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By Root 516 0

by 100,000 per cent, from perhaps three million to nearly seven billion people. It has given itself comforts and luxuries to a level that no other species can even imagine. It has colonised every habitable corner of the planet and explored almost every uninhabitable one. It has altered the appearance, the genetics and the chemistry of the world and pinched perhaps 23 per cent of the productivity of all land plants for its own purposes. It has surrounded itself with peculiar, non-random arrangements of atoms called technologies, which it invents, reinvents and discards almost continuously. This is not true for other creatures, not even brainy ones like chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, parrots and octopi. They may occasionally use tools, they may occasionally shift their ecological niche, but they do not ‘raise their standard of living’, or experience ‘economic growth’. They do not encounter ‘poverty’ either. They do not progress from one mode of living to another – nor do they deplore doing so. They do not experience agricultural, urban, commercial, industrial and information revolutions, let alone Renaissances, Reformations, Depressions, Demographic Transitions, civil wars, cold wars, culture wars and credit crunches. As I sit here at my desk, I am surrounded by things – telephones, books, computers, photographs, paper clips, coffee mugs – that no monkey has ever come close to making. I am spilling digital information on to a screen in a way that no dolphin has ever managed. I am aware of abstract concepts – the date, the weather forecast, the second law of thermodynamics – that no parrot could begin to grasp. I am definitely different. What is it that makes me so different?

It cannot just be that I have a bigger brain than other animals. After all, late Neanderthals had on average bigger brains than I do, yet did not experience this headlong cultural change. Moreover, big though my brain may be compared with another animal species, I have barely the foggiest inkling how to make coffee cups and paper clips, let alone weather forecasts. The psychologist Daniel Gilbert likes to joke that every member of his profession lives under the obligation at some time in his career to complete a sentence which begins: ‘The human being is the only animal that ...’ Language, cognitive reasoning, fire, cooking, tool making, self-awareness, deception, imitation, art, religion, opposable thumbs, throwing weapons, upright stance, grandparental care – the list of features suggested as unique to human beings is long indeed. But then the list of features unique to aardvarks or bare-faced go-away birds is also fairly long. All of these features are indeed uniquely human and are indeed very helpful in enabling modern life. But I will contend that, with the possible exception of language, none of them arrived at the right time, or had the right impact in human history to explain the sudden change from a merely successful ape-man to an ever-expanding progressive moderniser. Most of them came much too early in the story and had no such ecological effect. Having sufficient consciousness to want to paint your body or to reason the answer to a problem is nice, but it does not lead to ecological world conquest.

Clearly, big brains and language may be necessary for human beings to cope with a life of technological modernity. Clearly, human beings are very good at social learning, indeed compared with even chimpanzees humans are almost obsessively interested in faithful imitation. But big brains and imitation and language are not themselves the explanation of prosperity and progress and poverty. They do not themselves deliver a changing standard of living. Neanderthals had all of these: huge brains, probably complex languages, lots of technology. But they never burst out of their niche. It is my contention that in looking inside our heads, we would be looking in the wrong place to explain this extraordinary capacity for change in the species. It was not something that happened within a brain. It was some thing that happened between brains. It was a collective