Cultural evolutionary tipping points in the storage and transmission of information.

R Alexander Bentley,Michael J O’Brien

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00569

Abstract

Human culture has evolved through a series of major tipping points in information storage and communication. The first was the appearance of language, which enabled communication between brains and allowed humans to specialize in what they do and to participate in complex mating games. The second was information storage outside the brain, most obviously expressed in the “Upper Paleolithic Revolution” – the sudden proliferation of cave art, personal adornment, and ritual in Europe some 35,000–45,000 years ago. More recently, this storage has taken the form of writing, mass media, and now the Internet, which is arguably overwhelming humans’ ability to discern relevant information. The third tipping point was the appearance of technology capable of accumulating and manipulating vast amounts of information outside humans, thus removing them as bottlenecks to a seemingly self-perpetuating process of knowledge explosion. Important components of any discussion of cultural evolutionary tipping points are tempo and mode, given that the rate of change, as well as the kind of change, in information storage and transmission has not been constant over the previous million years.

Highlights

In Kurzweil’s (2005) best-selling book, The Singularity is Near, the well-known inventor and futurist predicts that by the year 2040 people will be able to upload their brains onto computers – just one of many incredible changes portrayed for popular audiences in Barry Ptolomy’s 2009 movie, Transcendent Man
That will be the second tipping point that we examine, and it is worth pointing out that it highly visible because of the nature of the phenomena that herald the change in tempo and mode
The pace of cultural evolution has accelerated over time, much of it tied to the ways in which humans have been able to harness and manage information

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In Kurzweil’s (2005) best-selling book, The Singularity is Near, the well-known inventor and futurist predicts that by the year 2040 people will be able to upload their brains onto computers – just one of many incredible changes portrayed for popular audiences in Barry Ptolomy’s 2009 movie, Transcendent Man. With respect to the time series of events, these signals include slower recovery from perturbations, unequal rates of recovery in the different directions toward equilibrium, and increased autocorrelation, variance, and “flickering” in the time series Aside from this list of warning signals, we can consider some tipping points of the past, including the very recent past, where the mode of gene–culture evolution changed dramatically through new forms of information transmission. Evidence suggests that the evolution of breathing control and increased brain size could have enabled complex communication by the time of the last ancestor common to both Neanderthals and modern humans at about 600,000 years ago (Krings et al, 1997; MacLarnon and Hewitt, 2004) Both Neanderthal and modern human populations shared the derived form of the FOXP2 gene (Krause et al, 2007), which has been implicated in the development of speech and language (Enard et al, 2002). The evolution of ideas reveals this nested pattern (Bentley and Maschner, 2000), but identifying the pattern does not explain when the punctuated transition will occur

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION