Well maybe you should read the book! I think that there are a few concrete points you can disagree on.
One thing I think about a lot is: are we sure this is unique, or did something else like luck or geography
somehow play an important role in one (or a handful) of groups of sapiens happening to develop some
strong (or “viral”) positive-feedback cultural learning mechanisms that eventually dramatically outpaced
other creatures?
I’m not an expert, but I’m not so sure that this is right; I think that anatomically modern humans already had significantly better abilities to learn and transmit culture than other animals, because anatomically modern humans generally need to extensively prepare their food (cooking, grinding etc.) in a culturally transmitted way. So by the time we get to sapiens we are already pretty strongly on this trajectory.
I think there’s an element of luck: other animals do have cultural transmission (for example elephants and killer whales) but maybe aren’t anatomically suited to discover fire and agriculture. Some quirks of group size likely also play a role. It’s definitely a feedback loop though; once you are an animal with culture, then there is increased selection pressure to be better at culture, which creates more culture etc.
If Homo sapiens are believed to have originated around 200,000 years ago, but only developed agricultural techniques around 12,000 years ago, the earliest known city 9,000 years ago, and only developed a modern-style writing system maybe 5,000 years ago, are we sure that those humans who lived for 90%+ of human “pre-history” without agriculture, large groups, and writing systems would look substantially more intelligent to us than chimpanzees?
I’m gonna go with absolutely yes, see my above comment about anatomically modern humans and food prep. I think you are severely under-estimating the sophistication of hunter-gatherer technology and culture!
The degree to which ‘objective’ measures of intelligence like IQ are culturally specific is an interesting question.
Well maybe you should read the book! I think that there are a few concrete points you can disagree on.
I’m not an expert, but I’m not so sure that this is right; I think that anatomically modern humans already had significantly better abilities to learn and transmit culture than other animals, because anatomically modern humans generally need to extensively prepare their food (cooking, grinding etc.) in a culturally transmitted way. So by the time we get to sapiens we are already pretty strongly on this trajectory.
I think there’s an element of luck: other animals do have cultural transmission (for example elephants and killer whales) but maybe aren’t anatomically suited to discover fire and agriculture. Some quirks of group size likely also play a role. It’s definitely a feedback loop though; once you are an animal with culture, then there is increased selection pressure to be better at culture, which creates more culture etc.
I’m gonna go with absolutely yes, see my above comment about anatomically modern humans and food prep. I think you are severely under-estimating the sophistication of hunter-gatherer technology and culture!
The degree to which ‘objective’ measures of intelligence like IQ are culturally specific is an interesting question.