speaker-1: imagine, Social life as a forager, you know, and life as a forager is like going on a camping trip with a bunch of people where all the gear's been left behind, most of the food's been left behind and the camping trip lasts forever. under circumstances like that it doesn't take people very long to find out, you know, who's selfish and who's not, who makes the best of things and who who doesn't, who is the person who's reliable, keeps their cool and who doesn't. so the cognitive problem of tracking people who are lazy, people who are greedy, that's actually in the intimate kind of social world to our past, that wasn't a big problem.
Nickilina Herrmann: Before we start, here's a quick note on the audio. This episode is recorded on an Australian landline, yes, an actual old school telephone. So bear with us if the sound of times is less than perfect. Professor Storelney's insights are really worth a listen.
speaker-0: Today I am joined by Professor Kim Sterelny. Kim is a philosopher of science and an evolutionary theorist whose work focuses on one of the biggest questions we can ask about our species. What made humans so unusual? Much of his work explores the evolution of human social learning, cooperation, and cumulative culture, essentially how humans became so extraordinarily good at learning from one another and building on what previous generations discovered. His book, The Evolved Apprentice, develops into the idea that human uniqueness isn't simply the result of suddenly evolving a much more powerful brain. Instead, our remarkable abilities emerge through feedback loops between social learning, cooperation, Ecological challenges and the environments in which children develop. He's also written extensively about cooperation and cultural evolution, including his book The Place to see Social Contract, sorry about the pronunciation, where he explores how increasingly sophisticated cultural learning may have made cooperation both more valuable and more stable. So today we're going to talk about something I think sits quite centrally at the heart of this podcast. How did humans become the kind of creatures who are so dependent on one another for learning? And what might that history tell us about how we should think about childhood, education, cooperation, and life in the modern world? So Kim, welcome to Original Human.
speaker-1: Okay, here I am.
speaker-0: Super. Well, if we're gonna start in the big question, like what what made us as a species so unusual? So let's say if you had to explain to someone who knows very little about human evolution, what and like what makes humans special, where would you start? What would you say?
speaker-1: I guess when it start in Africa, something like two and a half billion years ago, maybe three million years ago. after our ancestors had become bipedal, we're not sure exactly when that happened, and there are different views about why, but our ancestors became bipedal and they started to live in more op open landscapes, less forested landscapes. and that had two consequences. One was it made them more vulnerable. you know, they weren't physically very imposing creatures. as the landscape opened out and as they became more committed to a biopedal life, you know, they were less able to escape, you know, into trees, less able to s to sleep in trees safely. So they became more vulnerable. So that was a one change and another change was an opportunity opened up for them that didn't open up for our relatives who were still living in forested landscapes and that was the opportunity to scavenge woodlands have lots of dead animals in them, you know, no doubt including many of our dead ancestors. but the the good thing about large dead animals is that even when predators and and and other fierce creatures have had their fill, there was still food left. most predators, maybe not even any predators, could open the skulls of large animals, and there's brain material in there which has lots of lots of fat, lots of protein, lots of good stuff. They couldn't open the big leg bones of of big animals. So there was an opportunity for a creature that could learn to use rocks as hammers to break open, you know, those brain cases, break open those long leg bones. And that was a you know both an opportunity and a challenge because to be able to do that successfully, they had to learn to to act together for safety and for cooperation. They had to start to learn how to use stone tools. They had to start to learn to read the landscape a bit better, both for safety and for you know to maximize those opportunities. And once they started to do that, other opportunities opened up. As soon as you start scavenging, once you're starting to scavenge on a regular basis, you can a few innovations away and things get better. So if you can cooperate better, if you can wave sticks looking fierce, start throwing volleys of rocks, you can start scaring away some of the less frightening predators like cheetahs, you know, from their kill and get to it quicker and get more food out of it. You can defend your kill against less scary, you know, scavengers like jackals. and so that's another that's a step forward in cooperation, a step forward, you know, in reading the landscape, a step forward, you know, in in tool use. So the basic if I was talking talking to someone at the pub, I'd say two things happened. One was that they had to learn to cooperate and learn, you know, about one another and the environment to for for protection against predation, once they couldn't sleep in the trees. And another thing that happened was this opportunity opened up for them. And once they started to grasp that opportunity, more opportunities followed.
speaker-0: Hmm, fascinating. So so two parts to it. Both like a a need and and an opportunity. So so where does social learning come into the picture?
speaker-1: Le just about all animals that live together learn socially. You know, because when one animal does something, it creates information for its fellows. So one animal notices a predator and and stares or starts to flee, you know, or goes into alert mode. Others notice it and then notice what where it's looking towards. If one animal notices food and starts to move towards it, other animals will crack it, you know, with the toe. So social learning's really common, you know, learning socially generates useful information for everyone. So that was the basis. But once you know the the process I was talking about earlier, you know, which was, you know, cooperating for defense and cooperating, you know, for scavenging, once that kicks in, the more you know about the environment, the safer you are, the more you know about the environment, the more opportunities there are, to exploit it. so for example, if you're a scavenger, starting to look up matters. Because in if you're in in Africa, and I've been in Africa and and you know, I'm a birder, so I've done this, you look up, you know, and there are vultures and hawks and eagles. And they're on the lookout for carcasses all the time. So, and of course they can see far, far more than you can. So, if a a group of vultures start to trap towards a particular area in the landscape, you know there's something there. and so you learn to re read the landscape, you know, becomes more and more important, as I say, more important both for safety and more important both and for opportunities. And as adults learn to l read the landscape, it's in their interests, you know, for their kids to learn to to read it too. and also if you're acting cooperatively, if if having your fellows around you, is important for defence and safety, if it's important for scaring off other predators, and other scavengers, you've got a stake in their competence and they have a stake in your competence. So sharing information starts to turn into something that's sensible for you to do rather than trying to keep information for yourself, because you need the social support for others, to exploit the resources that are available in the environment and to survive the dangers, the very many dangers there were in those environments. Pleistocene Africa was full of really fucking scary creatures.
speaker-0: I can imagine. Yes. but so then is so all animals are social learners in in some sense. Is is human social learning different from how other animals do it?
speaker-1: there's a massive debate about that. You know, so certainly we learn much more socially than other animals do. On some views, that's because our minds are specially adapted for it. You know, so there's a line of thought which says, you know, we have special cognitive abilities for social learning that other animals don't. There's another line of thought which says, we're in general better at learning, you know, about anything than most animals. That's what part of what our big brain gives us. we're we're attentive to what our fellows do, we're highly motivated to learn, and you know, because of the way human social life is organized, kids have lots and lots and lots of opportunities to learn from from from adults. So on one view, you know, our so on everyone's views human social learning is different. We learn more and we learn more accurately. The big debate is whether that's made possible by special cognitive machines in our head or whether it's made possible by a general upgrade of the kind of cogni cognitive machines most animals have, together with the supportive features of human social environments. I I lean towards the second explanation, but most people, you know, lean towards the first.
speaker-0: Okay, interesting. And why would you lean towards the second rather than the first?
speaker-1: I mean for one thing I think, you know, there is evidence from the ethnography from the study of you know, kids and kids learning in forager environments, which really bring out just how many opportunities to learn those kids have. You know, they learn together. in sort of collaborative and cooperative ways. Parents, other adults are very tolerant, about kids borrowing their stuff, looking at what they do, eaves eavesdropping on them, experimenting, with tools and s and stuff like that. So I think if you look at at what, you know, forage forager kids do, you see a an an environment which is very richly supported for social learning.
speaker-0: Hmm, fascinating. and that kind of I guess this ties into because you have a book titled The Evolved Apprentice.
speaker-1: I do indeed.
speaker-0: Yeah, and this title, Evolved Apprentice, does to me, I I would guess it it goes in this direction, right? But what the what does the title mean? What what what does it mean?
speaker-1: emphasizes you know the way that human social environments are adapted to support kids learning. on one view what's adapted to support kids learning is what's in their head and on another view it's what's outside their head. Now of course both could be true, you know, and to some degree no doubt both are true. but I wrote the Evolved Apprentice in part because I thought the way that environments are adapted to support human social learning was a bit understated and a bit understudied in the literature. So I wanted to emphasize the external supports for learning and somewhat de emphasize the idea that our social learning depended on our fancy internal machine and say, well look And we d we do have a fancy internal machine, but that fancy internal machine only works as well as it does because of the way that human social environments are structured to support learning.
speaker-0: Mm, absolutely. And then for I mean, I am a mom, so I'm really curious about this. What makes up a good environment for for children to learn in?
speaker-1: Well, I mean it's a really striking contrast between the way that forager kids learn and education in advanced Western societies. Forager kids learn in company with one another, in a mixed age group and a mixed gender group. They have an enormous amount of freedom, you know, in what they do and when they do it. so learning for them is it's collaborative. It's kid directed rather than adult directed. The kids have a lot of choice about who they learn from and how they learn and and when they learn. they're very motivated. there's not a lot of alienation, from educational in institutions in in forager society. it is not at all risk averse. I mean forager kids are allowed to do things and routinely allowed to do things which would have you arrested, and your kids taken away in Western societies. So it it it's a risky way of learning, but it's very kid directed, it's very effective, it's low cost, because the par parents don't have to supervise and micromanage their kids. so so I think there's a tremendous the interesting difference between the way social learning happens in forager societies and the way it happens in sedentary societies and especially in w in Western societies.
speaker-0: Yeah, it sounds sounds like there are quite some contrasts.
speaker-1: There is certainly a contra I mean the the the riskiness of it is really dramatic. so there's a very, you know, nice paper by a guy called Block from Memory, on kind of how long does it take, for foragers to learn, and his his his paper is on fishing, and acquiring fishing skills on the old Wango River, in Botswana. Well I've I've been on that river. it is full of Nile crocodiles. it's full of hippos. The river, you know, goes through kind of, steep, yeah, grasslands, so it's very hard to see where the the grass banks end and the river begins. so it's actually a really, really dangerous environment for five and six and seven year old kids. But five and six and seven year old kids go out in company with one another, you know, and learn learn to fish there. mean it is it is a strikingly, risk tolerant education system. Very, very different from what we have, where I mean I teach, a course on at at university level, on human evolution. I would have loved I have a friend who's a stone knapper, makes makes stone tools. I would love to have got him into, give the kids a hands on sort of education on how difficult it is to make stone tools. The number of forms I would have had to fill out, the number of risk assessment, and health and safety, regulations that would have to be negotiated to do something like that made it so daunting that I've never done it. You know, so the the Western education is this sort of absurdly risk sensitive stuff. forager education is very different.
speaker-0: Yeah, really. And what a shame that you didn't I that would have been so cool. It is
speaker-1: It's shame. The kid I mean is I mean I I haven't done it much. I've had a couple of lessons. It's great fun, you know, but it also brings home to you just how skilled stone napping is.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: You don't you you don't make, you know, sharp, you know, stone tools by randomly banging one rock against another.
speaker-0: No, no. I can imagine that. Okay, so childhood sounds really central to to kind of this whole learning and evolving.
speaker-1: Yes, I think I I think it is central. I mean that's not to say that adults don't learn and they don't learn from one another. I'm sure they do. and I'm sure that's important. There have been a few case studies, of innovations in the lives of non Western people, and adults pick up innovations too. But yeah, look, I mean the central engine of social learning, is the reliability with which kids pick up, the informational resources of the adult generation. And human social life wouldn't have survived without that being a highly reliable process.
speaker-0: Hmm. Fascinating. you've written about the way that children's learning environments themselves became more organised and enriched. What what does that actually mean?
speaker-1: I think it means a couple of things. I mean one is of course over over evolutionary time, childhood lasted longer. You know, so you know, if you I there's a lot of assumptions and and complexities in trying to recover the life history of erectus grade humans and and Heidelbergensis grade grade humans. And it's pretty clear, you know, that their childhoods were longer, you know, than than great ape childhoods, but not as long, you know, as the childhoods and juvenile periods of humans. So one one difference over evolutionary time is simply the amount of time kids had, you know, available to acquire adult skills. And that in turn is only made possible by adults being, you know, efficient providers of resources. So there's a kind of coevolution, you know, between the efficiency of adult, you know, sort of foraging and resource acquisition and the lengthening of human childhood and the human juvenile period and hence the human kind of educational period. So that's that's you know, one factor. Another factor is the gradual enrichment of the technical repertoire of our ancestors because one thing one way kids educate themselves is simply by borrowing, you know, gear, experimenting with it, seeing what works and what doesn't, trying to duplicate it themselves by using adult tools or templates for trying to make their own tools. So as as the you know, as the technological, you know, environment became richer, kids' learning opportunities became richer. Another thing which I think must have been important, it's very hard to date, but must have been important, was theaters becoming scared of humans. You couldn't have had the kind of relaxed, hands off attitude, you know, that foragers have, you know, towards kids roaming around in the bush by themselves. You know, if predators still routinely regarded humans as food, it would have been too dangerous for kids to be out and about by themselves. Yet, you know, the ethnographic record is pretty clear that very often they are out and about by themselves. So becoming dominant, you know, in the predator niche and having, you know, reducing the number of other predators and those that were still around, avoiding people. rather than regarding them as food, that must have been important. As I say, very hard to tell when that happened. It must have been important. and other things were were kind of the in changes I mean at some stage humans became incredibly socially tolerant of their young. I mean if you look at great apes, you know, chimps and bonobos, they're fairly tolerant, of the young, but mostly only of the very young. juveniles have to kind of steer well clear, you know, of of adult males. Whereas in human social life in forager communities and many other communities, you know, adults are really tolerant, you know, of juveniles hanging around, asking questions, looking at what they do. getting in the way often, you know, so social tolerance, you know, was a im important part of it as well.
speaker-0: Yeah, I c I can imagine. So yeah, but tolerance is I don't know. I'm probably way too intolerant sometimes, but I can imagine it's important. But then so when I hear you, it sounds like a lot of the the the learning that children do is very self directed. is is that true or or did actually or did
speaker-1: Yes, I I think I think it's very self directed. Not always there are you know, I mean especially for sacred knowledge and things like that. so in Australian Aboriginal communities there is or at least there was, I mean it's basically gone now, but at one stage there was fairly serious and quite focused teaching, you know, of origin myths and sacred and arcane knowledge. And I think there's evidence of the same thing in many other forager communities. I think you know there's the teaching of sort of social norms and social law and stuff like that. That was probably in many forager communities that's more top down. You know, so and insisted upon by the adult. But a lot of the what you might think of as the utilitarian skills, you know, how to survive in the landscape, how to make things, how to find things, you know, what's found where. A lot of that, you know, is very was very self directed, though typically self directed, you know, in groups, you know, collaboratively rather than as individual children.
speaker-0: Hmm, fascinating. Do you think that? I mean, of course, let's say modern Western sedentary lives today are very different from the the foraging groups and the way they live. But still, do you think like parents today would because I think I'm probably not the only one who thinks a lot about teaching. Like, what do I want my children to learn? What do I want them to know? Do we think about that too much? Could could I s back off a little and let my kids like do you think it could like even today in the modern world be more self directed, like kids learning?
speaker-1: it's an interesting day. I mean, I grew up a long fucking time ago, but not in the Pleistocene. and at least outside the formal educational hours, I was much freer than kids are now to roam around by myself, you know, and to live in a self-directed way. I when I was at primary school, you know, my parents had a small poultry farm, and next to that poultry farm was, you know, a lot of bush and a lot of forest. And I was allowed, you know, from the age of eight or nine to go exploring, you know, in in that bush country by myself. That w would not be regarded as okay anymore. So I think there's room, you know, in the modern world for at least outside the educational institutions of you know, the of school and stuff like that, you know, for a a somewhat more hands off attitude towards kids. But it I mean the thing is It's very hard to do that one by one as individual parents. Walking home and in the streets and stuff like that because there were kids. a single kid walking around in the streets, you know, is vulnerable in a way that a pack of kids is not. so I think it's so I think it's very hard for an individual parent to think, you know what, you know, I think we should back off a l a bit, let you know, let Junior walk home from school by himself. If he wants to go down to the park by himself, then go down to the park by himself. Because, you know, he or she will be by himself too much. And what made this both safe and enjoyable was the fact that there were kids, not a kid, doing this sort of thing. So I think it's very hard to go back.
speaker-0: Yeah, you're probably right. You're probably right. And we shouldn't, maybe today. It's a different, different time and place, maybe. but so another topic that you write a lot about is cooperation and its relation to to intelligence. so did we as humans become more intelligent because we just got better at thinking or is it because we got better at learning from one another, cooperating? Like how how do the two relate? Cooperation, intelligence, what is the the relationship there?
speaker-1: I mean I mean my general picture in all of these things is sort of incremental feedback. You know, so go back to what I you know my my fable, you know, of the Pisces in Woodlands, those early humans simultaneously, you know, under selection for material cooperation in chasing humanity. Predators and scavengers from prey, they're under selection for learning from one another, they're under some selection for communicating and coordinating, so that they can go collectively to places where they're more likely to find resources, they're under selection, you know, to learn from from one another. So I think all of these things are happening at once. incrementally. So I don't think, you know, I kind of try and avoid a picture which says what really mattered was cooperation over material resources and that therefore selected the X, Y, and Z. I don't think there's a sort of a master variable here, as some theorists would put it. I think what happened was small incremental changes, each of which you know, linked to other small incremental changes in cycles of positive feedback.
speaker-0: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. But so then and that's there's also this other concept about learning, that's cultural learning. How how would you explain cultural learning to someone who doesn't know it?
speaker-1: I don't I some people draw a distinction between social learning and cultural learning. I don't I I use the terms interchangeably. But the people who do use the you know the term cultural learning to mean something different from social learning typically mean, you know, a form of social learning that depends on language, that depends on active support, by the more knowledgeable for the less knowledgeable. So actor support can be teaching, you know, it can be advice, it can be, you know, providing material resources, it can be providing feedback, you know, of the no, you're doing it wrong. so there's a tradition of using cultural learning as a term for fancier forms of social learning.
speaker-0: okay, I see. So yeah, okay, so a little a little a little faster a little.
speaker-1: Same. I d I just use social learning and cultural learning interchangeably.
speaker-0: Super. Okay, then then then I got it. Then I got it. so how does cooperation and social learning kind of interact? Does does social learning be better that makes cooperation easier or what what is the
speaker-1: I think I think it I think it i inter interacts to both ways basically. I mean so the more the more you know, the more opportunities for material cooperation there are. You know, so the more you the more you know about your environment and the more you know about its, you know, the landscape and its resources and the capacities, you know, and foibles, you know, of those that you're with. you know, the more opportunities there are for successful cooperation, you know, over material things. the more successful material cooperation is, the better you can support social learning. You can support social learning, in the younger generation, but you also make time for yourself, you know, for experiment and play. So Innovation often requires a certain amount of slack or surplus in the resource budget. If if you're spending every available minute just getting enough to stay alive, you know, and for your kids to stay alive, you're not gonna have time, you know, for experiment, for play, for seeing whether a certain idea might work. You're not gonna have time to, you know, explore the properties of a rock, you know, that looks interesting. and maybe might nap better, but y you know, you just don't have time. whereas if material cooperation eases the resource budget and hence eases the time budget, it gives not just the next generation more time and space in which to learn, it gives the adult generation more time and space in which to sort of innovate and experiment.
speaker-0: That is so true. And still today. Still today, right? That's really I have not thought of it like that, that corporation
speaker-1: R and D is expensive. It it costs. You know, you know, it costs now and it's always costed. You know, so you've got to be able to afford it.
speaker-0: That's true. That's true. In what sense would you say that that that it costs? Like like what does it cost?
speaker-1: It at a minimum it costs time.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, in most cases it'll do more than costing time, it'll require some energetic input, there might be some risks involved, but at a minimum it requires time.
speaker-0: That is true. But that's also what you get out in the end, right? So so but it has this like kind of investment.
speaker-1: You've got to invest it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean very few ideas work perfectly the first time.
speaker-0: That's true. That is absolutely true. something I found quite nice if I interpret your work correctly, but that is you don't seem to somehow it seems like to you, like this whole kind of dark, bad side of humanity, like deception, manipulation, that doesn't seem to be the reason for why we are intelligent when when I if I interpret your work correctly. Or how do you see this? Are we are we bad or or is there another
speaker-1: I do my best to avoid moralizing. but I I there is a sort of line on human evolution, you know, called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, where the basic idea is that we got smart, you know, partly to protect ourselves from being exploited by others and partly to when possible exploiting others. Now there's really some element of truth in that, you know. people will, lie, cheat and steal. they will bludge if they can get away with it, they'll take more than they can say their fair share if they can get away with it. So it's certainly part of the human cooperation story, you know, that we had to develop. social and cognitive mechanisms to limit the amount of damage, you know, that kind of selfish, you know, behavior causes. But I do think, that's been oversold, as part of the kind of explanation of human intelligence. I I mean one way I like to put it is look, imagine, Social life as a forager, you know, and life as a forager is like going on a camping trip with a bunch of people where all the gear's been left behind, all the s most of the food's been left behind and the camping trip lasts forever. under circumstances like that it it doesn't take people very long to find out, you know, who's selfish and who's not, who makes the best of things and who who doesn't, who is the person who's reliable, you know. keeps their cool and who doesn't. The so the cognitive problem of tracking people who are lazy, people who are greedy, that's actually in the intimate kind of social world to our past, you know, that wasn't a big problem. Doing something about it might have been a big problem, but but identifying, you know, the bludges and the bullies, you know, that wasn't a big problem. I mean it is a big problem in modern societies because people can be anonymous and they can hide their past. But, you know, in the intimate societies of our past, that wasn't a big problem. What was a big problem, what was genuinely cognitively difficult, was actually, you know, successfully collectively generating the resources people needed to live. I mean for millions of years, you know, humans have depended on kind of high quality food and high quality resources. they've depended, you know, on on game, on fish, and on plant foods, high end plant foods. Well fish don't like being caught, animals don't like being eaten, and apart from you know their fruit, plants don't like being exploited. So Learning how to find those things, how to process them, how to get them safely. All of that was really hard. I mean even finding water, you know, in many human environments, is really seriously challenging cognitively. So there's a an Australian a famous, you know, sort of Australian exploring expedition was an expedition by Edmund Eyre, who did the first white person overland trip from Adelaide, which is, you know, sort of in South Australia, west, to Albany, which is in, Western Australia, it's about a couple of thousand kilometers. of that couple of thousand kilometers, for about fifteen hundred kilometers, there was no surface water whatsoever. all the water had to be found underground in native wells and stuff like that. That's incredibly challenging place to live. Yet, indigenous Australians lived in those environments and the only reason why air was able to get from the east to the west was he was good enough bushman to be able to recognize the Aboriginal tracks and follow them to the to the native wells and excavate those wells to get enough water for him and his one companion, to survive. These are very, very challenging environments. Yet people have lived, in arid and semi arid environments for at least tens of thousands of years and probably hundreds of thousands of years. that's why we were under selection to be smart, individually and collectively to cope with very challenging environments. It wasn't that hard to work out, you know, who was an idle bastard, you know, and who was a greedy bastard. It was very hard to work out where in an arid landscape you might be able to sink a well and get water. That's hard.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I like that. it makes sense that you actually have to have to behave properly if you're a small group and you have real problems. But so humans, we learn from each other, but we don't only learn from people real time. We also seem to be good at kind of building on what previous people learned. What Is it about our culture that makes it this way, this like cumulative way that we can actually learn from previous generations in the past?
speaker-1: I mean in my I this is to go back to something we were talking about a little earlier. On some views the only way you can do cumulative culture is if you can do something like imitation learning. Where I watch you performance skill and I learn how to perform that skill by watching you. Now I don't think there's any doubt that imitation learning is part of the package. but I think in lots of cases we don't need to learn you know by by imitation. there are I mean especially for the skills involved in in making artifacts in using artifacts and finding animals. we learn, through what I sometimes call hybrid learning, which is a mixture of trial and error experiment, the trial and error experiment which is guided socially and repeatedly guided socially. You know, so you try and get something, to work, you try, and make a handle that sticks to a blade, the blade is you know, is too loose, it keeps falling out. you see how someone else had done it, you have another go. It's still not quite working, but it's working a bit better than it was before. You have another go and you have another go. So you zero in on it by a process of successive approximations. And you can do that, through this mix, of trial and error learning, but trial and error learning. with lots of different forms of social support. so I think socially supported trial and error learning is more important, than the standard literature supposes and imitation learning is somewhat less important than the standard literature supposes.
speaker-0: Okay. Yeah, that's fascinating. So it's not just seeing someone and doing the same. It's it's
speaker-1: Yeah, you get I mean a really important skill I think here is self-assessment is being able to work out, look at what someone else has done, look at what you have done and think, have I succeeded? No, I've failed. How did I fail? What went wrong? You know, and trying again and see and be able to assess whether it improves and in what ways it improves. I think that's a really important, cognitive skill. And I think that cognitive skill was it has been very, very important, in the evolution of cumulative social learning in our lineage.
speaker-0: Huh, fascinating. we inherit a lot from previous generations. so what does that then say about the individual? Like like how much our of let's say our intelligence or what they call it is is really something we inherit culturally or and or how much is like a biological thing? Do you know what I mean?
speaker-1: I I do know what you mean, but I kind of resist giving some kind of proportionality, in an answer. I mean I think I think we've biologically evolved to be able to learn culturally. so I don't think it's sort of it's X or Y, it's X because Y. now, you know, there's a there are different views about exactly what's involved in that biological evolution. So my my friend Cecilia Hayes thinks the main way that that biological evolution has gone is by enhancing our general learning capacities and changing our motivations and attention. So we attend much more, to what other people do, we're motivated by social rewards much more than other animals and we're good at sort of general purpose learning. So that's the kind of view of the biological changes that she would give and I'm pretty sympathetic to that view. But as I said, there are also people who think, you know, that quite specific cognitive adaptations, are involved in this process. So, you know, one obvious possibility is language here. we're so good at cultural learning In part we're so good at cultural learning because we have language. Other animals don't have language or anything like it and language is part of our biological equipment. So that would be a very natural view as to sort of how we've evolved biologically, in order to learn culturally.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So then yeah, as always it's it's never w one or the other, right? It's always
speaker-1: Well, it's not just not one or the other. You know, one thing which is biology has evolved to enhance, our cultural learning and because cultural learning has been so important in our lineage and for so long, you know, we've further evolved biologically to enhance that cultural learning. So on this view there's what's sometimes called gene culture coevolution, for cultural learning.
speaker-0: Fascinating. I'm gonna go back a little again to the social learning, the kids, but maybe also adults. So we are really social learners, but as we said today, at least modern Western societies, it looks quite differently from what maybe we have evolved, like our learning environments, what they looked like in the past. What Do we most misunderstand here today in like the modern Western world about how we learn and develop? But that it doesn't have to be limited to kids. It could also be for us adults too. I mean, we also hopefully still learn and develop even as we're older.
speaker-1: I mean the real answer is I don't know. I mean one thing about humans is, that we show an enormous amount of cognitive and neural plasticity. we are capable, of adapting to an enormous range of environments. The environment that we currently live in is extraordinarily unlike the environment. that most human evolution took place in. yet we cope pretty well. we don't cope perfectly. there are you know, sort of famous diseases of of obesity and things like that. so it's not that we cope perfectly with the novel environment that we've made, but we cope surprisingly well. Think of cars and and driving a car. Think how dangerous that is, how extraordinarily skilled you have to be in order to drive a vehicle at, eighty, ninety, a hundred, a hundred and ten kilometers an hour, often on roads in which other people are doing the same thing. You've gotta be alert and responsive. to the signs of what other drivers are doing. You've got to be alert and responsive to the physical conditions of the road and so on and so forth. Extraordinary tiny number of people get killed doing this. I mean when you think that how utterly unlike that skill is for anything from which, sort of human biological evolution could have prepared us for. You'd expect roads to be slaughterhouses. But I mean in Australia, what? Something like I guess something like a thousand or fifteen hundred people get killed on the road a year. That's pure, compared to the number of people there are on the road, the millions of miles, of people on the road for every fatality. It's extraordinarily low rate. I mean, it's really testament to how extraordinarily adaptable humans are, including it being adaptable to very different environments to the ones in which we evolved. And so I suspect our social learning is like that. It doesn't operate perfectly in these new environments. You do have, we know, sort of alienation of kids in school and dropping out and all of that sort of thing. But still most of the kids who go to school leave school having learnt quite a bit, even though that that kind of learning environment isn't remotely like the learning environments, of human evolutionary history. we're an extraordinarily adaptable creature.
speaker-0: True, true. We really are. that's fascinating and very good. Very lucky that we are.
speaker-1: Yes, we'd be needed otherwise.
speaker-0: That's true. That's true. Well, so when you talked about how children they learn a lot in groups, back historically, what were the role of adults? did kids usually learn from parents or or was it like a much broader sense of you can learn from anyone and adult?
speaker-1: So from what I've read, and there's actually now quite a lot of literature on this, adults are really, really important in the first couple of years. till kids are about three, or four, their parents, basically, who they learn from, especially their mum, but not only their mum. Then from sort of something like four or five, through to twelve ish they tend to spend most of their time with other kids. adults play a role, they eavesdrop on adults, borrow adults' gear, occasionally get advice and stuff like that. But adults then fade a bit into the background, for seven or eight years. And then from about twelve or thirteen on, they basically move into the adult community, and spend time with adults that not necessarily with their parents.
speaker-0: Hmm. Okay. Fascinating. in the beginning a very, very very much parents, but then
speaker-1: It's yeah, it's very parent focused in the beginning and sometimes parent focused again, as adolescents, but by no means necessarily.
speaker-0: Mm, super, I'm gonna look at little at like life today, how would you think about children's learning or how would you set up a good childhood or a good environment for a child to learn in today as as we you live.
speaker-1: I think it would be I mean given the amount that kids have to learn, and given that at least some of the things that they have to learn, you really have to learn in a particular sequence. I mean, the most obvious for that is maths, but there are many other things where a structured sequence is really critical. I don't think you could go back to the kind of child directed learning. of forager societies. But I think it it's and certainly but at at primary school, I think you could make you could go back towards that a bit. you could give kids more choice about what they did when, you know, give them more opportunities to sort of learn collaboratively, with other kids and they're not necessarily the same age. So have it have a bit less age segregation. the forager childhoods are not age segregated in that in that kind of way. there's a fair bit of downward social learning from older kids to younger kids. so I think you could move back a little bit towards that. I don't think you can go all the way or even even close to going all the way. But you could make it a little less pop down. a bit more bottom up, in decision and control.
speaker-0: Hm. And then if if I think like outside of school, so like at home, is that like a little more freedom? Is that like the the important aspect?
speaker-1: Think I that would I mean look I think that would be great but I think it's very hard to go back because you'd have to go back in a coordinated way. there's no fun for a kid to have freedom to be outside and doing what they want to do and stuff like that if they're the only one.
speaker-0: No. No that makes sense. that would be quite boring. Yeah. So you did find
speaker-1: Exactly. They go back inside and go back onto their screen.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. so then the
speaker-1: No, you need to be a bit less risk averse.
speaker-0: I know that's that's
speaker-1: Let them let them play with explosives. You know, I
speaker-0: Oof, oof, I we'll see. Awful, awful, so scary. so then this other aspect then, cooperation that has been like so important to us during all the years. maybe we do this enough today, but maybe not. Maybe we Don't do as much like cooperation as we we could. what is your take on this today?
speaker-1: I mean we still absolutely depend on cooperation. I mean none of us, gathers the resources we need to live by ourselves. I don't gather any of the resources I need to live by myself. and I I suspect you don't either. modern society is completely dependent on cooperation, but of course it's now managed through institutions and stuff like that. And it has to be. the mechanisms that manage cooperation in pre-state societies, they're all scale dependent. None of them would scale up, to the to the social scales of the modern world. institutionally structured cooperations, through corporations, institutions, contracts, markets. that's the only way cooperation could be, structured, is in social environments. of the stars that we live in.
speaker-0: Hm. Yeah, but sure. Okay. So so we do cooperate pretty much. in a in a different way, perhaps.
speaker-1: Yeah, we we in a different yeah, you know, at at at enormous social scales.
speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. For sure. so then if you could give people listening to this one thing they could experiment with in yeah, let's say the the week that's coming now, what would it be? It could be based on anything that we talked about or that you've just learned in in all your work.
speaker-1: Have a try at making a stone tool and learn to yourself just how hard it is and then remember that and respect the enormous amount of skill and knowledge that foragers needed to live, so there's this kind of view, that humans only became smart, and that the dawn of agriculture and settled psych and stuff like that was the shift from kind of primitive ignorance towards sort of knowledge and civilization. Foragers to survive, in the environments that they survived in, they had to be enormously skilled and enormously knowledgeable. So next time you're at the beach and you see a hard piece of rock, try and turn it into A cutting tool and just see how hard it is.
speaker-0: Wow. That and yeah, that that I I think it is very hard, but I am gonna try, absolutely. my daughter's gonna love joining joining that trial. So lastly then, after spending your career thinking about what made humans human, what do you think we most misunderstand about ourselves today?
speaker-1: misunderstanding is is quite right, but but the thing that I find that I like an answer to and don't have an answer to, and don't even see how to get an answer to, is just what are the scopes and limits of human adaptability. We know we're highly adaptable. Almost certainly we're not, there are limits to that adaptability. and it would be very, very interesting to know what those limits are, where they are, how they're structured. and I don't know. and I find it really quite hard to see how to find find out. I mean we know the societies that have survived and we know the societies the sale but but there are so many possible ways of living, that we have no record of, that so we don't know whether they worked or not. The vast majority of human social experiences are completely unrecorded. they've disappeared, into into kind of historical oblivion. so it's very hard to know what what the scope and limits are of human possibility. And I would I'd I would like to know what those scopes scope and limits are, and I don't
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. If you do find out, I would also like to know. So then you'll have to let me know.
speaker-1: I wouldn't hold your breath.
speaker-0: Well, we'll see. We'll see. I have faith in you. Well, thank you so, so much for taking the time to talk to me today. It's been really, really fascinating. Well, and and the lastly, before I let you go here, if people listening to this want to learn more about you and your work, where can they do that?
speaker-1: well that's I mean a fair number of the paper the papers are online, so just go in through Google Scholar, and that. But I've got a kind of synthesizing book coming out in a in a few weeks, called evolution and human uniqueness, coming out with OUP at the beginning of October. so that's that's the latest installment. in my long and fruitless struggle, to understand our own species.
speaker-0: Super, that's super fascinating. I'll when it's out, I can add a link to that so people can find it. well, thank you so much.
Nickilina Herrmann: Before we start, here's a quick note on the audio. This episode is recorded on an Australian landline, yes, an actual old school telephone. So bear with us if the sound of times is less than perfect. Professor Storelney's insights are really worth a listen.
speaker-0: Today I am joined by Professor Kim Sterelny. Kim is a philosopher of science and an evolutionary theorist whose work focuses on one of the biggest questions we can ask about our species. What made humans so unusual? Much of his work explores the evolution of human social learning, cooperation, and cumulative culture, essentially how humans became so extraordinarily good at learning from one another and building on what previous generations discovered. His book, The Evolved Apprentice, develops into the idea that human uniqueness isn't simply the result of suddenly evolving a much more powerful brain. Instead, our remarkable abilities emerge through feedback loops between social learning, cooperation, Ecological challenges and the environments in which children develop. He's also written extensively about cooperation and cultural evolution, including his book The Place to see Social Contract, sorry about the pronunciation, where he explores how increasingly sophisticated cultural learning may have made cooperation both more valuable and more stable. So today we're going to talk about something I think sits quite centrally at the heart of this podcast. How did humans become the kind of creatures who are so dependent on one another for learning? And what might that history tell us about how we should think about childhood, education, cooperation, and life in the modern world? So Kim, welcome to Original Human.
speaker-1: Okay, here I am.
speaker-0: Super. Well, if we're gonna start in the big question, like what what made us as a species so unusual? So let's say if you had to explain to someone who knows very little about human evolution, what and like what makes humans special, where would you start? What would you say?
speaker-1: I guess when it start in Africa, something like two and a half billion years ago, maybe three million years ago. after our ancestors had become bipedal, we're not sure exactly when that happened, and there are different views about why, but our ancestors became bipedal and they started to live in more op open landscapes, less forested landscapes. and that had two consequences. One was it made them more vulnerable. you know, they weren't physically very imposing creatures. as the landscape opened out and as they became more committed to a biopedal life, you know, they were less able to escape, you know, into trees, less able to s to sleep in trees safely. So they became more vulnerable. So that was a one change and another change was an opportunity opened up for them that didn't open up for our relatives who were still living in forested landscapes and that was the opportunity to scavenge woodlands have lots of dead animals in them, you know, no doubt including many of our dead ancestors. but the the good thing about large dead animals is that even when predators and and and other fierce creatures have had their fill, there was still food left. most predators, maybe not even any predators, could open the skulls of large animals, and there's brain material in there which has lots of lots of fat, lots of protein, lots of good stuff. They couldn't open the big leg bones of of big animals. So there was an opportunity for a creature that could learn to use rocks as hammers to break open, you know, those brain cases, break open those long leg bones. And that was a you know both an opportunity and a challenge because to be able to do that successfully, they had to learn to to act together for safety and for cooperation. They had to start to learn how to use stone tools. They had to start to learn to read the landscape a bit better, both for safety and for you know to maximize those opportunities. And once they started to do that, other opportunities opened up. As soon as you start scavenging, once you're starting to scavenge on a regular basis, you can a few innovations away and things get better. So if you can cooperate better, if you can wave sticks looking fierce, start throwing volleys of rocks, you can start scaring away some of the less frightening predators like cheetahs, you know, from their kill and get to it quicker and get more food out of it. You can defend your kill against less scary, you know, scavengers like jackals. and so that's another that's a step forward in cooperation, a step forward, you know, in reading the landscape, a step forward, you know, in in tool use. So the basic if I was talking talking to someone at the pub, I'd say two things happened. One was that they had to learn to cooperate and learn, you know, about one another and the environment to for for protection against predation, once they couldn't sleep in the trees. And another thing that happened was this opportunity opened up for them. And once they started to grasp that opportunity, more opportunities followed.
speaker-0: Hmm, fascinating. So so two parts to it. Both like a a need and and an opportunity. So so where does social learning come into the picture?
speaker-1: Le just about all animals that live together learn socially. You know, because when one animal does something, it creates information for its fellows. So one animal notices a predator and and stares or starts to flee, you know, or goes into alert mode. Others notice it and then notice what where it's looking towards. If one animal notices food and starts to move towards it, other animals will crack it, you know, with the toe. So social learning's really common, you know, learning socially generates useful information for everyone. So that was the basis. But once you know the the process I was talking about earlier, you know, which was, you know, cooperating for defense and cooperating, you know, for scavenging, once that kicks in, the more you know about the environment, the safer you are, the more you know about the environment, the more opportunities there are, to exploit it. so for example, if you're a scavenger, starting to look up matters. Because in if you're in in Africa, and I've been in Africa and and you know, I'm a birder, so I've done this, you look up, you know, and there are vultures and hawks and eagles. And they're on the lookout for carcasses all the time. So, and of course they can see far, far more than you can. So, if a a group of vultures start to trap towards a particular area in the landscape, you know there's something there. and so you learn to re read the landscape, you know, becomes more and more important, as I say, more important both for safety and more important both and for opportunities. And as adults learn to l read the landscape, it's in their interests, you know, for their kids to learn to to read it too. and also if you're acting cooperatively, if if having your fellows around you, is important for defence and safety, if it's important for scaring off other predators, and other scavengers, you've got a stake in their competence and they have a stake in your competence. So sharing information starts to turn into something that's sensible for you to do rather than trying to keep information for yourself, because you need the social support for others, to exploit the resources that are available in the environment and to survive the dangers, the very many dangers there were in those environments. Pleistocene Africa was full of really fucking scary creatures.
speaker-0: I can imagine. Yes. but so then is so all animals are social learners in in some sense. Is is human social learning different from how other animals do it?
speaker-1: there's a massive debate about that. You know, so certainly we learn much more socially than other animals do. On some views, that's because our minds are specially adapted for it. You know, so there's a line of thought which says, you know, we have special cognitive abilities for social learning that other animals don't. There's another line of thought which says, we're in general better at learning, you know, about anything than most animals. That's what part of what our big brain gives us. we're we're attentive to what our fellows do, we're highly motivated to learn, and you know, because of the way human social life is organized, kids have lots and lots and lots of opportunities to learn from from from adults. So on one view, you know, our so on everyone's views human social learning is different. We learn more and we learn more accurately. The big debate is whether that's made possible by special cognitive machines in our head or whether it's made possible by a general upgrade of the kind of cogni cognitive machines most animals have, together with the supportive features of human social environments. I I lean towards the second explanation, but most people, you know, lean towards the first.
speaker-0: Okay, interesting. And why would you lean towards the second rather than the first?
speaker-1: I mean for one thing I think, you know, there is evidence from the ethnography from the study of you know, kids and kids learning in forager environments, which really bring out just how many opportunities to learn those kids have. You know, they learn together. in sort of collaborative and cooperative ways. Parents, other adults are very tolerant, about kids borrowing their stuff, looking at what they do, eaves eavesdropping on them, experimenting, with tools and s and stuff like that. So I think if you look at at what, you know, forage forager kids do, you see a an an environment which is very richly supported for social learning.
speaker-0: Hmm, fascinating. and that kind of I guess this ties into because you have a book titled The Evolved Apprentice.
speaker-1: I do indeed.
speaker-0: Yeah, and this title, Evolved Apprentice, does to me, I I would guess it it goes in this direction, right? But what the what does the title mean? What what what does it mean?
speaker-1: emphasizes you know the way that human social environments are adapted to support kids learning. on one view what's adapted to support kids learning is what's in their head and on another view it's what's outside their head. Now of course both could be true, you know, and to some degree no doubt both are true. but I wrote the Evolved Apprentice in part because I thought the way that environments are adapted to support human social learning was a bit understated and a bit understudied in the literature. So I wanted to emphasize the external supports for learning and somewhat de emphasize the idea that our social learning depended on our fancy internal machine and say, well look And we d we do have a fancy internal machine, but that fancy internal machine only works as well as it does because of the way that human social environments are structured to support learning.
speaker-0: Mm, absolutely. And then for I mean, I am a mom, so I'm really curious about this. What makes up a good environment for for children to learn in?
speaker-1: Well, I mean it's a really striking contrast between the way that forager kids learn and education in advanced Western societies. Forager kids learn in company with one another, in a mixed age group and a mixed gender group. They have an enormous amount of freedom, you know, in what they do and when they do it. so learning for them is it's collaborative. It's kid directed rather than adult directed. The kids have a lot of choice about who they learn from and how they learn and and when they learn. they're very motivated. there's not a lot of alienation, from educational in institutions in in forager society. it is not at all risk averse. I mean forager kids are allowed to do things and routinely allowed to do things which would have you arrested, and your kids taken away in Western societies. So it it it's a risky way of learning, but it's very kid directed, it's very effective, it's low cost, because the par parents don't have to supervise and micromanage their kids. so so I think there's a tremendous the interesting difference between the way social learning happens in forager societies and the way it happens in sedentary societies and especially in w in Western societies.
speaker-0: Yeah, it sounds sounds like there are quite some contrasts.
speaker-1: There is certainly a contra I mean the the the riskiness of it is really dramatic. so there's a very, you know, nice paper by a guy called Block from Memory, on kind of how long does it take, for foragers to learn, and his his his paper is on fishing, and acquiring fishing skills on the old Wango River, in Botswana. Well I've I've been on that river. it is full of Nile crocodiles. it's full of hippos. The river, you know, goes through kind of, steep, yeah, grasslands, so it's very hard to see where the the grass banks end and the river begins. so it's actually a really, really dangerous environment for five and six and seven year old kids. But five and six and seven year old kids go out in company with one another, you know, and learn learn to fish there. mean it is it is a strikingly, risk tolerant education system. Very, very different from what we have, where I mean I teach, a course on at at university level, on human evolution. I would have loved I have a friend who's a stone knapper, makes makes stone tools. I would love to have got him into, give the kids a hands on sort of education on how difficult it is to make stone tools. The number of forms I would have had to fill out, the number of risk assessment, and health and safety, regulations that would have to be negotiated to do something like that made it so daunting that I've never done it. You know, so the the Western education is this sort of absurdly risk sensitive stuff. forager education is very different.
speaker-0: Yeah, really. And what a shame that you didn't I that would have been so cool. It is
speaker-1: It's shame. The kid I mean is I mean I I haven't done it much. I've had a couple of lessons. It's great fun, you know, but it also brings home to you just how skilled stone napping is.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm.
speaker-1: You don't you you don't make, you know, sharp, you know, stone tools by randomly banging one rock against another.
speaker-0: No, no. I can imagine that. Okay, so childhood sounds really central to to kind of this whole learning and evolving.
speaker-1: Yes, I think I I think it is central. I mean that's not to say that adults don't learn and they don't learn from one another. I'm sure they do. and I'm sure that's important. There have been a few case studies, of innovations in the lives of non Western people, and adults pick up innovations too. But yeah, look, I mean the central engine of social learning, is the reliability with which kids pick up, the informational resources of the adult generation. And human social life wouldn't have survived without that being a highly reliable process.
speaker-0: Hmm. Fascinating. you've written about the way that children's learning environments themselves became more organised and enriched. What what does that actually mean?
speaker-1: I think it means a couple of things. I mean one is of course over over evolutionary time, childhood lasted longer. You know, so you know, if you I there's a lot of assumptions and and complexities in trying to recover the life history of erectus grade humans and and Heidelbergensis grade grade humans. And it's pretty clear, you know, that their childhoods were longer, you know, than than great ape childhoods, but not as long, you know, as the childhoods and juvenile periods of humans. So one one difference over evolutionary time is simply the amount of time kids had, you know, available to acquire adult skills. And that in turn is only made possible by adults being, you know, efficient providers of resources. So there's a kind of coevolution, you know, between the efficiency of adult, you know, sort of foraging and resource acquisition and the lengthening of human childhood and the human juvenile period and hence the human kind of educational period. So that's that's you know, one factor. Another factor is the gradual enrichment of the technical repertoire of our ancestors because one thing one way kids educate themselves is simply by borrowing, you know, gear, experimenting with it, seeing what works and what doesn't, trying to duplicate it themselves by using adult tools or templates for trying to make their own tools. So as as the you know, as the technological, you know, environment became richer, kids' learning opportunities became richer. Another thing which I think must have been important, it's very hard to date, but must have been important, was theaters becoming scared of humans. You couldn't have had the kind of relaxed, hands off attitude, you know, that foragers have, you know, towards kids roaming around in the bush by themselves. You know, if predators still routinely regarded humans as food, it would have been too dangerous for kids to be out and about by themselves. Yet, you know, the ethnographic record is pretty clear that very often they are out and about by themselves. So becoming dominant, you know, in the predator niche and having, you know, reducing the number of other predators and those that were still around, avoiding people. rather than regarding them as food, that must have been important. As I say, very hard to tell when that happened. It must have been important. and other things were were kind of the in changes I mean at some stage humans became incredibly socially tolerant of their young. I mean if you look at great apes, you know, chimps and bonobos, they're fairly tolerant, of the young, but mostly only of the very young. juveniles have to kind of steer well clear, you know, of of adult males. Whereas in human social life in forager communities and many other communities, you know, adults are really tolerant, you know, of juveniles hanging around, asking questions, looking at what they do. getting in the way often, you know, so social tolerance, you know, was a im important part of it as well.
speaker-0: Yeah, I c I can imagine. So yeah, but tolerance is I don't know. I'm probably way too intolerant sometimes, but I can imagine it's important. But then so when I hear you, it sounds like a lot of the the the learning that children do is very self directed. is is that true or or did actually or did
speaker-1: Yes, I I think I think it's very self directed. Not always there are you know, I mean especially for sacred knowledge and things like that. so in Australian Aboriginal communities there is or at least there was, I mean it's basically gone now, but at one stage there was fairly serious and quite focused teaching, you know, of origin myths and sacred and arcane knowledge. And I think there's evidence of the same thing in many other forager communities. I think you know there's the teaching of sort of social norms and social law and stuff like that. That was probably in many forager communities that's more top down. You know, so and insisted upon by the adult. But a lot of the what you might think of as the utilitarian skills, you know, how to survive in the landscape, how to make things, how to find things, you know, what's found where. A lot of that, you know, is very was very self directed, though typically self directed, you know, in groups, you know, collaboratively rather than as individual children.
speaker-0: Hmm, fascinating. Do you think that? I mean, of course, let's say modern Western sedentary lives today are very different from the the foraging groups and the way they live. But still, do you think like parents today would because I think I'm probably not the only one who thinks a lot about teaching. Like, what do I want my children to learn? What do I want them to know? Do we think about that too much? Could could I s back off a little and let my kids like do you think it could like even today in the modern world be more self directed, like kids learning?
speaker-1: it's an interesting day. I mean, I grew up a long fucking time ago, but not in the Pleistocene. and at least outside the formal educational hours, I was much freer than kids are now to roam around by myself, you know, and to live in a self-directed way. I when I was at primary school, you know, my parents had a small poultry farm, and next to that poultry farm was, you know, a lot of bush and a lot of forest. And I was allowed, you know, from the age of eight or nine to go exploring, you know, in in that bush country by myself. That w would not be regarded as okay anymore. So I think there's room, you know, in the modern world for at least outside the educational institutions of you know, the of school and stuff like that, you know, for a a somewhat more hands off attitude towards kids. But it I mean the thing is It's very hard to do that one by one as individual parents. Walking home and in the streets and stuff like that because there were kids. a single kid walking around in the streets, you know, is vulnerable in a way that a pack of kids is not. so I think it's so I think it's very hard for an individual parent to think, you know what, you know, I think we should back off a l a bit, let you know, let Junior walk home from school by himself. If he wants to go down to the park by himself, then go down to the park by himself. Because, you know, he or she will be by himself too much. And what made this both safe and enjoyable was the fact that there were kids, not a kid, doing this sort of thing. So I think it's very hard to go back.
speaker-0: Yeah, you're probably right. You're probably right. And we shouldn't, maybe today. It's a different, different time and place, maybe. but so another topic that you write a lot about is cooperation and its relation to to intelligence. so did we as humans become more intelligent because we just got better at thinking or is it because we got better at learning from one another, cooperating? Like how how do the two relate? Cooperation, intelligence, what is the the relationship there?
speaker-1: I mean I mean my general picture in all of these things is sort of incremental feedback. You know, so go back to what I you know my my fable, you know, of the Pisces in Woodlands, those early humans simultaneously, you know, under selection for material cooperation in chasing humanity. Predators and scavengers from prey, they're under selection for learning from one another, they're under some selection for communicating and coordinating, so that they can go collectively to places where they're more likely to find resources, they're under selection, you know, to learn from from one another. So I think all of these things are happening at once. incrementally. So I don't think, you know, I kind of try and avoid a picture which says what really mattered was cooperation over material resources and that therefore selected the X, Y, and Z. I don't think there's a sort of a master variable here, as some theorists would put it. I think what happened was small incremental changes, each of which you know, linked to other small incremental changes in cycles of positive feedback.
speaker-0: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. But so then and that's there's also this other concept about learning, that's cultural learning. How how would you explain cultural learning to someone who doesn't know it?
speaker-1: I don't I some people draw a distinction between social learning and cultural learning. I don't I I use the terms interchangeably. But the people who do use the you know the term cultural learning to mean something different from social learning typically mean, you know, a form of social learning that depends on language, that depends on active support, by the more knowledgeable for the less knowledgeable. So actor support can be teaching, you know, it can be advice, it can be, you know, providing material resources, it can be providing feedback, you know, of the no, you're doing it wrong. so there's a tradition of using cultural learning as a term for fancier forms of social learning.
speaker-0: okay, I see. So yeah, okay, so a little a little a little faster a little.
speaker-1: Same. I d I just use social learning and cultural learning interchangeably.
speaker-0: Super. Okay, then then then I got it. Then I got it. so how does cooperation and social learning kind of interact? Does does social learning be better that makes cooperation easier or what what is the
speaker-1: I think I think it I think it i inter interacts to both ways basically. I mean so the more the more you know, the more opportunities for material cooperation there are. You know, so the more you the more you know about your environment and the more you know about its, you know, the landscape and its resources and the capacities, you know, and foibles, you know, of those that you're with. you know, the more opportunities there are for successful cooperation, you know, over material things. the more successful material cooperation is, the better you can support social learning. You can support social learning, in the younger generation, but you also make time for yourself, you know, for experiment and play. So Innovation often requires a certain amount of slack or surplus in the resource budget. If if you're spending every available minute just getting enough to stay alive, you know, and for your kids to stay alive, you're not gonna have time, you know, for experiment, for play, for seeing whether a certain idea might work. You're not gonna have time to, you know, explore the properties of a rock, you know, that looks interesting. and maybe might nap better, but y you know, you just don't have time. whereas if material cooperation eases the resource budget and hence eases the time budget, it gives not just the next generation more time and space in which to learn, it gives the adult generation more time and space in which to sort of innovate and experiment.
speaker-0: That is so true. And still today. Still today, right? That's really I have not thought of it like that, that corporation
speaker-1: R and D is expensive. It it costs. You know, you know, it costs now and it's always costed. You know, so you've got to be able to afford it.
speaker-0: That's true. That's true. In what sense would you say that that that it costs? Like like what does it cost?
speaker-1: It at a minimum it costs time.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: You know, in most cases it'll do more than costing time, it'll require some energetic input, there might be some risks involved, but at a minimum it requires time.
speaker-0: That is true. But that's also what you get out in the end, right? So so but it has this like kind of investment.
speaker-1: You've got to invest it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean very few ideas work perfectly the first time.
speaker-0: That's true. That is absolutely true. something I found quite nice if I interpret your work correctly, but that is you don't seem to somehow it seems like to you, like this whole kind of dark, bad side of humanity, like deception, manipulation, that doesn't seem to be the reason for why we are intelligent when when I if I interpret your work correctly. Or how do you see this? Are we are we bad or or is there another
speaker-1: I do my best to avoid moralizing. but I I there is a sort of line on human evolution, you know, called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, where the basic idea is that we got smart, you know, partly to protect ourselves from being exploited by others and partly to when possible exploiting others. Now there's really some element of truth in that, you know. people will, lie, cheat and steal. they will bludge if they can get away with it, they'll take more than they can say their fair share if they can get away with it. So it's certainly part of the human cooperation story, you know, that we had to develop. social and cognitive mechanisms to limit the amount of damage, you know, that kind of selfish, you know, behavior causes. But I do think, that's been oversold, as part of the kind of explanation of human intelligence. I I mean one way I like to put it is look, imagine, Social life as a forager, you know, and life as a forager is like going on a camping trip with a bunch of people where all the gear's been left behind, all the s most of the food's been left behind and the camping trip lasts forever. under circumstances like that it it doesn't take people very long to find out, you know, who's selfish and who's not, who makes the best of things and who who doesn't, who is the person who's reliable, you know. keeps their cool and who doesn't. The so the cognitive problem of tracking people who are lazy, people who are greedy, that's actually in the intimate kind of social world to our past, you know, that wasn't a big problem. Doing something about it might have been a big problem, but but identifying, you know, the bludges and the bullies, you know, that wasn't a big problem. I mean it is a big problem in modern societies because people can be anonymous and they can hide their past. But, you know, in the intimate societies of our past, that wasn't a big problem. What was a big problem, what was genuinely cognitively difficult, was actually, you know, successfully collectively generating the resources people needed to live. I mean for millions of years, you know, humans have depended on kind of high quality food and high quality resources. they've depended, you know, on on game, on fish, and on plant foods, high end plant foods. Well fish don't like being caught, animals don't like being eaten, and apart from you know their fruit, plants don't like being exploited. So Learning how to find those things, how to process them, how to get them safely. All of that was really hard. I mean even finding water, you know, in many human environments, is really seriously challenging cognitively. So there's a an Australian a famous, you know, sort of Australian exploring expedition was an expedition by Edmund Eyre, who did the first white person overland trip from Adelaide, which is, you know, sort of in South Australia, west, to Albany, which is in, Western Australia, it's about a couple of thousand kilometers. of that couple of thousand kilometers, for about fifteen hundred kilometers, there was no surface water whatsoever. all the water had to be found underground in native wells and stuff like that. That's incredibly challenging place to live. Yet, indigenous Australians lived in those environments and the only reason why air was able to get from the east to the west was he was good enough bushman to be able to recognize the Aboriginal tracks and follow them to the to the native wells and excavate those wells to get enough water for him and his one companion, to survive. These are very, very challenging environments. Yet people have lived, in arid and semi arid environments for at least tens of thousands of years and probably hundreds of thousands of years. that's why we were under selection to be smart, individually and collectively to cope with very challenging environments. It wasn't that hard to work out, you know, who was an idle bastard, you know, and who was a greedy bastard. It was very hard to work out where in an arid landscape you might be able to sink a well and get water. That's hard.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. I like that. it makes sense that you actually have to have to behave properly if you're a small group and you have real problems. But so humans, we learn from each other, but we don't only learn from people real time. We also seem to be good at kind of building on what previous people learned. What Is it about our culture that makes it this way, this like cumulative way that we can actually learn from previous generations in the past?
speaker-1: I mean in my I this is to go back to something we were talking about a little earlier. On some views the only way you can do cumulative culture is if you can do something like imitation learning. Where I watch you performance skill and I learn how to perform that skill by watching you. Now I don't think there's any doubt that imitation learning is part of the package. but I think in lots of cases we don't need to learn you know by by imitation. there are I mean especially for the skills involved in in making artifacts in using artifacts and finding animals. we learn, through what I sometimes call hybrid learning, which is a mixture of trial and error experiment, the trial and error experiment which is guided socially and repeatedly guided socially. You know, so you try and get something, to work, you try, and make a handle that sticks to a blade, the blade is you know, is too loose, it keeps falling out. you see how someone else had done it, you have another go. It's still not quite working, but it's working a bit better than it was before. You have another go and you have another go. So you zero in on it by a process of successive approximations. And you can do that, through this mix, of trial and error learning, but trial and error learning. with lots of different forms of social support. so I think socially supported trial and error learning is more important, than the standard literature supposes and imitation learning is somewhat less important than the standard literature supposes.
speaker-0: Okay. Yeah, that's fascinating. So it's not just seeing someone and doing the same. It's it's
speaker-1: Yeah, you get I mean a really important skill I think here is self-assessment is being able to work out, look at what someone else has done, look at what you have done and think, have I succeeded? No, I've failed. How did I fail? What went wrong? You know, and trying again and see and be able to assess whether it improves and in what ways it improves. I think that's a really important, cognitive skill. And I think that cognitive skill was it has been very, very important, in the evolution of cumulative social learning in our lineage.
speaker-0: Huh, fascinating. we inherit a lot from previous generations. so what does that then say about the individual? Like like how much our of let's say our intelligence or what they call it is is really something we inherit culturally or and or how much is like a biological thing? Do you know what I mean?
speaker-1: I I do know what you mean, but I kind of resist giving some kind of proportionality, in an answer. I mean I think I think we've biologically evolved to be able to learn culturally. so I don't think it's sort of it's X or Y, it's X because Y. now, you know, there's a there are different views about exactly what's involved in that biological evolution. So my my friend Cecilia Hayes thinks the main way that that biological evolution has gone is by enhancing our general learning capacities and changing our motivations and attention. So we attend much more, to what other people do, we're motivated by social rewards much more than other animals and we're good at sort of general purpose learning. So that's the kind of view of the biological changes that she would give and I'm pretty sympathetic to that view. But as I said, there are also people who think, you know, that quite specific cognitive adaptations, are involved in this process. So, you know, one obvious possibility is language here. we're so good at cultural learning In part we're so good at cultural learning because we have language. Other animals don't have language or anything like it and language is part of our biological equipment. So that would be a very natural view as to sort of how we've evolved biologically, in order to learn culturally.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So then yeah, as always it's it's never w one or the other, right? It's always
speaker-1: Well, it's not just not one or the other. You know, one thing which is biology has evolved to enhance, our cultural learning and because cultural learning has been so important in our lineage and for so long, you know, we've further evolved biologically to enhance that cultural learning. So on this view there's what's sometimes called gene culture coevolution, for cultural learning.
speaker-0: Fascinating. I'm gonna go back a little again to the social learning, the kids, but maybe also adults. So we are really social learners, but as we said today, at least modern Western societies, it looks quite differently from what maybe we have evolved, like our learning environments, what they looked like in the past. What Do we most misunderstand here today in like the modern Western world about how we learn and develop? But that it doesn't have to be limited to kids. It could also be for us adults too. I mean, we also hopefully still learn and develop even as we're older.
speaker-1: I mean the real answer is I don't know. I mean one thing about humans is, that we show an enormous amount of cognitive and neural plasticity. we are capable, of adapting to an enormous range of environments. The environment that we currently live in is extraordinarily unlike the environment. that most human evolution took place in. yet we cope pretty well. we don't cope perfectly. there are you know, sort of famous diseases of of obesity and things like that. so it's not that we cope perfectly with the novel environment that we've made, but we cope surprisingly well. Think of cars and and driving a car. Think how dangerous that is, how extraordinarily skilled you have to be in order to drive a vehicle at, eighty, ninety, a hundred, a hundred and ten kilometers an hour, often on roads in which other people are doing the same thing. You've gotta be alert and responsive. to the signs of what other drivers are doing. You've got to be alert and responsive to the physical conditions of the road and so on and so forth. Extraordinary tiny number of people get killed doing this. I mean when you think that how utterly unlike that skill is for anything from which, sort of human biological evolution could have prepared us for. You'd expect roads to be slaughterhouses. But I mean in Australia, what? Something like I guess something like a thousand or fifteen hundred people get killed on the road a year. That's pure, compared to the number of people there are on the road, the millions of miles, of people on the road for every fatality. It's extraordinarily low rate. I mean, it's really testament to how extraordinarily adaptable humans are, including it being adaptable to very different environments to the ones in which we evolved. And so I suspect our social learning is like that. It doesn't operate perfectly in these new environments. You do have, we know, sort of alienation of kids in school and dropping out and all of that sort of thing. But still most of the kids who go to school leave school having learnt quite a bit, even though that that kind of learning environment isn't remotely like the learning environments, of human evolutionary history. we're an extraordinarily adaptable creature.
speaker-0: True, true. We really are. that's fascinating and very good. Very lucky that we are.
speaker-1: Yes, we'd be needed otherwise.
speaker-0: That's true. That's true. Well, so when you talked about how children they learn a lot in groups, back historically, what were the role of adults? did kids usually learn from parents or or was it like a much broader sense of you can learn from anyone and adult?
speaker-1: So from what I've read, and there's actually now quite a lot of literature on this, adults are really, really important in the first couple of years. till kids are about three, or four, their parents, basically, who they learn from, especially their mum, but not only their mum. Then from sort of something like four or five, through to twelve ish they tend to spend most of their time with other kids. adults play a role, they eavesdrop on adults, borrow adults' gear, occasionally get advice and stuff like that. But adults then fade a bit into the background, for seven or eight years. And then from about twelve or thirteen on, they basically move into the adult community, and spend time with adults that not necessarily with their parents.
speaker-0: Hmm. Okay. Fascinating. in the beginning a very, very very much parents, but then
speaker-1: It's yeah, it's very parent focused in the beginning and sometimes parent focused again, as adolescents, but by no means necessarily.
speaker-0: Mm, super, I'm gonna look at little at like life today, how would you think about children's learning or how would you set up a good childhood or a good environment for a child to learn in today as as we you live.
speaker-1: I think it would be I mean given the amount that kids have to learn, and given that at least some of the things that they have to learn, you really have to learn in a particular sequence. I mean, the most obvious for that is maths, but there are many other things where a structured sequence is really critical. I don't think you could go back to the kind of child directed learning. of forager societies. But I think it it's and certainly but at at primary school, I think you could make you could go back towards that a bit. you could give kids more choice about what they did when, you know, give them more opportunities to sort of learn collaboratively, with other kids and they're not necessarily the same age. So have it have a bit less age segregation. the forager childhoods are not age segregated in that in that kind of way. there's a fair bit of downward social learning from older kids to younger kids. so I think you could move back a little bit towards that. I don't think you can go all the way or even even close to going all the way. But you could make it a little less pop down. a bit more bottom up, in decision and control.
speaker-0: Hm. And then if if I think like outside of school, so like at home, is that like a little more freedom? Is that like the the important aspect?
speaker-1: Think I that would I mean look I think that would be great but I think it's very hard to go back because you'd have to go back in a coordinated way. there's no fun for a kid to have freedom to be outside and doing what they want to do and stuff like that if they're the only one.
speaker-0: No. No that makes sense. that would be quite boring. Yeah. So you did find
speaker-1: Exactly. They go back inside and go back onto their screen.
speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. so then the
speaker-1: No, you need to be a bit less risk averse.
speaker-0: I know that's that's
speaker-1: Let them let them play with explosives. You know, I
speaker-0: Oof, oof, I we'll see. Awful, awful, so scary. so then this other aspect then, cooperation that has been like so important to us during all the years. maybe we do this enough today, but maybe not. Maybe we Don't do as much like cooperation as we we could. what is your take on this today?
speaker-1: I mean we still absolutely depend on cooperation. I mean none of us, gathers the resources we need to live by ourselves. I don't gather any of the resources I need to live by myself. and I I suspect you don't either. modern society is completely dependent on cooperation, but of course it's now managed through institutions and stuff like that. And it has to be. the mechanisms that manage cooperation in pre-state societies, they're all scale dependent. None of them would scale up, to the to the social scales of the modern world. institutionally structured cooperations, through corporations, institutions, contracts, markets. that's the only way cooperation could be, structured, is in social environments. of the stars that we live in.
speaker-0: Hm. Yeah, but sure. Okay. So so we do cooperate pretty much. in a in a different way, perhaps.
speaker-1: Yeah, we we in a different yeah, you know, at at at enormous social scales.
speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. For sure. so then if you could give people listening to this one thing they could experiment with in yeah, let's say the the week that's coming now, what would it be? It could be based on anything that we talked about or that you've just learned in in all your work.
speaker-1: Have a try at making a stone tool and learn to yourself just how hard it is and then remember that and respect the enormous amount of skill and knowledge that foragers needed to live, so there's this kind of view, that humans only became smart, and that the dawn of agriculture and settled psych and stuff like that was the shift from kind of primitive ignorance towards sort of knowledge and civilization. Foragers to survive, in the environments that they survived in, they had to be enormously skilled and enormously knowledgeable. So next time you're at the beach and you see a hard piece of rock, try and turn it into A cutting tool and just see how hard it is.
speaker-0: Wow. That and yeah, that that I I think it is very hard, but I am gonna try, absolutely. my daughter's gonna love joining joining that trial. So lastly then, after spending your career thinking about what made humans human, what do you think we most misunderstand about ourselves today?
speaker-1: misunderstanding is is quite right, but but the thing that I find that I like an answer to and don't have an answer to, and don't even see how to get an answer to, is just what are the scopes and limits of human adaptability. We know we're highly adaptable. Almost certainly we're not, there are limits to that adaptability. and it would be very, very interesting to know what those limits are, where they are, how they're structured. and I don't know. and I find it really quite hard to see how to find find out. I mean we know the societies that have survived and we know the societies the sale but but there are so many possible ways of living, that we have no record of, that so we don't know whether they worked or not. The vast majority of human social experiences are completely unrecorded. they've disappeared, into into kind of historical oblivion. so it's very hard to know what what the scope and limits are of human possibility. And I would I'd I would like to know what those scopes scope and limits are, and I don't
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. If you do find out, I would also like to know. So then you'll have to let me know.
speaker-1: I wouldn't hold your breath.
speaker-0: Well, we'll see. We'll see. I have faith in you. Well, thank you so, so much for taking the time to talk to me today. It's been really, really fascinating. Well, and and the lastly, before I let you go here, if people listening to this want to learn more about you and your work, where can they do that?
speaker-1: well that's I mean a fair number of the paper the papers are online, so just go in through Google Scholar, and that. But I've got a kind of synthesizing book coming out in a in a few weeks, called evolution and human uniqueness, coming out with OUP at the beginning of October. so that's that's the latest installment. in my long and fruitless struggle, to understand our own species.
speaker-0: Super, that's super fascinating. I'll when it's out, I can add a link to that so people can find it. well, thank you so much.
