When I was a child, I didn’t understand that adults were more intelligent than children. I thought adults just seemed smarter because they had more experience, but I didn’t realize there were biological changes in the brain that made them smarter.
Similarly there are some anthropologists like Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks who argue that late stone age humans were just as smart as modern people, they just didn’t have as much time to accumulate culture, since our species was very young then.
This begs the question, since cultural evolution happens so much faster than biological evolution, how do we know when cultural progress reflects biological progress?
Most kids don’t study calculus until their later teens. Is this because they’re not biologically ready until the brain approaches adulthood, or they simply haven’t had time to acquire the prerequisite knowledge?
Similarly representational art does not appear before the upper paleolithic? Was this because our species wasn’t biologically ready, or not culturally ready?
Perhaps one way to tell is to look at the growth curve. If knowledge or culture is progressing gradually in a person or our species, there’s no reason to suspect it’s anything more than cultural progress, but if the growth suddenly starts accelerating, then maybe cultural has had some help from biology.
For example, after 150,000 long years of being confined to Africa, and being just one of several homo species on Earth, anatomically modern humans suddenly colonized six other continents, created representational art, and replaced all other Homo species, in just 40,000 years. This was such a massive change in our trajectory that scientists like Richard Klein think it must have been a biological leap in evolution, stating:
What happened 40,000 or 50,000 years ago was the last major change in the genotype. At least the last major biological change. Evolution continues, but the evolution that’s involved in making us capable of wielding this vast variety of cultures–that probably stopped around 40,000 or 50,000 years ago and there’s been no essential change since.
Mitchell Leslie writes:
Forget about the construction of the first cities or the introduction of the internal combustion engine. The revolution that made the biggest difference occurred on the savanna of East Africa roughly 45,000 years ago, Klein and others maintain.
Stephen Jay Gould agreed with Klein, famously stating:
There has been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain
However is the Upper Paleolithic Revolution really that much more dramatic than other revolutions that have since followed it? Since cultural change is hard to judge, perhaps the most objective measure of humanity’s progress is population size.
It took us 200,000 years to reach a population size of 1 billion people, and yet in just the last few centuries we’ve hit 7 billion! That seems like a much bigger revolution than the Upper Paleolithic. The Upper Paleolithic may have been when modern humans left Africa, but the industrial revolution is when humans left the Earth!
So why do people like Richard Klein invoke a massive brain mutation to explain the Upper Paleolithic, but feel no genetic explanation is needed for the industrial revolution? Is this just political correctness or was the Upper Paleolithic genuinely in a class of its own?
I’m skeptical that a genetic mutation caused either, but just as biological evolution happens in sudden growth spurts (punctuated equilibrium model), perhaps cultural evolution does the same.
Here’s Klein discussing his views:
Pumpkin Person 
If you define intelligence as adaptability and creativity, then yes children are more intelligent than adults despite the biological changes that occurred during maturation
Adults are more intelligent in the sense that they have more efficieny in a particular task that involves problem solving, Essentially the synaptic connections are more “solidified” and automatic.
It’s basically Performance IQ vs Hypothetical/Abstract IQ which I’m sure is related to VIQ
If you define intelligence as adaptability and creativity, then yes children are more intelligent than adults despite the biological changes that occurred during maturation
adults do better on every psychometric test i’m aware of. well you might say that’s because they have more experience, but even on tests measuring novel problem solving, adults do better.
On the other hand, the child’d brain is said to be more plastic and modern humans look like baby apes perhaps because preserving that childlike plasticity made us more cognitively adaptable.
Even questions that test novel problem solving adhere to cultural norms, specifically a western one. I don’t outright discount IQ tests but they only correlate to real intelligence.
Which do you think is closer to intelligence? The ability to learn or the ability at applying what you learn. I prefer the former because I feel it’s more predispositional and therefore more reflective of true potential.
PP, I think around 50,000 years ago the mutation that occurred was related to the hyoid bone or some bone in the neck which must have moved around or become better placed,. and this could have enabled amh at that time to communicate with each other better. Maybe this process started 80,000 years ago and by. 50,000 years ago it settled in the right place to enable good enough advanced verbal communication for those times. Maybe. this change in the placement also enable d them to eat brain power boosting sea food. Sea food if it has bones cannot be eaten without getting choked, if people are not careful. And before 80,000 years ago they might not have been able to eat it at all.
“There has been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain”
This person makes me sick reading his comments. He knows and he LIES.
So if I forced a random ethnic group to keep marrying their cousins for 500 years, nothing would happen?
Is that right Gould? You never wondered no?
At least the Bible flat out says God created everything. Everything that happens god intended.
And that way the story actually logically flows.
But when you say ‘i believe in evolution’, and then say ‘but it stopped happening 40,000 years ago’ and ‘nobody knows why’ and ‘you aren’t allowed say anything contrary, just accept it’ this is waaaaay worse than just saying god made everything or the world floats on the back of a giant turtle.
you ask the best questions! thanks for wondering about this.
What’s so “special” about it? A few researchers have some just-so stories.
Herculano-Houzel and Kaas (2011) argue that cultural accumulation through the ages accounts for our cultural development over Neanderthals and Heidi.
In this regard, it is tempting to speculate on our prediction that the modern range of number of neurons observed in the human brain [Azevedo et al., 2009] was already found in H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis, raising the intriguing possibility that they had similar cognitive potential to our species. Compared to their societies, our outstanding accomplishments as individuals, as groups, and as a species, in this scenario, would be witnesses of the beneficial effects of cultural accumulation and transmission over the ages.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3064932/
Sorry, “speculate” (which is the perfect term to use. Wish EvoPsychos would use the term more often).
“There has been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain”
I laugh at this quote because Cochran and Harpending didn’t know what Gould was really talking about. (They quoted this on page one of 10000 Year Explosion.)
“The most impressive contrast between natural evolution and cultural evolution lies embedded in the major fact of our history. We have no evidence that the modal form of human bodies or brains has changed at all in the past 100,000 years—a standard phenomenon of stasis for successful and widespread species, and not (as popularly misconceived) an odd exception to an expectation of continuous and progressive change. The Cro-Magnon people who painted the caves of the Lascaux and Altamira some fifteen thousand years ago are us—and one look at the incredible richness and beauty of this work convinces us, in the most immediate and visceral way, that Picasso held no edge in mental sophistication over these ancestors with identical brains. And yet, fifteen thousand years ago no human social grouping had produced anything that would conform with our standard definition of civilization. No society had yet invented agriculture; none had built permanent cities. Everything that we have accomplished in the unmeasurable geological moment of the last ten thousand years—from the origin of agriculture to the Sears building in Chicago, the entire panoply of human civilization for better or for worse—has been built upon the capacities of an unaltered brain. Clearly, cultural change can vastly outstrip the maximal rate of natural Darwinian evolution.” (Gould, 1996: 220)
But human cultural change is an entirely distinct process operating under radically different principals that do allow for the strong possibility of a driven trend for what we may legitamately call “progress” (at least in a technological sense, whether or not the changes ultimately do us any good in a practical or moral way). In this sense, I deeply regret that common usage refers to the history of our artifacts and social orginizations as “cultural evolution.” Using the same term—evolution—for both natural and cultural history obfuscates far more than it enlightens. Of course, some aspects of the two phenomena must be similar, for all processes of genealogicallt constrained historical change must share some features in common. But the differences far outweigh the similarities in this case. Unfortunately, when we speak of “cultural evolution,” we unwittingly imply that this process shares essential similarity with the phenomenon most widely described by the same name—natural, or Darwinian, change. The common designation of “evolution” then leads to one of the most frequent and portentious errors in our analysis of human life and history—the overly reductionist assumption that the Darwinian natural paradigm will fully encompass our social and technological history as well. I do wish that the term “cultural evolution” would drop from use. Why not speak of something more neutral and descriptive—“cultural change,” for example? (Gould, 1996: 219-20)
(Nevermind the fact that “Darwinian evolution [through natural selection] is tautological; it’s not an explanatory mechanism. Gould and Lewontin didn’t go far enough in their critique of adaptionism.)
The brain has changed a lot in the past 100,000 years. Gould is obviously Ignorant.
” Darwinian natural paradigm will fully encompass our social and technological history as well.”
LMAO it’s like he doesn’t know what niche construction is. What an Idiot.
You claim to have read the book so what’s the context?
The context is self evident. He’s obviously referencing the upper Paleolithic revolution.
I don’t remember every passage of every book I’ve ever read, and neither do you.
I can pull up a relevant passage when needed in every book I’ve ever read.
We all watched that interview. Where were all the “relevant passages” you had then?
1 I brought one up. 2 I never hardly got a chance to speak.
So what’s the premise of the book? Don’t say “against progress” because that’s vague. It’s like me saying that Rushton’s book is about race, evolution and behavior.
What did Gould write about in the first half of the book? The second half?
You had multiple chances to speak, you just choked. Must be the low T.
“So what’s the premise of the book? Don’t say “against progress””
Hahahaha, you’re such a loser.
I guarantee my testosterone is higher than yours.
So what does he argue in parts one and two?
So the overly reductionist assumption that the Darwinian paradigm will subsume our technological and social history is true—reductionism is true? It’s like you never read the book…
“I guarantee my testosterone is higher than yours.”
Estrogen*
Just fixing your typo…
“It’s like you never read the book…”
It’s like you think disagreeing with the book must mean I haven’t read it….
Is Gould infallible?
“So the overly reductionist assumption that the Darwinian paradigm will subsume our technological and social history is true—reductionism is true?”
What kind of strawman is that? Words don’t matter. Switching “evolution” with “change” in that particular phrase is extremely redundant and makes it painfully obvious how emotionally invested Gould is, that he has to resort to whining about semantics just to make a “point”. Evolution is literally just change over time.
And the physical side of his “anti-reductionist” rants is equally stupid. It takes less than 10 seconds to do a cursory google search and you can find plenty of articles and studies clearly showing how our bodies and brains have changed in the past 100 thousand years.
Get an assay and get back to me.
I asked you to tell me what his points were in part 1 and 2.
One of the main points in part 2 is how the reductionist assumption is incorrect.
Can you answer the questions on what is in the book? You read it, didn’t you?
I don’t care what you asked RR. I was simply pointing out the errors in Gould’s work. If you don’t have a response that addresses my points then you’re just boring to me.
Actually i think it is true. Correct me if I am wrong but I think we only developed lactose tolerance after that.
But dairy products. have choline, which helps in neuronal growth. Connections between neurons could have increased .