I have an hypothesis that the key ability of humankind that evolved over the millennia is learning. Broadly speaking this means the awareness, recognition, and synthesis of patterns. This doesn’t refer just to academic learning or book knowledge, but instead to the more generalized concept of pattern recognition. We are learners.
Everything we do is about foraging for new patterns or confirming previously learned patterns. Of course, we forage for patterns to survive – to eat, sleep, find water, mate and avoid predation. While in the modern world it can be hard to see how everything we do is about these basic survival aspects so far removed is our daily experience from pulling food from the ground and running from sabre tooth tigers, no doubt our homes, transportation, logistics networks and so forth have been built up to provide essentials for increasing populations. And the one common behavioral thread from how our pre history ancestors likely lived and how we live today is Learning. This is the biological strategy developed from our interaction with the world over time.
Our physiology compared to the rest of the animal kingdom favors us using our large brains and capable senses to forage for and use patterns vs. terrifying strength or built in camouflage, etc. A baby can do very little physically for a very long time while it is learning. Our period of growth to adolescence and self sufficiency is very long. There is a lot to learn to become surviving human.
Certainly all living things learn to some degree. The simplest creatures all of have some sorta of biological memory that helps them find food and avoid destruction – though that memory is often quite different from ours and may not even be anything we’d recognize. The difference is the sophistication and complexity of that learning made possible by our complex nervous system. As individuals we learn a great deal. As a species we learn a great deal. Over time we are able to store and retrieve an increasing amount of learning that we pass on to our descendents through culture, written records, and now the internet and digital technology. There is simply no other animal we’ve found that does this to the scale we do it.
Plenty of literature suggests it’s language or consciousness or art that makes us “human” or “different that the rest of animals.” Rather than saying learning makes us a superior life form or different than other animals I’m merely suggesting that this our evolutionary strategy that developed and that all of those other things people mention come from this ability and need to learn. We are constantly in search of more efficient ways to discover and transmit patterns that help us survive. Music, language, art, writing, sport, etc all of this are varied, efficient and robust ways to teach other patterns. Yes, they often have more pragmatic and immediately practical effects like making us attractive to mates, etc. but they also are transmissions of patterns we’ve found interesting or useful or they help unearth other patterns.
Now, this being per speculation as so much of evolutionary biological thinking is, it’s quite possible that everything that allows us to learn was simply evolving in response to other things than learning. Perhaps that’s true, but the emergent effect is that we happen to be extremely powerful learnings and we have yet to devise anything that can learn more effectively. It’s unsurprising to me that our key enterprise is developing non human machinery to help us learn and that might learn better than us. This is literally what we must do, it’s all we do do.
Why is any of this important? It is a perspective that might put various aspects of organizing our lives, societies, countries, world, technology in a new, more resilient light. If learning is the key ability we have to survive should we not organize around this and NOT do things that reduce learning? Should we not amplify our ability and scope of learning?
Maybe that’s too directional of a way to think about it. Perhaps it matters not if there’s something we OUGHT to do and rather we Do What We Do and that’s the whole lot of it. EIther way, as an individual looking to find better ways to survive and thrive I find it useful to think through and understand what might be underlying it all. You know, seems like I should learn.
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