culture

All of the previous examples I have highlighted until now, show living beings collaborating and cooperating require a basic feature: communication. Communication involves shared channels in which the individuals that form a group or interaction have cues and signals that can be understood by other members and entities. These are mainly visual, chemical, acoustical, and vibrational cues. With these cues, the basic structure of formations larger than the individual exists, allowing for the generation of other ways of interacting with the environment that individuals alone cannot achieve.

Out of the three bases of global reach (intelligence, collaboration, and communication), I will focus on communication as the most critical for our understanding of how we got here—that is, the capacity to communicate at many and diverse levels and across a wide range of scales. From really superficial to deeply technical ones, from proximity to global.

At some point in this arrangement, a complex cognitive structure emerged in the form of language. This sophisticated communication would encompass most forms of categorising the external and internal world of individuals in any group united by communication. Many debates concerning the limits of knowledge originate from analysing where our knowledge of the world around us is constrained by language. These debates span back centuries, for example G. Berkeley’s, A Treatise on Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) or J. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), or take really interesting forms, like the Sapir-Whorf effect, where language might shape the essence of how we see our world. For example, many languages do not have words for numbers larger than 3 or 4, but might have hundreds of words for different scents, which we lack.

In any case, at some point language was used not only for the communication between members of in-groups, but also with external groups, becoming a federation of groups, as anthropological research shows. That is where everything really changed, where “Culture” emerged in the sophisticated form that we know and where information, collaboration, exchange, reduction of conflict and complex networks would extend the wealth of possibilities of how interact and shape our environment. This level of inter-group communication is something that has not been achieved successfully by any other living thing on this planet —maybe with the exception of the Fire Ants, and they are a only doing it for the last 100 years or so. As humans, we achieved the creation of a structure —culture— which allows detailed communication between virtually all the members of our species.

Once communication between groups emerges, everything changes. This accumulative communication allows for the complexity of the tools we use to be open-ended, as the evolution of technology and tools like large particle accelerators or space satellite constellations shows.

Communication is also open-ended, meaning that it can potentially keep increasing indefinitely, probably linked to the complexity of tools. In nature, communication channels tend to be very limited and do not show growth or evolution by themselves, while human languages are always in continuous evolution—incorporating new concepts and terms, combining existing ones, losing or forgetting others, and actually forging what is needed. This applies not only to language but also to symbols, signs, experiences, training, repetitions, etc. This indefinite addition of communication elements adapts to achieve the desired level of communication, understanding, and sharing of the initial information. To put it simply, to pass on a specific message. This depth of communication also requires boundless collaboration to construct the complex concepts needed for sophisticated knowledge.

All in all, this open-ended way of sharing messages has created what we have come to know as culture and cultural evolution—the body of messaging and knowledge that is passed from one generation to another, with the capacity to add new pieces to that pool or lose them. Moreover, we have, in principle, the limitless capacity to transmit accumulated knowledge and messages to other human beings, as long as there is a shared communication channel.

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