I read the book below and either learned useful ideas or found creative inspiration or both, which means now you can:
Take my notes and assorted excerpts for your own use
Decide if it looks good enough to buy for yourself
Buy a copy for someone else
1. is a time saver 🕰
2. is a recommendation source 📌
3. is a gift idea generator 🎁
Have at it and if you have feedback or thoughts I’d love to hear ‘em. :)
—@Mark
“We are now, all of us, on the brink of something quite exceptional. The interplay of human culture, biology, and environment is creating a new creature from our hypercooperative mass of humanity: we are becoming a superorganism.”
—Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time, by Gaia Vince (2020)
This book is the perfect blend of history, science, culture, technology, archaeology, anthropology, and philosophy, weaving threads from each and showing how they influence one another so deeply that you lose track of which is which. Reading it becomes an altogether new experience, not just a collection of strands but something larger and more sublime. Something transcendent. —M.
In the tradition of Jared Diamond’s classic book Guns, Germs, and Steel, the author begins at a deep beginning:
Just one in 3 million of the molecules of Earth is water, but they are concentrated at the surface, and that makes all the difference.
The reader picks up fascinating facts and insights along the way for the entirety of the book, from a range of disciplines. Such as this these: explaining type 2 diabetes and red hair by way of Neanderthal genetics:
Many of the genes we have inherited from Neanderthals are associated with keratin, the protein in skin and hair. These visible variants may have been sexually appealing to our ancestors (Neanderthals were redheads), or perhaps their genes for tougher skin offered some advantage to the African migrants in the colder, darker European environment. Some Neanderthal genes are now problematic—a gene that may once have helped people to cope with food scarcity now leaves Europeans more prone to diseases like type 2 diabetes.
It’s a well-established fact in the world of genetic and DNA ancestry studies that every one of today’s 7.8 billion human beings descended from a disaster-induced population bottleneck that wiped out all but a few thousand individuals:
We were physically so unprepared for hostile conditions that for most of human history, our survival has been touch and go. Just 74,000 years ago, for instance, a supervolcanic eruption at Toba in Indonesia nearly wiped us all out, and our ancestors' population shrank to a few thousand. Today, although there are several species of ape, only one human species has survived.
Fire can wipe us out, but it also warms us, feeds us, and in a very real sense powers our entire cellular makeup:
Fire is chemistry made visible: a marriage of oxygen and fuel in an exuberance of heat and light. This is the same basic reaction that sustains all life—it is how we get energy from our food—but in living cells, it is called metabolism and is a slow stepwise process, whereas fiery combustion is lightning-fast and intensely energetic.
Hunting was such a pivotal change in our behavior and culture as a species—a calculated tradeoff that skewed toward survival—that it led to measurable biological changes, including the brain.
Lionesses, which spend more time in groups and do the majority of the hunting, have the largest frontal cortex. 👇
Hunting was socially and mentally complex as well as being physically demanding and risky, but the pay-off of more calories outweighed these energy costs, and the mutually reinforcing evolutionary process propelled us on. […]
The intellectual rigors of a cooperative hunt require a bigger frontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with social behavior, decision making, and problem solving. That is why lions, the only big cat to hunt in groups, have the most highly developed frontal cortex. Lionesses, which spend more time in groups and do the majority of the hunting, have the largest frontal cortex.
Here the author makes a point about biology and physics that echoes a principle found in philosophy texts the world over: you are not separate from nature, you are nature. (“We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’ Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” —Alan Watts)
When we describe something as artificial, it is something taken from nature and rearranged by us, and what are we if not part of nature? Our cultural evolution is part of our biology just as its products are a part of the new Earth we've helped create.
Lest things get too heady, we get pulled back to earth for a fascinating discussion of mud that changed the way I look at pottery forever:
Take mud. From mud, you can make almost anything, and people have. Fire makes it permanent, turning the pliable molecular sheets into a solid three-dimensional object with completely different characteristics. Firing clay was as transformative for our culture as it was for the material.
Pottery provided a way of cooking stews and broths; preparing fats, seafood, and fermented beverages; and carrying liquids. Before pottery, the only way nomadic peoples could carry or store water was in bladders or skins, so a solid container for blood, milk, water, oils, and entrails would have been revolutionary. The ability to make soups would have helped wean infants, allowing them to eat a wide range of nutritious, easily digested, detoxified foods, providing gradual exposure to new and potentially dangerous foodstuffs. Fish broths prepared in pots, for example, retain the fats, including omega-3 lipids for infant brain development and female fertility. Soups alone would increase childhood health and survival rate, resulting in a real impact on population numbers.
The most expensive part of pottery is the firing-fuel needs to be gathered, the kiln needs to be kept hot enough-but several pots can be fired at the same time. This mass production made it cheaper
All of these skills, knowledge, and technology had to be transmitted through time and across generations somehow. That’s where stories and tradition come in.
Stories save our lives. 👇
As human culture evolved in complexity, storytelling became more than a vital cultural adaptation—our brains evolved with reflexive use of narrative as part of our cognition. Stories shaped our minds, our societies, and our interaction with the environment. Stories save our lives.
“in many languages, the word for ‘story’ is the same as that for ‘history.’ 👇
Epic narratives help form national identities, telling audiences where they come from, who they are, and how to regard their neighbors. The replication of stories forms a shared history that glues society together—in many languages, the word for "story" is the same as that for "history."
As the thread from stories takes us to language, we learn about the adaptations birds have made in optimizing their calls to carry best in the environment they are given. These same patterns show up in human languages too, with the proportion of syllables and consonants depending on climate, vegetation, elevation, and more:
Biologists have recently noticed that some city birds are adapting their songs the better to be heard against the background din of urban life, singing lower frequency songs with simpler structures than relatives living in quieter places. Now, scientists are finding the same kind of adaptation among human languages. The number of consonants in a language, and how consonants cluster together in syllables, seems to depend on the average annual temperature and rainfall, the amount of vegetation, and the elevation and ruggedness of the place where the language is traditionally spoken.
This leads us quickly to the link between literacy and music:
Whistling and drumming languages force their speakers to combine language and melody processing in the brain, and could hold clues to the origins of speech. Music and language are both processed by the same brain regions and appear to be linked in other ways, too—studies have shown that music classes improve literacy.
This is where culture begins to affect biology: the words we have for things, and how those words function in a language, impacts human development at infancy.
By this point the author has made a strong case for learning both a musical instrument as well as a second language:
Naming things opens a mental door into new cognition—new ways of understanding the world. Children who speak Hebrew, a strongly gendered language, know their own gender a year earlier than speakers of nongendered Finnish.
...bilinguals have significantly more gray matter in their ACC [anterior cingulate cortex], because they are using it so much more often. This enables them to perform better in a range of cognitive and social tasks, from verbal and nonverbal tests to how well they can read other people." Bilingualism seems to keep us mentally fit and so perhaps it was selected for, both culturally and biologically-an idea supported by the ease with which we learn new languages and flip between them, and the pervasiveness of bilingualism throughout our history.
The author also illuminates the mystery of altruism—why humans regularly perform acts of kindness for complete strangers when there doesn’t seem to be any obvious advantage to the individual herself or her in-group.
But altruism does have survival value at the species level over the course of human history, and it has to do with imitation:
Reciprocal altruism makes sense long-lasting relationships between individuals, but doesn't explain the vast array of anonymous altruism that we all practice every day, such as holding a door open for a stranger or bigger acts of charity such as giving blood. We don't do this with the expectation that the strangers that receive our help will somehow find out who we are and compensate us. And yet our many acts of kindness are seen by others and copied. Our brains have evolved to be exquisitely attuned to social cues, with our so-called mirror neurons triggering an empathic response to another person's action or experience, and promoting imitative behavior from the youngest babies. We are social copiers and get measurable pleasure from matching our behaviors and choices with those whom we like or admire. This means that those who are generally liked—nice people-help make society nicer as more people emulate them.
I found this brief dissection of the difference in effectiveness between shame and guilt to be particularly insightful.
Depending on the culture, one or the other tends to be used more to get others to conform or behave:
Shame is an important method of social control in such groups and the best way to appease is to conform. However, in individualistic societies such as cities—where people are more private and less densely connected and individuals are reliant on many overlapping groups rather than a single group—the pattern of gossip may produce less judgmental attitudes and so shame is weaker and less effective. Instead, internal promptings of guilt may be more successful.
The importance of beauty to humankind is the third major section of the book, where its importance, we quickly learn, is far from superficial.
It triggers our instinct to find meaning and connection:
Beauty is a motivational force, an emotional reaction alerting us to explore further—it is a particularly potent and intense form of curiosity. Art hijacks this instinct: if we're looking at a Van Gogh, that twinge of beauty in the brain's aesthetic center is telling us that this painting isn't just swirls of color, it is meaningful.
Take, for example, the decorating of spears in hunter-gatherer cultures, a task that is both time and labor intensive:
For such large animals, any unnecessary activity is particularly expensive. A spear is not going to do a better job at providing essential food if it is more pleasingly decorated. And yet the significant time, effort, and material resources that all human societies devote to decoration speaks of an important survival role. It is through the symbolism and meaning of beauty that we draw unity, community, shared values and beliefs, compassion, and other emotions that bind us as cooperative societies.
What a culture finds beautiful or attractive is just one of several shared traits a society unconsciously adopts and believes to be objective.
In this example, social norms around gender appear to affect the way pregnant mothers describe their baby’s behavior in the womb:
Indeed, social norms even have an impact before birth: one study found that when pregnant women were informed of the sex of the fetus they were carrying, they described its movements differently. Women who learned they were carrying a girl typically described the movements as "quiet," "very gentle, more rolling than kicking"; whereas those who knew they were carrying a boy described "very vigorous movements," "kicks and punches," "a saga of earthquakes." By contrast, women who did not know the sex of the babies they were carrying showed no such distinctions in their descriptions.
In one of the more succinct illustrations of the central concept of the book, here’s an example of human culture changing animal genetics which in turn changes human genetics:
We took a wild auroch and guided its evolution to produce a domesticated cow. We drank its milk and our genes adapted. This is cultural-environmental-genetic evolution.
In our current times of social isolation from the C19 viral pandemic, there’s no shortage of examples in circulation citing the tremendous human discoveries or creations that were made in the past while self-quarantined to escape plague or outbreaks. (Isaac Newton developed his physics and invented calculus, and Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, for example.)
I never knew, however, how the Black Death led to the discovery of America:
Disruption to a network—such as from epidemics or war—helps shake people out of "safe" ways of doing things and allows new connections to be made… 👇
Disruption to a network—such as from epidemics or war—helps shake people out of "safe" ways of doing things and allows new connections to be made; different people, ideas, and technologies to become prioritized; and new network shapes to form. The societal restructuring that followed the Black Death facilitated the rise of the Ottoman Empire, making the Silk Road an expensive, dangerous passage for European traders, which, as we have seen, prompted the discovery of the Americas.
And in case you’ve ever wondered why we call money “cash”…
The first paper money, made of mulberry bark, was issued by the Chinese in the seventh century, and although it spread quickly around the region, it didn't catch on in Europe for nearly a thousand years. One problem was its vulnerability to forgery, but a bigger problem was managing inflation. Faith in the paper note was maintained by the promise that it could be exchanged at any time for the same value in coinage—in China's case, this meant small brass coins with square holes, known as "cash."
A self-quarantined existence is also causing many of us to think about, question, and value the place we call '“home.”
It turns out that designation causes a number of biological responses in us:
In making a habitat a home, humans increasingly transformed the environment-logging forests, hunting megafauna, and eventually creating entirely artificial landscapes. Our bodies mentally and physiologically respond to these home environments. We feel safe and comfortable in our home, and on entering, glucose tolerance, adrenaline levels, respiration, and metabolism respond by changing measurably. This environmental stimulus triggers our biology in subtle ways, affecting everything from sleep patterns to fat deposition.
The rise of a new technology always carries with it negative consequences that calls into question its positive ones.
In the case of agriculture, the tradeoff almost wasn’t worth it due to the long-term negative consequences of a starch-based, low-protein diet:
Evidence from an archaeological site in Anatolia between 9,100 and 8,000 years ago, for example, shows that while there was a rapid expansion in population (mainly from a rise in birth rate), there was also an increase in bone infection and tooth decay from their starch-based, low-protein diets. The expansion of agriculture initially led to societal collapse.
Agriculture is also the cause for what some now mistakenly consider to be “natural” gender roles.
Environmental pressures can strongly influence human culture. 👇
Shifting cultivation, which uses handheld tools like the hoe and the digging stick, is labor-intensive, with women actively participating in farm work; whereas using a plough to prepare the soil is more capital-intensive and requires significant upper-body strength, grip strength, and bursts power to either pull the plough or control the animal that pulls it. Farming with the plough is also less compatible with childcare. As a result, men in societies characterized by plough agriculture tended to specialize in agricultural work outside the home, while women specialize in activities within the home. In time, this division of labor generates a norm that the "natural" place for women is in the home.
Many modern cultures, in which the economy was previously based on hoeing or shifting agriculture, such as African ones, are more egalitarian than those that used to plough, such as Middle Eastern ones, research shows. A similar change occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, where the spread of cattle ownership led to a switch from matrilineal to patrilineal norms. Matrilineal societies only persisted where the tsetse flies prohibited livestock farming. Environmental pressures can strongly influence human culture.
The type of crop grown in a society also led directly to the type of governmental system that arose around it, as more regular and visible crops can be more predictably managed and taxed:
States didn't commonly form in places where the staple crops were tubers, like cassava, because avoiding tax is so much easier when you can't actually see the food and harvest times are so variable.
In yet another charming example of profound unintended consequences, the author describes how post-war bicycle sales led to a healthier, more diverse gene pool:
Even when tribes held strict norms forbidding intermarriage between groups, the genetic evidence reveals it continued. The domestication of the horse and the invention of wheeled transport accelerated this, but well into the nineteenth century, Europeans were still marrying close relatives. The bicycle reduced this considerably, by enabling sex between geographically distant populations. The sale of 4 million bicycles before the First World War had a striking impact on French society, including making the French taller by reducing the number of marriages between blood relations. The same effect was seen in England.
And our societal notion of the number 7 being “lucky” likely stems from the cross-cultural importance placed through the ages on the cluster of seven stars known as the Pleiades, which held great significance due to practical applications of its presence:
Certain constellations, such as the Pleiades, became culturally important across the world. The Pleiades is useful because it's a distinctive reference point: the seven stars are close together and bright, and always rise over the horizon at the same time each year—this has also made the number 7 auspicious. In the Americas, the Maya and Inca associated the Pleiades with abundance because it returns each year at harvest time, and they built solar and nocturnal observatories to follow it. For the Zuni of New Mexico, the Pleiades are the Seed Stars because they appear at the start of sowing season The north African Berbers use the Pleiades to mark the changeover of the hot and cold seasons, and in ancient Greece, they heralded the start of the safe sailing season in the Mediterranean.
And as the Passover and Easter holidays approach, it’s the perfect time to recall the mathematical and astronomical insights that deeply shaped these two religious traditions:
A complex system of astronomical and mathematical calculations to model the motion of the moon, sun, and stars was required to date the vernal equinox into the future, so Christian clerics led and supported observational research in astronomy for centuries. 👇
Christian clerics were extremely invested in astronomy to establish the dates of the solstices and equinoxes on which the complicated Easter calculations depend. The politics of the Christian calendar reveal our complicated relationship with time, and how we build our cultural norms around our interpretations of it. Easter, the most important festival in the Christian year, only started being celebrated in the second century CE, and morphed out of the pagan celebrations of spring. Christians believe Jesus was resurrected three days after he celebrated Jewish Passover (Good Friday), which Jews mark on the fifteenth day of Nisan (around April) in their calendar—this corresponds to around the first full moon of spring, but the Jewish calendar has a leap month rather than leap day, so Passover moves around from year to year. Christians wanted Easter to fall on their holy day, Sunday, and they also wanted to make sure their new religion was distinct from Judaism and ensure that their holiday would never coincide with Passover. This may seem strange, given the integral nature of the Passover feast to the Easter story, but such is religious politics. In the end, the decision was to date Easter to the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, unless that moon fell on a Sunday, in which case, Easter would be delayed to the following Sunday. A complex system of astronomical and mathematical calculations to model the motion of the moon, sun, and stars was required to date the vernal equinox into the future, so Christian clerics led and supported observational research in astronomy for centuries. And the Christian calendar remains lunisolar—keeping pace with the seasons, but celebrating certain holidays according to the phase of the moon.
As we learned to mark the seasons by the stars we soon invented a way to mark our days by machine.
In fact, the origin of the word “clock” is a reference to the bell that sounded on the hour as part of early timekeeping mechanisms:
Timekeeping finally became divorced from the motions of the heavens in the fourteenth century with the invention of the escapement mechanism, a device to regulate the rotation of a wheel pulled by a falling weight. Such a wheel could operate a gear mechanism, striking a bell on the hour (the word "clock" comes from the French for "bell")
The myth of the Oracle of Delphi and the mystical abilities attributed to the temple’s location turn out to also have a scientific explanation:
In the past, when there were no scientific explanations for visions and other strange phenomena, such experiences were convincing evidence for gods. Recently, a team of scientists investigating the underlying geology at Delphi discovered two hidden fault lines that cross exactly under the ruined temple. Psychoactive gases seeping up through these tectonic cracks, including sweet-smelling ethylene, which produces feelings of aloof euphoria at light doses (and anesthesia at higher doses), were very likely responsible for the Oracle's visions.
This Delphic example is a fitting close to a book dedicated not so much to explanation but illumination.
What we call explanations are formed with minds shaped according to a number of environmental and genetic factors outside of our control, and our explanations in turn generate cultural traditions and meaning-laden works of creation that can affect what we consume and how we think.
Myths (Arts) and geologic biochemistry (Sciences) that have led to societal decisions that will continue to have long-lasting genetic implications on our species.
The human evolutionary triad—genes, environment, and culture—are all implicated in the way the network is shaped, and this determines how we operate as a society.
(This is not an affiliate link, I get nothing if you buy it, but still… you might want to buy it. ☝️ )