One type of evolutionary mistake can be thought of as an evolutionary “hangover,” where we are plagued by behaviors and drives that were once adaptive, but are no longer. Our desire for Twinkies is a classic example of an evolutionary hangover. Junk food is appealing because evolution built us to like sugar and fat. This was a sensible strategy for our ancestors, hunter-gatherers haunted by the constant specter of hunger and starvation. It goes seriously off the rails, however, in modern environments, where most people have easy access to cheap sweets, carbs, and processed meats, sometimes helpfully delivered in a single, heart attack–inducing package. Evolution can also be subverted by “hijacks.” These are cases where we’ve figured out an illicit way to tap into a pleasure system originally designed to reward other, more adaptive behavior. Masturbation is an exemplary hijack. Orgasms are meant to reward us for having reproductive sex, thereby helping our genes get into the next generation. We can, however, trick our bodies into giving us that same reward in any number of entirely, wildly non-reproductive ways. (Location 109)
Alcohol is also something evolution could afford to ignore, at least until relatively recently. This is because alcohol, like sugar, occurs only in small quantities in the natural world. It takes some serious work to get a buzz off naturally fermenting fruit. It is only with the advent of agriculture and organized, large-scale fermentation—maybe 9,000 years ago, a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms—that serious booze became available to lots of people, pushing susceptible humans onto the slippery slide to widespread drunkenness, lost weekends, and ruined livers. (Location 126)
evolución cita nicho_ecológico homo_sapiens alcohol adaptación
From an evolutionary perspective, the use of certain drugs makes sense. Coffee, nicotine, and other stimulants are basically performance enhancers, allowing us to pursue our normal evolutionary goals with an extra spring in our step, our motor functions unimpaired, and our grip on reality firm.1 It is the use of intoxicants, primarily alcohol, that is truly puzzling. (Location 145)
Given the potentially enormous costs, and apparent lack of benefits, to impairing our cognitive control, why do humans still like to get intoxicated? (Location 156)
alcohol evolución costo pregunta cita
Among traditional societies, if there is something in the biome that has psychoactive properties, you can be sure that the locals have been using it for millennia. More often than not, it tastes horrible and has vicious side effects. For instance, ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew made from Amazonian vines, is painfully bitter and quickly brings on brutal diarrhea and vomiting. In some South American cultures, people go so far as to lick poisonous toads. All over the world, wherever you find people, you find them doing disgusting things, incurring incredible costs, and expending ridiculous amounts of resources and effort for the sole purpose of getting high.2 (Location 167)
At sites in eastern Turkey, dating to perhaps 12,000 years ago, the remains of what appear to be brewing vats, combined with images of festivals and dancing, suggest that people were gathering in groups, fermenting grain or grapes, playing music, and then getting truly hammered before we’d even figured out agriculture. In fact, archaeologists have begun to suggest that various forms of alcohol were not merely a by-product of the invention of agriculture, but actually a motivation for it—that the first farmers were driven by a desire for beer, not bread. It is no accident that the earliest human archaeological finds from around the world always include huge numbers of specialized, elaborate vessels used solely for the production and consumption of beer and wine. (Location 176)
Fermentación previa a la agricultura.
cita cultura homo_sapiens alcohol favorite agricultura
The ancient Aryans, who sometime between 1600 and 1200 BCE moved from the steppes of Central Asia into the Indian subcontinent, built their religious system around a mysterious intoxicant called “soma.” Scholarly debate continues to rage about what soma actually was—the current dominant theory is that it was a liquid made from the fly agaric hallucinogenic mushroom7—but it clearly packed a punch. (Location 186)
Once we begin to think deeply and systematically about the antiquity, ubiquity, and power of our taste for intoxicants, the standard stories suggesting it’s some sort of evolutionary accident become difficult to take seriously. Considering the enormous costs of intoxication, which humans have been paying for many thousands of years, we would expect genetic evolution to work toward eliminating any accidental taste for alcohol from our motivational system as quickly as possible. (Location 203)
Without understanding the evolutionary dynamics of intoxicant use, we cannot even begin to think clearly or effectively about the role intoxicants can and should play in our lives today. (Location 208)
I draw on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, poetry, and genetics to provide a rigorous, scientifically grounded explanation for our drive to get drunk. My central argument is that getting drunk, high, or otherwise cognitively altered must have, over evolutionary time, helped individuals to survive and flourish, and cultures to endure and expand. When it comes to intoxication, the mistake story cannot be correct. There are very good evolutionary reasons why we get drunk.10 What this means is that most of what we think we know about intoxication is wrong, incoherent, incomplete, or all of the above. (Location 214)
This book argues that, far from being an evolutionary mistake, chemical intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. The desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We could not have civilization without intoxication. (Location 231)
alcohol función cita evolución
This leads to a second point. The fact that drinking facilitates social bonding may not sound like a world-shaking revelation. Without an understanding of the specific cooperation problems that confront humans in civilization, however, we have no way of explaining why, throughout history and across the world, alcohol and similar substances have been the almost universal go-to solution. Why bond over a toxic, organ-destroying, mind-numbing chemical when a rousing game of Parcheesi might suffice? Without an answer to this question, we have no way to intelligently weigh arguments for or against replacing after-work pub sessions with escape room competitions or laser tag outings. Many of us deliberately seek out a glass or two of wine to relax after a hard day at work. Would an afternoon bike ride work just as well? How about fifteen minutes of meditation? None of these questions can be answered without an understanding of the relevant biochemistry, genetics, and neuroscience. (Location 234)
Although other forms of intoxication play a role in this story, there are good reasons for focusing primarily on alcohol in particular. Alcohol is the unchallenged king of intoxicants. It can be found almost anywhere people can. If you tasked a cultural engineering team with designing a substance that would satisfy specs aimed at maximizing individual creativity and group cooperation, they would come up with something very much like alcohol. A simple molecule. Easy to make out of almost any carbohydrate. Easy to consume. Storable. Precisely doseable. Complex but predictable and moderate cognitive effects. Quickly eliminated from the body. Easily influenced by social norms. Can be packaged in a tasty delivery system. Pairs nicely with food. Whatever the benefits and functions of cannabis, soma, or dance-induced ecstasy, none of these intoxication technologies display this full range of features, and most also have significantly greater downsides. It’s challenging to negotiate a treaty while high on mushrooms; the cognitive effects of cannabis show a high degree of variability between people; and dancing all night without food or sleep makes it really hard to show up for work in the morning. A two-cocktail hangover is, in contrast, a relatively minor burden to bear. This is why alcohol tends to displace other intoxicants when introduced into a new cultural environment, and has gradually become “the world’s most popular drug.”12 (Location 251)
understanding the evolutionary rationales for our drive to get high will help to inform conversations where we have hitherto—in our scientific and anthropological ignorance—been flying blind. (Location 264)
History can tell us when and with what we have gotten drunk. But it is only when we couple history with science that we can finally begin to understand not only why we desire to get drunk in the first place, but also how it might actually be good for us to tie one on now and then. (Location 280)
Chapter One Why Do We Get Drunk?
Images of imbibing and partying dominate the early archaeological record as much as they do twenty-first-century Instagram. A 20,000-year-old carving from southwestern France, for instance, shows a woman, possibly a fertility goddess, holding a horn to her mouth. (Location 289)
alcohol función homo_sapiens evolución cita favorite
The earliest direct evidence of alcoholic beverages deliberately being produced by human beings dates from around 7000 BCE in the Yellow River Valley of China, (Location 293)
and by 4000 BCE wine production had become a major collective undertaking. A huge cave site in Armenia apparently served as an ancient, full-scale winery, with basins for grape-stomping and pressing, fermentation vats, storage jars and drinking vessels.6 (Location 300)
Peyote buttons and mescaline-containing beans carbon-dated to 3700 BCE have been found in human cave dwellings in northeast Mexico.10 Enormous stone carvings with human faces or animals incorporated into images of psilocybin mushrooms, and ceramics depicting mescaline cacti atop shamanistic animals, like jaguars, date back as far as 3000 BCE, suggesting that hallucinogens have long played a central role in religious rituals throughout Central and South America.11 (Location 317)
kava has been cultivated by humans for so long that it can no longer reproduce on its own.14 (Location 328)
kava induces a contented and sociable state of mind, providing a more mellow high than alcohol. (Location 331)
we would be remiss in failing to mention cannabis, which is native to central Asia. Humans in Eurasia appear to have been lighting up and tuning out for at least 8,000 years, with cannabis becoming a widely traded and consumed ritual and recreational drug by 2000 BCE.15 (Location 331)
It is significant that in North America, one of the few places on the globe where native populations did not produce and use alcohol, there existed instead a highly elaborate system of tobacco cultivation and regional trade, with archaeologically recovered pipes dating back to somewhere between 3000 and 1000 BCE.18 (Location 343)
Opium is another drug that has been enjoyed by humans since our distant ancestors first figured out what it could do to their brains. Remains in Britain and Europe suggest that people were consuming opium poppies as long as 30,000 years ago,20 (Location 348)
So, people have been getting intoxicated—drunk, stoned, or lit up with psychedelics—for a really long time, all over the world. There is no shortage of entertaining books documenting our species’ taste for intoxicants, as well as the wildly diverse ways in which we have pursued our desire for altered states.22 As the alternative medicine guru Andrew Weil observes, “The ubiquity of drug use is so striking that it must represent a basic human appetite.”23 In his overview of the impressive variety of intoxication technologies used around the world, the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt similarly argues that “the deliberate seeking of psychoactive experience is likely to be at least as old as anatomically (and behaviorally) modern humans: one of the characteristics of Homo sapiens sapiens.”24 (Location 352)
Brain Hijack: Porn and Sexually Starved Fruit Flies
Perhaps the most common view of our taste for intoxication is that it involves precisely this sort of hijacking of previously adaptive drives. “Hijack” theories see alcohol and other intoxicating drugs as, like pornography, something that just happens to trigger reward systems in our brains originally designed by evolution to encourage adaptive behavior like sex. This was not a problem for most of our evolutionary history, when such drugs were hard to get in any quantity and were relatively weak in potency. Evolution could afford to ignore the fact that primates and other mammals enjoyed an occasional high from some fermented fruit found on the jungle floor in the same way it could overlook a bit of masturbation or non-reproductive sex. It could not, however, anticipate that one of these primates, with its big brain, tool use, and ability to accumulate cultural innovations, would suddenly—in an evolutionary blink of an eye—figure out how to make beer, wine, and then mind-bogglingly powerful distilled spirits. Hijack theories claim that these poisons have been able to slip through our evolutionary defenses because evolution is a sluggard in the face of rapid human innovation. (Location 402)
Given how tiny and apparently utterly unlike us they are, fruit flies (Drosophila) are surprisingly good proxies for humans in many respects, including the way they process alcohol.30 Fruit flies like booze, they get drunk, and it stimulates their reward systems in a manner similar to ours. They can also become alcoholics: flies come to prefer heavily alcohol-laden food over regular food, and this desire becomes more powerful over time. If deprived of alcohol, they go on binges when it is reintroduced.31 All of this is clearly maladaptive, at least at the levels of alcohol used in the lab, where the spiked food is often brought to the strength of a head-banging Australian Shiraz (about 15 to 16 percent alcohol). Shiraz-drinking fruit flies have trouble flying straight, and therefore locating food and mates. The study with the sexually deprived fruit flies further found that, in essence, when denied sex they turn to the bottle.32 Alcohol consumption artificially triggers the same reward signal as successful mating, which means that drunk fruit flies have a reduced interest in courtship behavior, since they are getting their pleasure elsewhere. Fine for the fruit flies, maybe, but not so great for their genes.33 (Location 426)
Evolutionary Hangovers: Drunken Monkeys, Liquid Kimchee, and Dirty Water
Hangover theories, however, see certain features of human psychology not as a purely accidental hijacking of our reward systems, but rather as something that originally did serve a good adaptive purpose, albeit one that has outlived its usefulness. Junk food is a classic example. (Location 439)
Dudley argues that an incidental feature of the molecule that we call alcohol (technically, ethanol) is the key to why primates acquired a taste for it. Ethanol is extremely volatile—that is, it is a small, light molecule that can travel long distances in the air. It is therefore ideally positioned to function as an olfactory dinner gong for a wide variety of species. This no doubt includes fruit flies, whose taste for alcohol is probably linked to its ability to lead them to fruit. (Location 447)
Dudley’s argument is that alcohol makes us feel good because, in our evolutionary environment, it led to a large caloric and nutritional payoff. It’s simply an evolutionary hangover that modern urbanites still derive pleasure from alcohol when it now only tends to lead to liver damage, obesity, and premature death. As Dudley puts it, “What once worked safely and well in the jungle, when fruits contained only small amounts of alcohol, can be dangerous when we forage in the supermarket for beer, wine, and distilled spirits.”35 (Location 455)
Other hangover theories argue that the fermenting of grains and fruits plays a useful role in converting their calories into a more durable, portable form, allowing the preservation of resources that would otherwise be lost in a world without refrigerators.36 Alcohol, in this view, traditionally functioned like a more fun version of kimchee or pickles. (Location 459)
Another advantage of fermentation, at least when we’re talking about the transformation of grains into beer, is what the British nutritionist B. S. Platt, observing that fermenting maize into beer nearly doubles its essential micronutrient and vitamin content, called “biological ennoblement.”38 (Location 465)
This points to another advantage of alcohol for pre-modern people: its simple caloric punch. A gram of pure alcohol packs 7 calories, compared to 9 calories for fat and 4 for protein. It is disturbing to note that a modest 5-ounce pour of red wine contains as many calories as a 2-inch square of brownie or small scoop of ice cream (around 130 calories). (Location 473)
Finally, the process of fermenting alcoholic beverages also has the effect of disinfecting the water from which they are made. For much of human history, especially after the advent of agriculture and dense urban living, local water sources have often been extremely unsafe for drinking. It is possible that alcoholic fermentation therefore played a role in converting contaminated water into potable liquids. (Location 493)
More Than Twinkies and Porn: Beyond Hangover and Hijack Theories
Hangover theories like the drunken monkey hypothesis have received a lukewarm reception among primatologists and human ecologists, who point out that wild primates appear to avoid the kind of overripe fruit that produces ethanol, and that studies with humans suggest we strongly prefer simply ripe (no ethanol) fruit to overripe fruit.45 (I certainly do.) Other hangover theories are hampered by the unfortunate fact that the postulated functions of alcohol or other drugs in our ancestral environment could have been performed just as well by something that doesn’t paralyze large portions of your brain and leave you with a splitting headache in the morning. For example, biologically “ennobling” a grain such as wheat, millet, or oats can be done simply by fermenting it into a porridge, as is still a common practice in small-scale agricultural communities around the world. Fermented porridges also solve the storage problem. (Location 506)
Or consider the dirty water hypothesis. If you are suffering from bacteria-laden water, just boil it. Of course, the germ theory of disease is quite recent, and there are still people around the world who haven’t gotten the news. But as human solutions to most adaptive problems have shown, we don’t need to know anything about the actual causality involved to solve a problem through trial and error. Individuals do this all the time. Cultures are even better at it, since they can “remember” particularly good, chance solutions to problems and pass them on, benefiting the individuals in the cultures and/or aiding the spread of the group itself.46 (Location 520)
Whether framed in terms of brain hijacking or evolutionary hangovers, existing theories all agree in seeing our taste for intoxication as a mistake, and in arguing that there is little or no functional role for intoxicants in contemporary human societies. (Location 557)
What is wonderful about evolutionary approaches is not only that they help us to explain otherwise puzzling aspects of human behavior, they also allow us to recognize the existence of these puzzles in the first place. (Location 562)
The cultures that survive and expand and gobble up other cultures tend to go in for waste and human sacrifice on a grotesque scale. As scientists, we can only conclude that some other adaptive forces must be at work, such as the need for group identity or social cohesion.48 (Location 583)
The use of intoxicants should puzzle us as much as religion does, and is similarly ripe for a proper scientific examination. Yet, as in the case of religious belief and practice, the very ubiquity of human intoxication renders the mystery of its existence invisible. It is only when we look at intoxicant use through the lens of evolutionary thinking that the truly odd nature of the phenomenon becomes clear. (Location 586)
All over the world, wherever you find people, you find ridiculous amounts of time, wealth, and effort dedicated to the sole purpose of getting high. In ancient Sumer, it is estimated that the production of beer, a cornerstone of ritual and everyday life, sucked up almost half of overall grain production.50 A significant portion of the Incan Empire’s organized labor was directed toward the production and distribution of the corn-based intoxicant chicha.51 Even ancient dead people were obsessed with getting wasted. It is hard to find a culture that did not send off their dead with copious quantities of alcohol, cannabis, or other intoxicants. (Location 596)
Because of its centrality in human life, economic and political power has often been grounded in the ability to produce or supply intoxicants. The Incan emperor’s monopoly on chicha production both symbolized and reinforced his political dominance. (Location 606)
By far the most technologically advanced and valuable artifacts found in early European settlements in the New World were copper stills, imported at great cost and worth more than their weight in gold.57 (Location 619)
For the year 2014, a Canadian research institute estimated that the annual economic cost of alcohol consumption, including impacts on health, law enforcement, and economic productivity, was 249 billion in economic damage. In 2018, a widely publicized article in the British medical journal Lancet concluded that alcohol use ranks among the most serious risk factors for human health worldwide, playing a role in almost 10 percent of global deaths among fifteen-to forty-nine-year-olds. (Location 638)
our particular lineage of ape appears to be genetically adapted to processing alcohol and eliminating it quickly from the body. Alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH), which are produced by many animals, especially those that feed heavily on fruit, are a class of enzymes involved in the processing of ethanol, the alcohol molecule. A small set of primates, including humans, possess a super-powered variant of ADH, called ADH4. In the animals that possess it, this enzyme is the first line of defense against alcohol, quickly breaking ethanol down into chemicals that can be readily used or eliminated by the body. (Location 676)
It is commonly thought that genetic evolution takes a long time to work, producing adaptations only over time scales on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Given that humans have only been living in large-scale societies for something like 8,000 to 10,000 years, this would mean that humans have remained genetically unchanged since we were hunter-gathers roaming the Pleistocene African plains. Another common belief is that, since the advent of large-scale societies and the invention of agriculture, humans have cast off the shackles of day-to-day survival challenges, and thereby freed themselves from the pressures of genetic evolution. Neither of these beliefs is true. (Location 701)
genetic evolution can sometimes be pretty stupid, as work-arounds like masturbation and junk food attest. There are also many problems that genetic evolution simply cannot help us with. Consider the human spine. It is a terrible design for an upright, bipedal organism, which is why so many people suffer from lower back problems. Yet evolution does not have the luxury of designing us from scratch. It has to do the best it can with what it has been given, a body scheme designed for climbing and living in trees, gradually modified and hacked until it could walk upright.73 Natural selection cannot peer around corners or see beyond adaptive valleys, and is often stuck in the ruts of evolutionary pathways that were originally chosen for long-irrelevant reasons. (Location 715)
At least when it comes to our taste for alcohol, both path dependence and availability problems can be definitively ruled out. This is because an excellent solution to this supposed evolutionary mistake, this parasite of the human mind, already exists in the human gene pool, and has for a really long time. (Location 724)
considering that the genes coding for these two enzymes are not directly linked, this odd coupling of super-efficient ADH and terrible-slacker ALDH does appear in some human populations. It is most common in East Asians, which is why the condition it causes is sometimes known as the “Asian flushing syndrome.” (Location 738)
This genetic silver bullet for the alcohol problem has been knocking around in the human gene pool for a long time, as far back as 7,000 to 10,000 years ago in East Asia. (Location 751)
If alcohol consumption were merely a counterproductive accident of our evolutionary history, we’d expect the “Asian flushing” genes to spread like wildfire anywhere where excessive alcohol consumption was a potential problem. In other words, almost everywhere in the civilized world. Given the rapidity with which other novel genetic adaptations, such as lactose tolerance or performance at high elevations, have taken over in regions where they are useful, anyone able to read this book should flush after a drink or two. This is clearly not the case. The genes producing this reaction remain confined to a relatively small region of East Asia, and are not even universal there. (Location 763)
Si el alcohol no tuviese función evolutiva, la adaptación del sonrojamiento asiático se habría difuminado.
alcohol evolución argumento función evidencia
A Cultural Mystery: Prohibition’s Strange Failure to Take Over the World
If a ban on alcohol were a cultural evolutionary killer app, you’d expect it to be more consistently enforced. (Location 869)
As the historian of American religion Robert Fuller has argued, the Mormon ban on psychoactive chemicals seems less targeted at the specific problem of alcohol, and more “a strategy to emphasize difference from other existing religious groups.”98 Similar arguments have been advanced about Islamic abstinence, which may have originally functioned to distinguish the early Muslim world from the wine-drinking cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East that surrounded it.99 Prohibition is a dramatic cultural statement, serving as a powerful group marker and costly loyalty-inspiring display. In the case of the Mormon Church, this ability to distinguish themselves from others through abstinence has been combined with other creative and impressive practices, such as demanding a two-year mission from all male devotees and allowing the proxy baptism of long-dead ancestors. It is likely this package of cultural evolutionary innovations, rather than the ban on alcohol itself, that accounts for the relative success of the Mormon faith. (Location 886)
To summarize, if intoxication had overall negative effects on cultural groups, we would expect anti-intoxicant norms to become universal, especially since cultural evolution moves much faster than genetic evolution. If alcohol bans are in the process of taking over the world, however, they are certainly taking their time about it. (Location 894)
Humans are the only animal that deliberately and methodically gets high. (Location 931)
Chapter Two Leaving the Door Open for Dionysus
For a very long time, the primary adaptive challenge for human beings has been other human beings, not the physical environment. Knowing how to find water in the desert is important, but nowhere near as crucial as learning how to share that water with other humans, negotiating the division of labor in carting the water back to camp, and sussing out who is likely to try to steal your share of the water when you’re not looking. (Location 947)
To answer this question, we first need to understand the specific ways in which it’s hard being human. Species arise and survive by adapting to a particular ecological niche. (Location 955)
El nicho ecológico del humano es primordialmente sociocultural. El alcohol ayuda a resolver algunos de los desafíos que este nicho plantea.
nicho_ecológico homo_sapiens comunidad desafío alcohol
Among primates, humans are in a situation not unlike the cave tetra’s. Homo sapiens have achieved their impressive success by adapting to an extreme and unusual ecological niche, one very different from that inhabited by our primate ancestors and closest primate relatives today. In the same way that the cave tetra can no longer survive out in the bright, terrifying world of the surface river, humans have become so dependent upon culture that we can no longer live without it.4 (Location 969)
Like the eyeless cave tetra, this loss makes us more efficient in our new environment of cooked, and therefore pre-digested, food, but it also makes us dependent upon fire. (Location 978)
Ejemplo con la adaptación a un a tecnología hominina muy primitiva: el fuego.
argumento herramientas evolución dependencia cultura homo_sapiens
Living in this niche therefore requires both individual and collective creativity, intensive cooperation, a tolerance for strangers and crowds, and a degree of openness and trust that is entirely unmatched among our closest primate relatives. (Location 985)
sociedad evolución comunidad nicho ecológico vínculo desafío
If you packed a similar number of chimpanzees onto a plane, what you’d end up with at the other end is a long metal tube full of blood and dismembered body parts.6 (Location 991)
I have compared humans to eyeless cave tetras and puppies, but in this respect a different analogy is more apropos: that of social insects, such as ants or bees.7 Compared to other primates, we are freakishly social and cooperative; not only do we sit obediently on airplanes, we labor collectively to build houses, specialize in different skills, and live lives that are driven by our specific role in the group. (Location 994)
Trying to hammer a square primate peg into a circular social insect hole is bound to be difficult. But, as we’ll see, intoxication can help. (Location 1002)
The Human Ecological Niche: Creative, Cultural, Communal
Other bird species, so-called “altricial” birds, are more or less helpless at birth. They emerge from their eggs naked and blind, unable to move on their own or feed themselves, and with the prospect of flying only a distant dream. They are completely unable to survive without intense parental investment, often for relatively long periods of time. (Location 1012)
In general, precocial species like chickens or pigeons are never able to exhibit anything other than a relatively narrow range of behavior. (Location 1044)
Both strategies—peaking early or peaking late—exist in the world because each has its own advantages, and you can’t say which is likely to be better without knowing the environment in which it is to be implemented. (Location 1050)
general intelligence, behavioral flexibility, ability to solve novel problems, and a reliance on learning from others tends to roughly correlate with an extended period of helpless immaturity.13 This relationship is found across a broad range of animals, including birds and mammals, suggesting that it tracks a fundamental evolutionary trade-off between narrow competence and creative flexibility. (Location 1052)
It’s possible that the haplessness of our offspring explains another unusual fact about humans. We are one of the few species where females go through menopause—basically giving up the whole reproductive game—with many years still left to live. This is an odd thing for an organism to do, unless it’s the case that it can maximize its overall reproductive success by forgoing personal reproduction, and instead plow its time and resources into helping with its grandchildren and great-grandchildren. This, in turn, only makes sense if these little ones are such an enormous hassle to deal with that they need grandmothers to survive. This appears to be the case with humans.14 (Location 1065)
Humans have adopted such an extreme form of the peak-late strategy because, as a species, we have come to inhabit an equally extreme ecological niche. (Location 1071)
We get drunk because we are a weird species, (Location 1079)
The Creative Animal
The universality of high-stakes riddles in human mythology highlights, in symbolic form, one of the main challenges that confronts us in adapting to our ecological niche: Humans need to be creative to survive. (Location 1101)
As a species, we are uniquely dependent on the insights and inventions that give rise to cultural technologies, (Location 1103)
Humans genuinely invent new things, in the sense that cultural innovations are not simply read off our DNA. (Location 1109)
Humans transform the world through our creative technologies, and we cannot survive without them. (Location 1111)
homo_sapiens tecnología herramientas cita
Human beings’ long developmental period, our extended childhood, may be one response to this need. If you want help with the Unusual Uses Test, just rope in a little kid. Solving lateral thinking tasks is where the four-year-olds who get distracted by an ant crawling across the floor when they are supposed to be putting on their shoes, or who suddenly decide to strip off their pants apropos of nothing, really come into their own. Kids are crappy at logistics and planning, but their little chaotic minds explore the nooks and crannies of possibility space with a speed and unpredictability that leave adults completely in the dust. (Location 1126)
While we might imagine that the brain matures through accumulation, building up more and more neurons in a given region, maturation in fact results from what is called “neural pruning,” the gradual elimination of unnecessary neural connections. A region of the brain becomes mature when it settles down into a lean, functionally well-organized system. (Location 1146)
As gray matter density decreases, the density of white matter—the myelinated axons that transmit information, the outputs of the computational work done by gray matter—increases, resulting in greater efficiency and speed but less flexibility. (Location 1150)
As roads are laid and bridges are built, I can move around more easily and quickly, but now I’m going to tend to move only along these established pathways. (Location 1155)
It is, in fact, the PFC that is the last region of the brain to mature, not reaching its adult state until the early twenties. This is why the teen years are so dangerous: Teens have adult-like motivational systems, raging hormones, and access to dangerous technologies like automobiles, but only limited rational self-control. (Location 1162)