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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams noted that "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."

This is an interesting point, and one that's tackled in great detail in Kevin Laland's new book, Darwin's Unfinished Symphony. Other species are indisputably smart; they can learn by example, they can communicate, they can innovate to solve problems, they can use tools, they may even have distinct cultures. But humans are clearly different. Other species don't listen to Baroque concerti or read classical philosophy hundreds of years after the scores were composed or the treatises written. They just don't.

This difference really bugged Laland. He is loath to say that humans are special because that implies some vast, unbridgeable gulf between us and our closest kin. Laland is an evolutionary biologist, and he doesn't go for those sorts of claims. He knows that humans evolved from a common ancestor with other primates through natural selection and other such well-defined mechanisms.

Yet a vast, unbridgeable gulf really does, in fact, come between us and our closest kin. Something huge must have happened to explain how and why we alone have built cathedrals and telescopes and banks and submarines and smartphones and particle accelerators. This is not navel gazing; we are special.

So, with Darwin's Unfinished Symphony, Laland set out to define what that something huge was. He concluded that it was not as dramatic as one of our early ancestors getting repeatedly struck by lightning or bitten by a radioactive spider. Rather, his thesis is that humans alone evolved such a complex culture because humans alone have teachers dedicated to teaching their young. And the reason only we have teachers—people who devote the bulk of their lives to teaching the offspring of strangers not only vital life skills, like how to hunt and fish, but the entire accumulated knowledge of our species over the past few millennia—is because... we have such a complex culture.

Yes, that's circular. We generated culture, which shaped our evolution to allow us to devise language so we could generate an increasingly complex culture—well, that's how feedback loops work.

-- submitted from IRC

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