Lecture 20: Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different?
complex information with great precision. Unlike a vervet, a human could
explain, for example, that: “My cousin was killed by a cat-like predator at
the water hole one mile away to the south of the volcano.”Symbolic language allows humans to exchange so much information so
precisely and so rapidly that more information is transmitted than is lost.
As a result, large stores of information can begin to accumulate within the
community as a whole. If chimps function mostly like stand-alone computers,
modern humans are networked. Each of us has access to a vast communal
database of information about how to adapt to our environment.I call this unique form of adaptation “collective learning.” If this line of
argument is correct, it suggests that collective learning is what explains
our exceptional ability to adapt. It is what makes our species unique on
this planet, and it explains why human history represents a new level of
complexity. Note that this argument does not yet count as an established
orthodoxy, though many researchers are converging on some form of it.Note, also, that it does not depend on individual humans being smarter than
individual apes. It is the sharing of information that makes us different.
Humans, unlike apes, face their environments armed with a vast amount of
information accumulated by millions of individuals over many generations.
Collective learning explains why only humans have a history of constant
change, as humans have accumulated more and more information about the
world they inhabit. Indeed, human history is all about the many changes
made possible by our capacity for collective learning. Collective learning
explains why we have gotten better and better at extracting energy and
resources from the environment and why, collectively, we have become one
of the most complex entities in the Universe.This lecture has argued that we are different because we have access to a new
and uniquely powerful adaptive mechanism: collective learning. How and
when did our ancestors ¿ rst acquire this unique ability? That is the question
tackled in the next lecture. Ŷ