The different layers of reality (2): How walking on two legs might have given birth to human culture
It is common knowledge that human beings are born prematurely. One of the most popular proposed underlying causes is the co-occurrence of bipedal locomotion and cortical extension: mothers’ pelvises got narrower while children’s heads were getting larger. As a result, babies started to come to birth without being fully matured. That might actually be one of our main distinctions from other mammals: we are born unfinished. But what are the implications from having our brain ending its maturation outside the womb? I would argue that they might be huge, as it might have given birth to human culture.
First, having our brain developing in the outside world exposes it to the external environment and its influences, meaning that it begins to interact with external information much earlier, while still being very plastic. This implies that our brain finishes being shaped by both internal and external influences, while other animals’ developing brains do not interact much with external information. In other words, most animals’ brains are almost fully determined by DNA and other biological constraints. Of course, brains remain relatively flexible information processing systems able to adapt to external situations, and this across the animal realm, but only the human brain seems to have such a tight relationship with external information.
We could phrase it that way: we are freed from strict biological conditioning earlier, letting more space for external influences to shape our brain. This process might have somewhat untied us from instinctive, automatic behavior determined by biological/genetic underlying mechanisms. In parallel, it gives our brain a more direct access to what I would call para-epigenetic information, or external information collected and processed by other biological systems (i.e., our peers) that will feed the newly born brain.
I would go even further. It is likely that brains began to mature outside the womb before the existence of what we commonly call culture. In fact, it might be this newly gained flexibility, this new access to external information, that might have allowed for the emergence of human culture. Think about it that way: how would culture exist if it couldn’t influence the way our brains are shaped?
But what is culture? It is an external collective information processing system, much faster and much more flexible than our brain and its biological constraints. Culture allowed for a complexification of the information that us, as humanity, could process. It is not only an information pit for our brains, it plays the role of a second, bigger brain. It has its own memory, its own processing capacities, its own biases… It offers us a new estimate of physical reality, and collective information processing, across individuals and generations, got us closer, and allowed us to (partly) free us from psychological limitations and biases. With culture, a new layer of reality is born.
To summarize, what we commonly call culture corresponds to the development of an external information processing system. This external system emerged thanks to our newly acquired flexibility and exposure to our external environment (and our peers). Being exposed to external information is what might have freed us from our instinct and desautomatized our behavior. This opened new doors in terms of the complexity of information processing we could reach as a collective. We are born unfinished, but we end our gestation in the womb of society.
