Cultural Animals

Crows can do some pretty amazing things. They can shape hooks from wire to extract bugs from crevices in trees. They can be taught to identify a triangle from a group of various shapes. Beyond these skills, they even seem to be able to do some rudimentary abstracting. For example, once they’ve learned how to make hooks, they can make them out of new materials they have never seen before. If they’ve learned how to identify triangles made of one substance, they can correctly identify the triangle even if its color or material differs from the triangle they were trained with. 

As talented as crows are, they pale in comparison to humans. Relative to crows, we are problem-solving gods. We are able to invent novel solutions to problems we have never faced before. On top of this, we are cultural animals. Individual innovations are passed on to the next generation. The aggregate of all of these enables us to build civilizations. 

I learned about crows, creativity, and culture while reading Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. In the section on culture, I was particularly struck by how powerful it is that we humans build upon past solutions rather than reinventing everything on our own. The author uses the example of an iPhone. He says that it is such a complex machine that there is no way that one human could have invented even a single part of it on his own. It is the result of the accumulated technology of many generations.  

This week, I invite you to harness the power of being a cultural animal.

What are the problems you are facing right now? Which of these problems are you trying to invent a solution to on your own? What would change if you tapped into the accumulated cultural wisdom of the people who have faced similar problems before? Where might you look to find this wisdom? 

God Bless,
Dan