On Mount Athos, in northern Greece, a monk rises before dawn to sing the same office that has been sung on that mountain for more than 1,000 years. He learned it from older monks who came before him, who learned it in turn in an unbroken chain stretching back to Athanasios the Athonite, in AD963.
Over the centuries, individual monks have come and gone, and yet their chants, prayers, oaths, costumes and ceremonies endure. This persistence is remarkable and revealing: cultural traditions endure because they share a fundamental property with biological organisms. They are alive. Not metaphorically, but literally.
I believe that human culture isn’t just an accidental add-on to organic life; rather, it’s a separate expression of life in its own right. But first we should define our terms. What is life? There isn’t just one answer; indeed, the lack of a clear definition has become a kind of bad joke among life scientists, who can’t quite agree what it is they actually study.
One attribute of life that most biologists would say is critical, however, is the encoding, processing and transmission of information. In organic life, this is the function of genes. Information about how to survive and reproduce is written in DNA, processed by cells and transmitted over generations. Thanks to occasional copying errors and the sifting of natural selection, biological information has evolved to produce the extraordinary diversity of life on Earth today.
But millions of years ago, a second kind of self-perpetuating information appeared – one that wasn’t written in DNA or read by cells, but which nonetheless began to replicate and propagate itself through time. And it has evolved and diversified to create the stupefying complexity of the modern world. We call it culture.
Cultures consist of knowledge or behaviours transmitted from one individual to another through social learning. We used to believe culture was uniquely human, but animals have cultures, too. Chimpanzees from some parts of west Africa use rocks to crack nuts, for example, but in other parts they don’t, even though the same nuts and rocks are available; in some places they strip sticks of their leaves to fish termites from their nests; and elsewhere they use moss as a sponge from which to drink water. Each population has its own particular way of doing things.
Our ancestors were apes who presumably had cultures at least as complex as those of chimpanzees. But then, as the Earth moved in and out of a series of ice ages starting about 2.6m years ago, something extraordinary happened. Culture began to overtake genes as the primary force shaping hominin evolution.
We became hunter-gatherers – a lifestyle for which we were ill-equipped genetically, but which nevertheless allowed us to thrive thanks to culture. Cultural innovations accumulated in hunter-gatherer groups – how to knap stone tools, track animals, process a root that would otherwise poison us. Where culture led, genes followed. More sophisticated tools and the control of fire allowed us to prepare and cook food, and consequently our jaws, teeth and guts shrank. At the same time, our brains – organs for acquiring, storing and transmitting cultural information – ballooned.
Bigger brains were not simply a consequence of culture – they accelerated it. As brains became better at learning from others, they could acquire and preserve ever greater amounts of cultural knowledge. But the big breakthrough came with language.
Language is not only a fundamental part of culture; it’s also our most powerful means of transmitting cultural information. Of course, language couldn’t have emerged fully formed. It must have evolved gradually, from a simple form of communication to a more complex one, akin to the languages we speak today.
Once even simple language existed, however, everything changed. Knowledge could be explained. Skills could be taught. Techniques could be learned faster, more accurately and with greater fidelity than mere visual copying could allow. Culture went viral.
As brains became better adapted to a world in which some information was available in linguistic form, and able to learn more words and phrases, language itself became gradually more complex, and capable of transmitting more complex cultural information. This positive feedback between language, culture and our neurological hardware turned the human brain into a sophisticated device for the acquisition and production of language.
Specific words and phrases weren’t hardwired into our brains, of course, but the ability to learn and use them became hardwired. This capability was entirely new, and constituted a crucial turning point in our cultural evolution, as revolutionary and important as the origin of DNA and the genetic code in biological evolution.
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Culture and languages diversified wildly as humans spread across the planet, while genetic differences between populations remained minimal. Cultural evolution accelerated away, creating different religions, styles of music, art, farming systems and complex civilisations. It led ultimately to the superabundance of human culture today – from Mozart to Madonna; dim sum to doughnuts; from St Peter’s Basilica to the Taj Mahal; Japanese tea ceremonies to Celebrity Traitors; and from heart transplants to the Hubble space telescope.
Life on Earth has evolved in two phases: first, biological, then cultural. But we may now be on the verge of the next critical juncture in the history of life. We’re currently witnessing the emergence of a new kind of information that can perpetuate itself – machines capable of writing their own code. A third form of life and mode of evolution may be beginning, in which case this will be the most extraordinary moment in human history to be alive as an observer. What might this mean for our future? And what can we learn from the past in order to prepare for this new phase of life on Earth?
Jonathan Loh is an honorary fellow in the School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, and the author of Life Story: From Cells to Civilisations and Beyond (Bodley Head).
Further reading
Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny by Michael Tomasello (Harvard, £20.95)
The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar (Penguin, £11.99)
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (Oxford, £12.99)
