1 | The story of the survival of human beings is particularly difficult to tell as a story of adaptation in nature. How did the weakest ape come out so far on top?
Man is of all others the most curious vehicle … so slight a frame and so totteringly put together …
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
2 | Our skulls are so large we risk death even by being born. Our jaws are weaker than they once were, in order, perhaps, to allow the head to expand to accommodate a larger brain. Large brains need massive amounts of energy, which is why we need to cook food, because it makes energy available more easily. We are indeed totteringly made. The spinal column is better for suspending a ribcage than for acting as a column to support a heavy head. The change to a standing posture1 resulted in the shortening of our intestines, which is why our digestion is relatively poor. We find it hard to keep warm, we overheat easily, we have fragile nails and teeth, a poor sense of smell, not to mention all the senses that other animals have and we don’t have at all. But the advantages of standing up are huge. Our hands are free to use tools, and to become tools. It was Aristotle who first pointed out that a hand is an instrument that represents many instruments. Standing upright also makes possible the kind of breath control that is necessary for speech.
3 | Non-human apes have a pelt, claws, and strong canines. An orangutan can kill a crocodile with its bare hands. What humans have instead is intelligence. Our brains are three to four times larger than any other ape’s, far larger than they need to be to outsmart an ape.
4 | For three million years after we began to walk upright our heads expanded.2 From an adaptationist’s point of view it would be hard not to predict that once the head was teetering on a spinal column, the size of the head would decrease rather than increase. It would be a poor physical theory that couldn’t make a predictive distinction between opposites, but biology isn’t only a physical theory; it relies on a degree of storytelling based on the accretion of circumstantial evidence.
5 | The anthropologist Timothy Taylor (b.1960) has argued that the target of evolution moved from the gene to tools and technology. We are strong because of our wits and our weapons, and because we have made a life for ourselves indoors, protected from nature. Few of us now would live long in the wild, but even a puny human with a bow and arrow is king of the jungle. Skill became more valuable than brute force, for a while at least. To handle a longbow requires skill: any idiot can fire a gun, and many do. Technology allows us to outsource our intelligence and to share it. We don’t need to know how a fridge works in order to benefit from it, and most of us don’t. Today most of us are ignorant about the workings of most of our tools.
The popular lore of all nations testified that duplicity and cunning, together with bodily strength, were looked upon, even more than courage, as heroic virtues by primitive mankind. To overcome your adversary was the great affair of life. Courage was taken for granted. But the use of intelligence awakened wonder and respect.
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
I wanted to beat the other boys and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively.
G.H. Hardy, on becoming a mathematician
6 | Human life seems to have broken the constraints of nature. At one time the fittest and strongest men won battles, but increasingly war became about strategy and weapons. The ‘fittest’ in an evolutionary sense became the smartest, not necessarily the strongest. An adaptationist explanation is preserved here if the unit of selection moves (far away from genes) to humans together with their weapons. Together, they take themselves outside nature, and in doing so evolution speeds up rather than slows down.
Our tools3 enabled us to transcend selection by nature. We have been selected by our tools. We are their playthings. Tools allowed us to give up power for vulnerability. Tools allowed us to become gracile. We have used technology to create the environment in which we have evolved, and in which we continue to evolve at increasing pace.
Artefacts have souls and historical memories.
Ertuğul Günay, Turkish Minister of Culture 2007–13
An insect-catching bird may have natural visual acuity hundreds of times finer than ours, but we can track it, catch it, tag it, trap it, or kill it at will … We can study its eyes to design new things.
Timothy Taylor, The Artificial Ape
7 | Humans never were part of nature. We were always part of technoogy. Humankind’s first inventions were containers: bowls, jars, bags and baskets.
Timothy Taylor suggests that one of the first containers that made humans possible was the baby sling: ‘we used technology to turn ourselves into kangaroos’. The sling protected the fragile baby outside the womb, allowing early, vulnerable, big-headed birth.
8 | Technology evolves a life indoors. We become increasingly cut off from nature. Technology achieves what the playwright Max Frisch called ‘the knack of so arranging the world that it no longer needs to be experienced’.