Hacker News Reader

Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

The gap between us and the chimpanzees is, at the same time, "tantalizingly small" and "too big".

We have learnt to communicate with them, but they also don't seem to ask questions, at least not the way that humans do.

There is obvious intelligence in their eyes and deliberation in their movements, but they seem to be content with an almost static culture. Which was also true for the Neanderthals.

What was the last subtle mutation that prodded our species onto the road of intellectual curiosity?

We still don't know.

View on HN

For most of human history cultural change was extremely slow, so slow as to be imperceptible. I'm not sure the neanderthals experienced any less dynamic a culture than the modern humans living at the same time.

Perhaps expecting change makes change more likely. Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off.

I'm pretty skeptical that cultural change was meaningfully slower (except as limited by effective population sizes). Cultural change for early humans is nearly invisible in the material record. Imagine that all archaeologists of the far future find nothing from the current era except iphones without working storage. Do they indicate a unified global culture without cultural change outside WWDC?

Obviously not, even though there are aspects of a shared global culture indicated by their global distribution. Material culture is related to culture, but it's an imperfect and imprecise record. The same issue occurs with correlating culture with genetics or language.

Sure, but this is true of neanderthals as well. So we can't say we are especially creative or dynamic in our culture. We can say that our material culture, that small fragment of it that was preserved, was static.

That was the point: I also wouldn't say that about neanderthals.

The evidence on the ground is of course, limited. But it's a fairly common view among anthropologists/archaeologists that our perspective on ancient societies is immensely limited by the material record, hence the generally positive reception to Dawn of Everything despite its sketchy details and interpretations.

"Also, when things are scarce and life is tenuous you are less likely to experiment. Why waste the resources? Why take the risk? When surplus calories became commonplace is when cultural change took off."

True, but not the entire picture either. From what we know, even hunters and gatherers living in inhospitable regions have a rich oral culture and extensive pantheons of gods, demigods and legendary heroes. There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories.

> There seems to be something in us humans that yearns for more than just calories.

And we have no evidence that we are different in this from Neanderthals (arguably also humans). There is evidence of cultural variation among chimps, so there must also be cultural change. Do they yearn for things more than calories? Well, they play. They are curious.

I am extremely skeptical of claims that humans are special. We are strongly motivated to find this to be true. On the one hand, it flatters us. On the other hand, it justifies believing we are ethically distinct. This same way of thinking has been applied to other humans with results we now deplore.

Are we special, the chosen creatures? Maybe. We sure want to believe we are. It's fun and useful to be special! But maybe we should be cautious leaping to that conclusion. I think Jane Goodall was of this mind as well.

"Special" means different things for different people.

For me, humans are special in their capability to create extensive culture. That does not mean that $deity has created us in its image, it may well be a random fluke of evolution.

But we haven't seen a cave painting done by non-humans yet, nor heard a story narrated by them.

This was ages ago when I was in college, but the theory then was the ability to walk upright freed our hands to do other things. Chimps primarily knuckle-walk, so they can't easily carry objects (food, tools, etc) from point A to point B.

    For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. 
    But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
    
    - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Yeah, I read it too, but let's not take the book as a holy one.

Dolphins are plenty smart, but their absence of a material culture also leaves them exposed to various forces beyond their control.

Are dolphin moms not grieving when their baby gets eaten by killer whales?

This sort of threats is ubiquitous in nature, but almost unknown in a civilization.

True nature is brutal.

So many unsubstantiated claims, you find this pattern in someone infected with exceptionalism.

Ok, show me apes who unambiguously ask abstract questions.

The Neanderthal claim is what you can call unsubstantiated (so, one claim, not so many), but I would like to draw your attention to the extreme stability of the Mousterien industry. No Homo sapiens sapiens industry comes close to this level of stability.

"infected with exceptionalism"

So, we aren't exceptional at all? How do you square this rejection with the fact that you have never encountered, say, a written comment by a member of another species?

The word "infected" is very negative. I like intelligent animals, but no one except for us has, for example, as versatile hands as we do.

Maybe asking annoying questions?

Maybe :)

To elaborate, there seems to be a difference between physical curiosity and intellectual curiosity.

Many mammals, especially when young, are very curious about their environment, peeking, sniffing, burrowing in the ground etc. So are human children.

But the ability to ask more abstract questions "why do the stars shine?" does seem to be limited to humans alone, and maybe not even all humans. And it is very uncertain if archaic humans had it as well.

Yes, that’s interesting.

I guess it’s mainly related to the fact that we have a different kind of consciousness than other mammals. Maybe that’s tautological? Maybe asking questions about stars defines our consciousness?

What’s this about Neanderthals?

> The gap between us and the chimpanzees is, at the same time, "tantalizingly small" and "too big".

You will find a similar gap between some humans. Just saying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com