Table Of ContentA FOOT IN THE RIVER
FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO
A FOOT IN THE RIVER
Why Our Lives Change—and the Limits of Evolution
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You cannot step twice into the same river.
Heraclitus [Diels and Kranz, fragments 12, 91; ed. T.A. Robinson
(Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1987), 16, 55.]
‘He is entirely human,’ I replied; ‘the accepted tests of humanity being, as I
understand, the habitual adoption of the erect posture in locomotion, and the
relative position of the end of the thumb –’
‘I don’t mean that,’ interrupted Mrs Haldean. ‘I mean human in things that
matter.’
R. Austin Freeman [The Famous Cases of Dr Thorndyke (London,
Hodder, 1929), 271–2.]
CONTENTS
Introduction: The weird planet
1. Challenging Change
2. The Frustration of Science
3. The Great Reconvergence
4. The Chimpanzees’ Tea Party
5. The Limits of Evolution
6. The Imaginative Animal
7. Facing Acceleration
8. Towards the Planet of the Apes
In the Vatican Garden: Afterword and Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION: THE WEIRD PLANET
We live on a weird planet.
As far as we know, all the others are pretty much inert. Gases and dust swirl.
Occasional cosmic events—experienced on Earth, too, such as a blip in an orbit,
the tilt of an axis, an errant meteor—may alter the environment. But most
changes on most planets happen predictably, within a narrow compass, or are
measurable on a slow scale of millions of years.
Earth is not like that. Sci-fi writers who strain to imagine strange worlds
might as well look inward, at the wild, untrackable, unparalleled oddness of our
own.
Earth is, to us, the most interesting large lump in the cosmos, not just because
we live on it and it matters most to us, but also because—objectively speaking—
a lot happens on it. For two reasons, Earth is the scene of vast, rapid changes,
unreplicated anywhere else that we know of: first, because our planet has life,
and organic systems are more dynamic than inorganic ones; second, because
Earth has us—cultural animals. And culture, which is the subject of this book, is
even more volatile than biota.
By ‘culture’ I mean behaviour—including mental behaviour, such as
thoughts and attitudes—acquired by learners, transmitted by teachers or
exemplars, and adopted widely. People use the word loosely to mean many
different things: civilization; ‘high’ culture; elaborate social organization; the
peculiar features of a particular society; the commonalities that make individuals
identify with a group; and hundreds of variants, with many nuances, on all these
definitions. Underlying every usage, however, and uniting them all, is the
bedrock of the word: differentiation from ‘nature’.
Culture is part of nature, in an unchallengeable sense: it happens inside nature
and cannot happen without it. But in equally obvious ways it is useful to
distinguish the cultural part of nature from what is merely natural. Some of what
we do comes to us without any conscious input of our own. We share it with
other creatures in the same measure as we share their ancestry or their physical
environment: that is mere nature. Other behaviour can vary from group to group;
we learn it from other members of our own group—our parents, for instance, or
our professors and peers: that is culture.
It is proper to speak of culture apart from nature, just as it is to speak of
Essex, say, apart from England, or of an organ apart from the body to which it
belongs, only if one is aware that the larger term always includes the smaller,
and that consideration of neither is complete without the other. At times,
especially in the West, people have pressed the distinction too far by treating
culture as if nature had nothing to do with it, but that is not a reason for refusing
to acknowledge that culture might have peculiar features that distinguish it from
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the rest of nature.
Nature and culture are not mutually independent: each influences the other.
But the balance is a battleground. Scholars and scientists fight over it. The
answer to the question ‘why do we have culture?’ lies, I think, in the realm of
nature: the simple (but, as we shall see, insufficient) answer is ‘it is natural for us
to be cultural’. The question ‘why do we have cultures?’—in the plural or, to put
almost the same question another way, ‘why does culture change?’—is, I want to
suggest, not answerable in the same way. I propose to explore that question by
posing two possibilities: whether evolution or some analogous process is the
answer, and whether cultural change happens beyond the limits of evolution’s
explanatory power. The purpose of this book is to contribute a new response to
what perhaps—as we puzzle over strangers’ comportment, or ponder alien ways
of life, or contemplate the variety of our conduct, or compare the commonalities
and curiosities that link and part us from other creatures—is the most perplexing
property of human beings: why we behave as we do.
*
Humans are not the only creatures with culture; over the last sixty years or so,
scientists have identified culture among many primate species and claimed it for
many others, including examples to be paraded in this book, like the menagerie
of some fantastic Barnum or Bailey, such as dolphins, whales, elephants, rats,
and even bacteria. Human cultures, however, are different: in comparison with
other species, we are strangely unstable. Communities become differentiated, as
they change in contrasting and inconsistent ways: that is true, as we shall see, of
any cultural species, but the processes involved happen incalculably more often,
with a perplexingly greater range of variation, among humans than among any
other animals. Human cultures register the constant series of changes that we
call ‘history’; they self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering and
apparently—now and for most of the recent past—accelerating speed. They
vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place.
A lifetime’s study of history has convinced me that one of the great problems
—unsolved by the scientists and sociologists who have confronted it and rarely
even broached among historians—is ‘why have human societies grown so
different from each other?’ Or, to express a similar question with the
comparative emphasis that I think will lead us to a solution: ‘why, compared
with those of other animals who lead social lives, are humans so mutable?’ It is
one of the most basic and pervasive questions, but we have no agreed answer.
The question raises, in turn, a matter of enduring and apparently unclinchable
controversy: how far the laws of evolution might provide solutions. Does
evolution or something like it regulate culture as well as organic life? Is all
behaviour the result of evolved traits? If not, where lie the limits between what
evolution can explain and what is beyond evolution? For historians, one might
express the subject of this book as ‘why do we have history at all? Why do the
changes we call history happen? Why do we humans alone have history—or, at
least, so much more of it than other animals?’ For biologists, a way of putting
the same problem might be: ‘is culture an effect or aspect of biology? Or is there
more to it?’ People with no disciplinary bias might put it like this: ‘why do
humans behave so differently from other animals?’
With some remarkable exceptions, which we shall come to in their place, the
lifeways of most extant cultural creatures seem nearly uniform and nearly
stagnant by human standards. That does not mean that their cultures are
incapable of multiplying and accelerating in the future. Maybe, one day, we will
find other species in other worlds with the same propensities as humans’ to
create highly mutable behaviours. At present, we have no evidence that such
beings exist. Part of the message of this book will be (I hope) that we may not
need to go as far as outer space to find them: given time, other Earthbound
species—chimpanzees, in particular, and perhaps some other primates—could
acquire some of the changeable traits in lifestyle and social and political
relationships that up to now seem uniquely human. So far, however, although
non-human creatures’ ways of life—those so far identified and studied, most of
which belong to apes, dolphins, and whales—do register measurable changes,
