Cooking helped make possible the evolution of human intelligence. Our clever brains and our clever cultures coevolved. Intelligence evolved partly in response to the dangers it created for itself in the form of our tools and technology. 

Perhaps language came first and then created a selection pressure for genes promoting the rapid acquisition of language.

Stabilizing selection. By enabling the short-sighted to survive and reproduce, our technology could be slowly eroding the genetic quality of human eyesight.

Will we cast off our superstitions by exposing them to rational scrutiny, or will our superstitions evolve into more virulent forms, like bacteria in response to antibiotics?

Whether we like it or not, though, our evolving culture is pushing our species ever-more firmly into the driver’s seat of planet Earth as a whole. For better or for worse – perhaps for better and for worse – this appears to be the destiny of the strangest animal in the world: the ape that understood the universe.

Appendix A.  How to Win an Argument with a Blank Slater

Violence is natural but bad, medicine unnatural but good.

Appendix B.  How to Win an Argument with an Anti-Metalist

Consider some of the traditional theories of religion. According to the wish fulfilment theory, religious beliefs spread because they’re good for us: They comfort us and help us through the hard times. According to the social glue theory, religious beliefs spread because they’re good for societies: They bind individuals together into socially cohesive groups. According to the social control theory, religious beliefs spread because they’re good for leaders: They help keep the rabble in line. And according to adaptationist theories, religious beliefs spread because they’re good for our genes: They enhance the transmission of the genes inclining us toward religion. The memetic theory of religion, on the other hand, claims something else entirely. It claims that religious beliefs spread purely because they’re good for themselves.

“ideas that are good at spreading tend to spread.”

“Martyrs will be rewarded with seventy-two virgins when they enter paradise.” Apparently, it was seventy-two grapes or raisins – a reward that, while not entirely unwelcome, might be somewhat disappointing if you were expecting the virgins.

The great William James observed, natural selection in the realm of ideas operates at two main levels: first, within the individual’s mind, and second, within the wider society.

Memeticists do sometimes describe memes as mind viruses, which seems to imply they’re usually harmful. But that’s just loose talk. A more apt analogy would be with bacteria. Some bacteria are bad for us, but plenty of bacteria are good: We couldn’t survive without them. Ditto memes