Hail Cecilia Heyes

I am addicted to ‘viewquakes’, insights which dramatically change my world view. (More)

To my shame, I missed Tyler’s review of the 2018 book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. I often get asked what are good books to read, and who are contemporary intellectual heroes, and now I have good answers: this book and its author Cecilia Heyes. 

For a very long time, few who studied human history and behavior thought it very relevant that humans evolved from other animals. Decades ago, it was a revelation to me to discover the new but still minority view of evolutionary psychology, that the nature of the human mind is not infinitely pliable, but was instead mostly fixed in our DNA hundreds of thousands of years ago based on our ancestors’ environments then. We have cavemen minds in a modern world. That view since infused much of my thinking, including our book The Elephant in the Brain.

Heyes radically overthrows that view. Yet she does so persuasively, with much evidence, and amazingly enough most nearby specialists seem to accept her view’s basic plausibility, if not its every detail. That new view: 

At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking [“gadgets”] from the social world around us. (More) 

Such gadgets plausibly give us abilities like imitation, teaching, language, literacy, mind-reading, narration, mental time travel, selective trust, metacognition, spatial reasoning, causal reasoning, logical reasoning, math reasoning, group-based reasoning, and normativity.

As cultural evolution is so much more powerful than DNA evolution, if it is at all possible for something to have evolved culturally, I’m quite inclined to guess that’s how it actually did evolve. I’ll mostly posit DNA evolution for the core abilities required to get cultural evolution going well.

As we only gained some of these abilities a few thousand years ago, it is possible that many of these abilities aren’t that much older. And even much older abilities might have arrived rather suddenly, or might have arisen and then become lost several times. 

So our familiar human natures are a lot more pliable, and might have arisen a lot more recently, than I had realized. Which implies that even without the aid of any technology, human nature also has a lot more room to change fast in the future. And once we add in technological aids, the possibilities become even wider. 

Of course there are no doubt limits; we can’t just make ourselves into anything we want. But I now see a lot more room for deep and rapid changes in human nature, via our inventing and accumulating more cognitive gadgets. And a lot bigger dangers if cultural drift destroys such things. Hail Cecilia Heyes indeed.