I had a conversation with a friend recently in which I mentioned that I don’t believe that an intelligent and benevolent force created the universe and humanity. He argued that humanity was too unique and the human mind too intricate to be a product of evolution. I still believe that humanity evolved, but he made a good point; I can’t really wrap my head around how we came to be the way we are today. Take the human mind, for instance. The infinite possibilities of creation, expression, the ability to see nuances and patterns, the ability to appreciate and critique art, the ability to empathize and take into account numerous factors when judging a situation. Then there are things like reason, logic, understanding the concepts underlying math and music. And how about imagination? I’m constantly astounded at the kind of things people come up with. The inventiveness that people can demonstrate when faced with a seemingly impossible situation amazes me. And the need, the drive, to make something of ourselves, of our lives…that is something uniquely human. What I’m asking is…how? How did these amazing abilities and intricacies of the human mind and spirit come about? Animals have limited mental capacities; they are alive primarily to eat and reproduce. We evolved from them, but what gave us that unique human spark?
As I understand it, walking upright changed everything for us. It freed our hands to use tools, then we developed bigger brains so we could… uh, read the user manuals or something.
And a large part of our brains are sexual ornamentation. Music and art attract better mates.
Very true. Douchebags who play the guitar in the quad on college campuses are well aware of this fact.
This must be why my wife claims she’s smarter than I. 
I must still have the little brain, which is unable to read a manual. (until I’ve got the thing fully apart anyway)
Yeah, most of human society is basically a big-dick contest. Art, literature, music, science - it all comes down to wanting to score with that cute girl in the corner.
Hey! I used to resemble that remark!
**Stauderhorse **- when I ponder that big question, I think of it this way:
- Evolution = Survival of the Fittest
- Fittest = within your environment, you end up with a toolset that increases your fitness. Could be horns, claws, a hive structure - you get the picture. Many / most complex organisms have these tools, but one of the tools is really emphasized. So cats and dogs have powerful brains (relatively) but their claws and fangs, etc., are their big Evolutionary Bid for Fitness.
- For Humans, clearly our Big Evolutionary Advantage is our brain
- Brains develop certain attributes as part of becoming the Big Evolutionary Advantage - scientist are arguing how the concept of a cohesive personality - an “I” if you will - helps organize the various mental systems in our brain. In other words, our brains really contain multitudes (Walt Whitman was right) but there is evolutionary advantage to organizing those different aspects of our brains into a somewhat
coordinated entity. - Creativity, etc. - it doesn’t take much to extend that thinking to see that there is evolutionary advantage to creativity. Just like baby carnivores wrestle and play in a way that sets them up for the hunt, an active, creative mind prepares our brain to embrace our Evolutionary Advantage.
- Does creativity also play into sexual selection, per the comment above? I am sure it can be pegged as a proxy for genetic fitness in our species’ selection process, sure - but not as the primary driver. Our brains are more like cat claws than peacock feathers, evolutionarily speaking, IMHO…
If you give that direction of evolution a few million years, it would not be surprised that you end up with the nuanced, broad sense of art and creativity present in our species today.
How’s that?
The only difference between humans and other, semi-sentient species (chimps, dolphins, some birds, octopi, etc.) is a somewhat increased capacity for symbolic thought. Put another way, what sets us apart is that we’re more obsessed than any other organism with “this means that, which represents that.”
Art, language, and religion in my opinion have no evolutionary benefit in and of themselves; rather than functioning to attract mates, the behaviors that characterize humanity are more readily explainable as manifestations and outlets of the ability for symbolic thought which grants us greater group, rather than individual, survivability.
You’re making it more complex than it needs to be. “Fit” = able to live long enough to produce a bunch of offspring (and to attract a mate to produce them with).
You’re not understanding what evolution is. Evolution is NOT about producing the “perfect” specimen. It’s about reproducing.
Look at humans, they are built far from perfect, the biggest flaw is the the fact our windpipe and food pipe cross. Now that is a HUGE design flaw. But evolutions doesn’t back up and fix things.
As bad a choking can be not enough people choke to death to stop people from reproducing so there is no advantage.
Jane Goodall studies of gorillas confirms this. We see in very tiny ways, Gorillas are evolving. Now they aren’t going to evolve into humans, they’re evolving into becoming better at being gorillas.
Take this quote from the original poster
Other animals show this. Gorillas can emphathize. Social animals do this all the time. An elephant will mourn over the loss of her baby. Indeed, you can see films of lions killing a baby elephant, then the mother drives off the lions and mourns the baby refusing to let the lions near it. After a day or so, she give up.
Our pets can critique things. They know what string is good to play with and which sucks. I had a dog and would say “Go get a rag!” (We’d play the shake a rag game). He’d go to the rag bag and pull out the rags but he wouldn’t grab any rag. He’d choose the rag that felt best to him.
Another quote
Birds sing and use that concept to attract mates. Some birds can count the number of eggs in their nest and throw out fake ones laid by birds or reasearchers. Some birds don’t get it, but some birds can. Now I know a bird doesn’t do calculus but then again a bird is so busy looking for bugs and trying not to get eaten by cats.
While it’s good the OP is questioning things, I find when people say life is too complex to be simple trial and error, they aren’t really understanding how much of our life is just chance.
For instance, when I needed a job when I was 17, I saw a sign on Red Roof Inn saying “help wanted.” So I went in and got the job. I needed ANY job. My whole adult life has basically been, in one form or another, associated with hotels. If I hadn’t seen that sign, my life would be completely different.
Olivia Newton-John has a song that has a line "Just one innocent smile, that I could’ve missed / That’s all it took to start all of this.
And that is true, think about your own spouse and kids, that’s all chance. But on some level it disturbs us to think the kids we love so much are a result of us being too lazy to go to a drug store that night 
Finally when you look at statistics, you have to realize this:
Statistics DO NOT tell you IF something WILL happen or WON’T happen. It tells you what is LIKELY to happen.
This confuses people. If I say something has a one in a billion chance, people equate that with impossible. “One in a billion” says something is very unlikely to happen, it doesn’t mean it CAN’T happen.
As a matter of fact if I was on a jury and the prosecuter said “There’s only a one in a billion chance someone else could’ve committed the crime,” I’d be apt to find that person “not guilty,” based on that statement. For while “one in a billion” seems like the odds are slim, there are 6.7 billion people in the world. So if there was a “one in a billion” chance, that means at least 5.7 other people could’ve done it. (That’s a bit oversimplified but you get my point)
The problem I have with arguments like this “something is too complex,” to me at least, boils down to basically saying “I can’t understand it, so ergo, it isn’t.”
Well we can talk to each other which is the functional equivalent of telepathy. Other animals can’t do that - or only in rudimentary ways.
I think you’re overrating the human brain and underrating the brains of other species too. Most of the things that make us so unique aren’t really the product or capacities of a single brain, they’re the products of lots of reasonably powered mammalian brains working together very very well - sort of like the way insects can create complex structures and societies even though any one insect has only a small set of instructions. All this stuff builds on itself, through time and across six billion cooperating organisms, so. Yeah amazing things happen. Technologies spread.
Basically you got mammalian brain + social coordination of insects + ability to rapidly spread and retain technological innovation + six billion of us + large, long-lived predator.
It seems unfair, really.
But on you’re own? You really think if you grew up on your own in the forest primeval you’d be contemplating art and doing math? You’d look pretty much like any other mammal.
Of course you are correct - but that doesn’t change my main point in the phrase that you quote: that species typically have one or two tools/strategies that evolve into their advantage…
Actually, there are some recent studies that show that some animals have pretty evolved language. I can’t cite anything, because I can’t even remember where I heard it, but there was a recent study on some small animals. Gerbils maybe. I don’t know how the researchers figured it out, but when one of them walked into the room where the gerbils were, they’d make a sequence of sounds and body movements. When someone else walked in, they’d make a different sequence. The researches essentially decoded the language to mean “Hey, Bob with the red shirt just walked into the room.” “Hey, Joe with the blue shirt just walked into the room.” “Hey, Joe just walked into the room, but he’s wearing Bob’s red shirt.”
I believe the term is a Contingency in evolution, a unique one of a kind feature that sometimes evolves. An elephant’s trunk, the tusk of a narwhal whale, human level intelligence, just a fluke.
However, Neanderthals have been walking upright longer than modern Homo Sapiens and also had large brains, made fire, made and used tools, engaged in burial rituals, and some other elements of primitive societies – yet they did not make it over the long haul.
There’s not universal agreement on the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans, but DNA testing has suggested Neanderthals diverged from Homo Sapiens about 500,000 years ago and they seem to have died out about 300,000 years ago, whereas modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago.
Apparently we evolved from one of several species that sprung up from a common ancestor at some point, and we were the species that survived - uh, so far anyway.
From reading Bryson’s A Short Hisotry of Nearly Everything*, I gather that evolution takes a lot of funny bounces. We didn’t evolve from tadpoles in a nice straight line. We easily might not have evolved at all (unless you believe God wanted it to happen). I think of it this way: if we hadn’t arrived at this point, we wouldn’t be able to wonder how it happened. If that doesn’t help, consider this question: how is it that I was born in Chicago and not in Berlin or Sydney? Because that’s the way the shit went down.
- highly recommended
That’s 30,000 years ago. There was overlap between our two species.
There’s good reason to believe that early Homo sapiens did not engage in many behaviors that modern people consider “uniquely human”. Anatomically modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years, but when we became behaviorally modern is a subject of considerable debate among experts.
Many scholars believe that for at least 100,000 years – half the time we’ve existed as a species – humans had little or nothing that we would recognize today as a culture. They could make stone tools and use fire (as could even earlier hominids), but there is reason to believe that they did not have complex language, did not create art, did not make music, did not make decorations or personal ornaments, did not hold spiritual beliefs, and did not engage in much experimentation or innovation.
The “Great Leap Forward” hypothesis holds that human culture took off relatively quickly about 50,000 years ago. This is supported by the archaeological record. The earliest musical instruments (bone flutes) that have been discovered are 35,000-45,000 years old, although singing, hand-clapping, and drumming had likely been around well before anyone was making flutes. The earliest known jewelry (beads) is 40,000-75,000 years old. The oldest surviving cave paintings are maybe 30,000 years old. Deliberate burials (which indicate some kind of spiritual belief) predate these artistic artifacts, but there isn’t clear evidence that Homo sapiens buried their dead until about 100,000 years ago.
A competing hypothesis holds that human culture didn’t suddenly kick into high gear but that early humans had gradually been making advances over thousands of years. Evidence of beadmaking and ritual burial prior to 50,000 years ago does suggest that we were doing some things much earlier than others. And with archaeology one does always have to be careful not to take absence of proof as proof of absence. If for instance early Homo sapiens were making wooden ornaments or poking holes in seeds to use as beads then we might never know because the evidence would likely have rotted away thousands and thousands of years ago.
But AFAIK few anthropologists or archaeologists believe that Homo sapiens achieved full behavioral modernity at exactly the same time as anatomical modernity. Based on the evidence we have, it seems pretty likely that our early ancestors had brains that were physically like yours or mine for many generations before they began using these brains to sing songs, create myths, or even style their hair.
That bug is a feature. Without the sharp angle in our throat, we would not be able to make most consonant sounds. The tendency to choke < greater ability to create language.
Seconded. Bryson is great, this one of his is my favorite.
Avoid I’m a Stranger Here Myself, though. That one is so VERY mid-90s.
“WHAT IS UP WITH AIRPORTS, HUH? WHY CAN’T I BRING A CAN OF STERNO ONTO THE PLANE, WOT-WOT?! WHAT DO THEY THINK COULD HAPPEN?!”
“WHAT IS UP WITH COMPUTERS? I THINK THEY MIGHT TAKE OFF! AMERICANS ARE LOUD! WOT-WOT!”
Not that I know enough about acoustic physiology to evaluate the validity of your factual claim, but: Big whoop. We could surely just make and pay attention to different sounds instead.
A quick answer.
A week ago ,I read that when humans tamed fire , and sat arond that fire, progress and culture resulted.
I forgot where I read this (mostly a local newspaper ) , but sounded interesting to me.