Specialists
We don't live the way we used to. We don't live in caves. We don't defend slavery anymore. Humans do change the way they behave—eventually. We do evolve, somehow—but not always. It is not inevitable; it is a choice. There are moments in the human saga when despair reigns, when it appears that this time we won't evolve. Civilizations and societies before us have stood at this place: at the crossroads between despair and greatness. Most failed the test and slid into oblivion—either rapidly or slowly, but at some point inexorably. Are we next in line? Will we follow their example or defy it?
There is good news: we do evolve, which means that we can evolve—when we want to and when we have to. How we do that matters, because the future has a nasty habit of showing up whether or not we are prepared for it. When we keenly grasp how humans evolve and actively participate in the process, we ascend to greatness. When we ignore the lessons and refuse to join the game, we descend into a hell of our own making. If you're the type who likes to grasp things keenly and actively join the game, keep reading. Here is how we have always done it and how we will do it again—if we so choose.
Charles Darwin described how our bodies evolved: natural selection and all that. But how does the way we behave change and evolve?
Our physical traits are passed on to our progeny through our genes. If we are parents, part of us will inhabit the future. The way we behave is called culture. It includes all those things we pass on to our progeny through teaching, learning, mimicking, and incentives. Culture is passed on through memes (rhymes with 'themes'). A meme is a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation. Memes are ways of thinking and behaving that are taught and learned, generation after generation. Richard Dawkins (1976) explains them as follows:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. . . . Memes are the DNA of human society, influencing every aspect of mind, behavior, and culture.
We humans are a social species. We are built to mimic. Most of us will spend our lives imitating the behaviors of our social group, understanding the world the way our group understands the world, choosing essentially what we were taught to choose and acting in ways that were modeled for us. We will mimic more or less happily until we die. Even then, when we come to the end of our days—the way we die, the way we are laid to rest, and the way our passing will be mourned—will be in the form of customs received from our specific culture. Even that most intimate and profound human moment will be mimicked, guided by culture.
It stands to reason that if we are built to mimic, we require things to mimic. The things we mimic the most enthusiastically for the longest time are the things we believe give us a survival advantage. We are an adaptive species. We do more than just survive. Weather patterns change, streams dry up, herds of animals move on. The way we used to survive doesn't work any longer, and we find ourselves in a state of stress and decline. So we pick up, move into a strange new environment, and figure out what to do next. Those who figure out what to do next then pass it along. Once enough of us are effectively behaving in new ways, we thrive again.
This finding of new behaviors and passing them on is a story within the story of human evolution, and it might be your story. As a species, we have a built-in mechanism that, when working properly, makes sure we develop just the right memes at just the right time. Just as ant colonies have specialists—subsets of ants that basically do one thing for the benefit of the entire colony—humans too have specialists. Some of us are built to work on the future while everyone else is busy working on the present. It is an ingenious division of labor that gives us enormous advantages as a species, because it allows us to take care of the present and the future at the same time.
The pattern of human culture has always been to first create adaptations to our environment, then preserve and pass them on to the next generation. This means that we are naturally about 90 percent conservative and about 10 percent innovative; if it were the other way around, we would have been wiped out long ago by too many failed experiments. With this mix, healthy societies are able to prepare for the future by shaping it to their liking.
A small cadre of humans has inborn traits that compel its members to create the memes that everyone else in their group will eventually mimic, the adaptations that will both create and ensure the group's future. Every group has a few such individuals already in its midst. These rare individuals are uniquely suited to drive human progress. Both who they are and what they do demonstrates the effectiveness of a new set of ideas and behaviors. After a certain amount of obligatory gear grinding, groups that make room for these specialists move gracefully into the future. In contrast, groups that make it too socially or economically painful for these specialists to emerge grow increasingly rigid and stupid and find their futures in peril.
Human behavior is all about gains and losses. We fear and flee from losses; we desire and pursue gains. We don't change and evolve as long as it appears that the new behavior will result in far more losses than gains, no matter how compelling the long-term argument is for the new behavior. This creates an impasse. The domain and everyone in it feels stuck.
Then comes the Specialist and his or her small but undeniable demonstration. That changes the apparent ratio of losses to gains. To the keen eye of the opportunist, the perceived risks (possible losses) of the new behavior just dropped to a manageable level and the possible gains just doubled. The impasse has been breached. The opportunist with skills and resources sees a future personal bonanza and dives in to make the idea come alive on a large scale. Soon the majority will be pouring through the opening created by the Specialist and enlarged by the opportunist.
The Specialist mechanism that is embedded within our species is marvelous to witness—at a distance. At close range there is another facet: the story within the story that is little known. Becoming a Specialist often comes at a very high social and emotional cost to the individuals who are built this way. Those who are made this way can't help it. They can't spend their lives just mimicking, and they don't know why. All this usually happens within a domain. We are by nature a group species. We used to group ourselves by blood: by family, clan, or tribe. Then we started grouping by location or religion. Now we tend to group ourselves more by what we do. A domain is a group of people who are doing the same thing. They have a shared set of goals, activities, and concerns. A domain can be a profession, a science, a sport, an industry, an art, an organization, a company, or an institution (to name just a few). The status quo is the way in which almost everyone in the domain does things.
©2010. Tim Daniel. All rights reserved. Reprinted from The Pursuit of Nobility. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442 |
