Read Online Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind by Mark Pagel - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Mark Pagel
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Indeed, a chimpanzee can be taught to use a saw to cut wood, push a broom to sweep a floor, drink tea from teacups, exchange plastic tokens for food, and even wash dishes, given a sufficient reward. But before you think of employing one around your house, be aware that it will as happily wash a clean dish as a dirty one. This is because it is not washing dishes to clean them, as we do, but to get a banana.
Even in humans, a theory of mind emerges only sometime around a child’s third or fourth year. A procedure known as the Sally-Anne test shows a child two dolls: Sally and Anne. Sally has a marble that she (with the help of a human experimenter) puts in her basket. Then Sally leaves the scene. While Sally is away, Anne takes the marble from Sally’s basket and puts it in her box, which differs in appearance from Sally’s basket. Sally then returns and the child is asked where Sally will look for the marble. Children younger than three to four say she will look in Anne’s box (intriguingly, many people who suffer from autism also respond this way). But older children realize that Sally can have beliefs that differ from theirs, and they correctly say she will look in her basket.
There are many varieties of these “false-belief” tests, and they can be difficult to interpret, but they all point to three to four years of age as being a critical period during which children’s awareness of others’ minds develops. To be fair to the other animals it must be allowed that some of them, especially some birds, behave as if they have an awareness of what others are thinking. For instance, if the small bird known as the nutcracker (and some other jay and crow species) sees another bird watching it while it hides its food, it will return alone later to hide the food in a new spot. What matters for this discussion, though, is that no other animal ever seems to get as far in their understanding of others’ minds as a four- to five-year-old human. Even among the Great Apes, any theory of mind seems to be no more advanced than that of a human two-year-old.
It is staggering and baffling to us that other animals could be so dim-witted. It is not that they are stupid: a chimpanzee is better at being a chimpanzee than you are. It is just that they lack social learning, and this small difference has made all the difference. But what of our more recent ancestors, such as the many now-extinct species in the Homo lineage? The African Rift Valley is an angry tear in the Earth’s crust that stretches for thousands of miles. It was in a part of the Rift Valley in Tanzania called the Olduvai Gorge that the pioneering archaeologist Louis Leakey discovered objects over 1 million years old that appeared to have been deliberately and intentionally shaped by hands. Later work established that these were Homo erectus hand axes, and they were often found near to bones with cut marks on them made by the same hand axes. For many archaeologists this time in our history, perhaps 2 million years ago, is one of those defining moments, a time we can look back on romantically as being the moment that creative thinking arose. These early humans, it seems, had acquired not only a compulsion to make things but also the insight that they could alter and improve them. It is that “light bulb” moment in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when the ape throws a bone up into the air. We watch it tumbling end over end, and as it falls back to the ground the bone transforms into a spaceship on an interstellar mission.
But the archaeological record tells a more prosaic story about our ancestors’ creativity. Remarkably, from careful sifting through layers of strata, archaeologists have been able to determine that our H. erectus ancestors living on the African savannah stubbornly chipped the same hand axes out of larger stones for nearly all of their 1.8 million-year history, without making any serious alterations to its form or function. For tens of
Even in humans, a theory of mind emerges only sometime around a child’s third or fourth year. A procedure known as the Sally-Anne test shows a child two dolls: Sally and Anne. Sally has a marble that she (with the help of a human experimenter) puts in her basket. Then Sally leaves the scene. While Sally is away, Anne takes the marble from Sally’s basket and puts it in her box, which differs in appearance from Sally’s basket. Sally then returns and the child is asked where Sally will look for the marble. Children younger than three to four say she will look in Anne’s box (intriguingly, many people who suffer from autism also respond this way). But older children realize that Sally can have beliefs that differ from theirs, and they correctly say she will look in her basket.
There are many varieties of these “false-belief” tests, and they can be difficult to interpret, but they all point to three to four years of age as being a critical period during which children’s awareness of others’ minds develops. To be fair to the other animals it must be allowed that some of them, especially some birds, behave as if they have an awareness of what others are thinking. For instance, if the small bird known as the nutcracker (and some other jay and crow species) sees another bird watching it while it hides its food, it will return alone later to hide the food in a new spot. What matters for this discussion, though, is that no other animal ever seems to get as far in their understanding of others’ minds as a four- to five-year-old human. Even among the Great Apes, any theory of mind seems to be no more advanced than that of a human two-year-old.
It is staggering and baffling to us that other animals could be so dim-witted. It is not that they are stupid: a chimpanzee is better at being a chimpanzee than you are. It is just that they lack social learning, and this small difference has made all the difference. But what of our more recent ancestors, such as the many now-extinct species in the Homo lineage? The African Rift Valley is an angry tear in the Earth’s crust that stretches for thousands of miles. It was in a part of the Rift Valley in Tanzania called the Olduvai Gorge that the pioneering archaeologist Louis Leakey discovered objects over 1 million years old that appeared to have been deliberately and intentionally shaped by hands. Later work established that these were Homo erectus hand axes, and they were often found near to bones with cut marks on them made by the same hand axes. For many archaeologists this time in our history, perhaps 2 million years ago, is one of those defining moments, a time we can look back on romantically as being the moment that creative thinking arose. These early humans, it seems, had acquired not only a compulsion to make things but also the insight that they could alter and improve them. It is that “light bulb” moment in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when the ape throws a bone up into the air. We watch it tumbling end over end, and as it falls back to the ground the bone transforms into a spaceship on an interstellar mission.
But the archaeological record tells a more prosaic story about our ancestors’ creativity. Remarkably, from careful sifting through layers of strata, archaeologists have been able to determine that our H. erectus ancestors living on the African savannah stubbornly chipped the same hand axes out of larger stones for nearly all of their 1.8 million-year history, without making any serious alterations to its form or function. For tens of
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