A foot in the river : why our lives change - and the limits of evolution PDF
Preview A foot in the river : why our lives change - and the limits of evolution
A FOOT IN THE RIVER FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO A FOOT IN THE RIVER Why Our Lives Change—and the Limits of Evolution Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Felipe Fernández-Armesto 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015931994 ISBN 978–0–19–874442–9 ebook ISBN 978–0–19–106185–1 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. You cannot step twice into the same river. Heraclitus [Diels and Kranz, fragments 12, 91; ed. T.A. Robinson (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1987), 16, 55.] ‘He is entirely human,’ I replied; ‘the accepted tests of humanity being, as I understand, the habitual adoption of the erect posture in locomotion, and the relative position of the end of the thumb –’ ‘I don’t mean that,’ interrupted Mrs Haldean. ‘I mean human in things that matter.’ R. Austin Freeman [The Famous Cases of Dr Thorndyke (London, Hodder, 1929), 271–2.] CONTENTS Introduction: The weird planet 1. Challenging Change 2. The Frustration of Science 3. The Great Reconvergence 4. The Chimpanzees’ Tea Party 5. The Limits of Evolution 6. The Imaginative Animal 7. Facing Acceleration 8. Towards the Planet of the Apes In the Vatican Garden: Afterword and Acknowledgements Notes Index INTRODUCTION: THE WEIRD PLANET We live on a weird planet. As far as we know, all the others are pretty much inert. Gases and dust swirl. Occasional cosmic events—experienced on Earth, too, such as a blip in an orbit, the tilt of an axis, an errant meteor—may alter the environment. But most changes on most planets happen predictably, within a narrow compass, or are measurable on a slow scale of millions of years. Earth is not like that. Sci-fi writers who strain to imagine strange worlds might as well look inward, at the wild, untrackable, unparalleled oddness of our own. Earth is, to us, the most interesting large lump in the cosmos, not just because we live on it and it matters most to us, but also because—objectively speaking— a lot happens on it. For two reasons, Earth is the scene of vast, rapid changes, unreplicated anywhere else that we know of: first, because our planet has life, and organic systems are more dynamic than inorganic ones; second, because Earth has us—cultural animals. And culture, which is the subject of this book, is even more volatile than biota. By ‘culture’ I mean behaviour—including mental behaviour, such as thoughts and attitudes—acquired by learners, transmitted by teachers or exemplars, and adopted widely. People use the word loosely to mean many different things: civilization; ‘high’ culture; elaborate social organization; the peculiar features of a particular society; the commonalities that make individuals identify with a group; and hundreds of variants, with many nuances, on all these definitions. Underlying every usage, however, and uniting them all, is the bedrock of the word: differentiation from ‘nature’. Culture is part of nature, in an unchallengeable sense: it happens inside nature and cannot happen without it. But in equally obvious ways it is useful to distinguish the cultural part of nature from what is merely natural. Some of what we do comes to us without any conscious input of our own. We share it with other creatures in the same measure as we share their ancestry or their physical environment: that is mere nature. Other behaviour can vary from group to group; we learn it from other members of our own group—our parents, for instance, or our professors and peers: that is culture. It is proper to speak of culture apart from nature, just as it is to speak of Essex, say, apart from England, or of an organ apart from the body to which it belongs, only if one is aware that the larger term always includes the smaller, and that consideration of neither is complete without the other. At times, especially in the West, people have pressed the distinction too far by treating culture as if nature had nothing to do with it, but that is not a reason for refusing to acknowledge that culture might have peculiar features that distinguish it from 1 the rest of nature. Nature and culture are not mutually independent: each influences the other. But the balance is a battleground. Scholars and scientists fight over it. The answer to the question ‘why do we have culture?’ lies, I think, in the realm of nature: the simple (but, as we shall see, insufficient) answer is ‘it is natural for us to be cultural’. The question ‘why do we have cultures?’—in the plural or, to put almost the same question another way, ‘why does culture change?’—is, I want to suggest, not answerable in the same way. I propose to explore that question by posing two possibilities: whether evolution or some analogous process is the answer, and whether cultural change happens beyond the limits of evolution’s explanatory power. The purpose of this book is to contribute a new response to what perhaps—as we puzzle over strangers’ comportment, or ponder alien ways of life, or contemplate the variety of our conduct, or compare the commonalities and curiosities that link and part us from other creatures—is the most perplexing property of human beings: why we behave as we do. * Humans are not the only creatures with culture; over the last sixty years or so, scientists have identified culture among many primate species and claimed it for many others, including examples to be paraded in this book, like the menagerie of some fantastic Barnum or Bailey, such as dolphins, whales, elephants, rats, and even bacteria. Human cultures, however, are different: in comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable. Communities become differentiated, as they change in contrasting and inconsistent ways: that is true, as we shall see, of any cultural species, but the processes involved happen incalculably more often, with a perplexingly greater range of variation, among humans than among any other animals. Human cultures register the constant series of changes that we call ‘history’; they self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering and apparently—now and for most of the recent past—accelerating speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. A lifetime’s study of history has convinced me that one of the great problems —unsolved by the scientists and sociologists who have confronted it and rarely even broached among historians—is ‘why have human societies grown so different from each other?’ Or, to express a similar question with the comparative emphasis that I think will lead us to a solution: ‘why, compared with those of other animals who lead social lives, are humans so mutable?’ It is one of the most basic and pervasive questions, but we have no agreed answer. The question raises, in turn, a matter of enduring and apparently unclinchable controversy: how far the laws of evolution might provide solutions. Does evolution or something like it regulate culture as well as organic life? Is all behaviour the result of evolved traits? If not, where lie the limits between what evolution can explain and what is beyond evolution? For historians, one might express the subject of this book as ‘why do we have history at all? Why do the changes we call history happen? Why do we humans alone have history—or, at least, so much more of it than other animals?’ For biologists, a way of putting the same problem might be: ‘is culture an effect or aspect of biology? Or is there more to it?’ People with no disciplinary bias might put it like this: ‘why do humans behave so differently from other animals?’ With some remarkable exceptions, which we shall come to in their place, the lifeways of most extant cultural creatures seem nearly uniform and nearly stagnant by human standards. That does not mean that their cultures are incapable of multiplying and accelerating in the future. Maybe, one day, we will find other species in other worlds with the same propensities as humans’ to create highly mutable behaviours. At present, we have no evidence that such beings exist. Part of the message of this book will be (I hope) that we may not need to go as far as outer space to find them: given time, other Earthbound species—chimpanzees, in particular, and perhaps some other primates—could acquire some of the changeable traits in lifestyle and social and political relationships that up to now seem uniquely human. So far, however, although non-human creatures’ ways of life—those so far identified and studied, most of which belong to apes, dolphins, and whales—do register measurable changes,
The list of books you might like
