Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man

Conclusion

So What Are We?

You can’t catch a cat with a carrot. Unless you fashion the carrot into the spear tip of a harpoon and have good aim, you’ll have better luck luring the cat with tuna fish. Even though cats didn’t evolve eating 500-pound tuna, the meaty odor and taste taps into what cat noses and tongues like. If you keep up a daily dose of fish—and a wee bit of water—you’re likely to have caught yourself a cat. Add a litter box next to your toilet and this cat will quickly become no more likely than you to stain the carpet. With these two simple steps, and only $39 in supplies, you’ll have quickly transformed a wild animal with hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary design into a toilet-trained, self-cleaning vermin remover.

Unlike dogs, who have changed their brains and bodies for hundreds of thousands of years to suit man—that is, they’ve become domesticated—cats are notoriously not domesticated. Cats may be our occasional friends and usefully serve as clean critter catchers, but they think they are wild cats, and they do what wild cats tend to do. They fit into our lives not because they have evolved for us, but because we’ve shaped our houses—and it doesn’t take much shaping—so that cats behaving like cats naturally leads to a function fulfilled for us.

Cats are harnessed, not domesticated—their innate talents redirected, with little or no training, in ways evolution didn’t intend. And the fundamental trick behind our harnessing cats is so simple we hardly appreciate it; in fact, I’ve already mentioned it. Tuna, not carrots, and kitty litter, not a bidet. Although tuna is not what cat ancestors ate, tuna is sufficiently meat-ish in odor and taste that it fits right into a cat’s finicky diet disposition. And although kitty litter is a strange and unnatural concoction, it mimics the loose soil in which cats prefer to bury their feces. Tuna and kitty litter are simulacra of nature, and thus successfully harness cats, turning them into good pets.

Just as we find cats with lifestyles they are not meant to have, we humans are apes living an un-ape life. Far beyond being potty trained, we build the very toilets we sit on. In light of tuna fish and kitty litter, in this book we have examined whether simulacra of nature could be the key to our humanity. Rather than supposing that our wild bits have evolved and changed to help us become modern humans, and rather than supposing the opposite—that our feral brain is a general-purpose learning machine that is extensively wired during our lifetime to make us genteel—in this book we have examined a third possibility: that our brains, to this day, are just as they were before anyone spoke or folded napkins, and that culture evolved to harness our ape powers, cleverly turning them into a new kind of power. Apes became literate and musical not because language and music got themselves innately encoded into the brain, but because the brain got its signature stamped upon language and music. We’re cats, not dogs.

In particular, this book has been about culture’s general strategy for harnessing us. The trick is to structure modern human tasks as tasks at which our ape selves already excel. And one surefire way to do this is to make the task thoroughly “like nature.” This book set out to put flesh on the bones of this idea, and to convey preliminary evidence that this is the strategy culture used to make us fit into modernity: making modernity fit us.

(a) Speech sounds like solid-object physical events, (b) music sounds like people moving, and (c) Homo sapiens became modern humans by virtue of cultural evolution designing language and music to mimic nature—by virtue of nature-harnessing. That’s the book in a nutshell. We have been down and dirty discussing (a) and (b) over the last three chapters, and these, in conjunction with arguments in The Vision Revolution that writing looks like opaque objects strewn in 3-D space, are the principal arguments for (c), that nature-harnessing is the mechanism for how we got from ape to man. Speech and music are the most central and transformative—revolutionary—powers we possess, and that’s why it is reasonable to say that nature-harnessing is the mechanism that created humans.

And if nature-harnessing is what made us, and if other animals don’t get made in this way, then it is worth reflecting upon what we humans are. How can we think about ourselves? To help illustrate what we are, it helps to back up really far away. So let’s consider how aliens try to make sense of us . . .

When aliens come to Earth to investigate life here, they don’t simply beam up a specimen and start probing. (And they’re also, by the way, not disproportionately interested in the anus.) Only a novice prober would do a simple beam-and-probe, and would surely get a quick rap on the proboscis from the instructor. The problem with abducting an animal of interest, all by itself, is that you can’t understand an animal without an appreciation of the environment the animal inhabits.

What an experienced alien prober does is gather as much information about the animal’s habitat as possible. In fact, the aliens beam up entire habitats so that they can study the animal in its home at their leisure. Alien Probe School graduates are consummate ecologists, understanding that organisms evolved to do stuff with their complex mechanisms, but that if you drop an organism into an environment for which it did not evolve, it will often do other stuff, and usually quite unsophisticated stuff.

By following their alien principles of good probing, they’ll have abducted what they need in order to someday, and with great effort, have a thorough knowledge of the organism, from its genome to its “phenome.” The phenome is the set of things the animal can do, implemented ultimately by the genome and the way it acts within the evolutionary habitat. For example, your cell phone’s genome is its electronic circuitry (or perhaps the engineer’s drawings for the circuitry), whereas its phenome is the list of things it can do, often enumerated in the user’s manual—exactly the manual that is missing for the Earth organisms the alien probers want to unravel.

But something unexpected happened when they applied these wise principles to humans, abducting an entire primitive tribe and the mountain they lived on. They already had abducted earlier hominids who had no language or music, and were interested to see what was new about these speaking and singing humans. To their surprise, the aliens could discern no difference between the nonspeaking, nonmusical hominids and the speaking and singing humans. Their biology was indistinguishable, they concluded. They were the same animal. Could the difference be due to a difference in habitat? No, they concluded, the earlier and newly abducted mountains appear to have no relevant differences. Same animal, same habitat, and yet the modern humans are a giant leap beyond, or at least distinct from, the more ancient Homo sapiens.

They scratched their antennae. Why, the aliens wondered, did the modern humans behave so fundamentally differently? Why did they have language and music? Why did the modern humans seem like something fundamentally different from the great apes, whereas the nonlinguistic, nonmusical humans seemed to fit more within the apes, albeit as a very bright great ape? How could two identical creatures in identical habitats end up so different in sophistication that it seemed natural to deem them different species?

The modern humans clearly must have learned language and music. But that only created another dilemma for the probers. How can you teach an animal a lesson so powerful that it practically becomes another species? Speech and music comprehension, the aliens knew, are astoundingly complex, with just the kind of complexity natural selection creates. These modern humans, the aliens noted, were competent at language and music in the highly adapted way animals evolve to be good at things. But from their alien experiences as ecologists, they knew that if an animal is not designed to accommodate that level and type of complex processing, then you can’t just force-feed it the learning. You can’t teach a deer to catch and eat mice. No training course will get your dog to climb trees like a monkey. And you can’t train a human to comprehend fax machine sounds. You simply cannot teach old hominids new tricks worthy of natural selection. The human brain is not such a rich general-purpose learning apparatus that it can master tasks as richly complex as language and music. Yet there they were, modern humans with brains highly honed for speech and music. The alien probers were stumped.

They reasoned that humans don’t have language or music innately installed in their heads. And neither one comes from their natural habitat. And they also can’t simply learn something that complicated. There must be selection of some kind underlying the human capability to do language and music, but what kind of selection could it be, if it is neither natural selection nor learning?

One of the alien probers wondered whether there might be design, or selection, underlying the difference between modern humans and their nonlinguistic and nonmusical ancestors—not natural selection, but cultural selection. This is a selection process that selects not on biology, but on human artifacts that are used by biology. The human artifacts are animal-like in the sense that they themselves have evolved over time, under selection pressure. These artifact-creatures (in the realm of “memes”), like naturally selected biological creatures, can be highly complex and intricately adapted, with all the hallmarks of an engineering masterpiece.

“Aha!” the alien prober exclaimed. The modern humans are not merely learning language and music, they’re being raised in an environment with symbionts. Language and music are technological masterpieces that evolved to live with nonlinguistic hominids and transform them into something beyond their biology. What makes these modern humans no longer the nonlinguistic Homo sapiens apes they biologically are is not on the inside, and not in the ancestral natural environment. Language and music are evolved, organism-like artifacts that are symbiotic with these human apes. And like any symbiont, these artifact symbionts have evolved to possess shapes that fit the partner biology—our brains.

What are we, then, in the eyes of alien probers? We are our biology, from the genes on up. But we are more than that, as indicated by the fact that the probers don’t abduct just a human, but, rather, abduct entire human habitats. We are our biology within its appropriate habitat. But that’s true of all animals on Earth. The special thing the aliens had to grapple with when they started probing humans was that biology and habitat are not enough. They needed to abduct the cultural-artifact symbionts that were coevolving with us. That’s not something any other animal can lay claim to. The pieces of what we are can be found in our wet biology, and in the habitat, but also in the artifactual symbionts we have been coevolving with. Our language, music, and other highly culturally evolved technologies are, like our genes and our habitat, deeply part of the modern human recipe. The human code is not just the genome, and not just the genome plus the habitat. The human code is now partly found in the structures of language and other cultural artifacts.

Through this allegory of alien probers, we can better see what we are. We owe our modern human identity to cultural symbionts that have evolved to get into our brains and harness us into something new. Cultural “animals” evolving to be symbiotic with humans: that is something the aliens could wrap their proboscises around, for they knew of lots of symbiotic interactions around the galaxy.

Although the aliens concluded that these cultural symbionts must have culturally evolved to fit the human brain, they hadn’t figured out how the symbionts got into human heads. “How did the cultural symbionts get in?” they wondered. And the answer they discovered: “Ah! They got in by mimicking nature.”