The Mother of Invention

An Irishman who was asked the way onwards to Dublin by atraveller made the helpful reply: "WelI, if I were YoU, I would

not start from hererr. It. is a reply which NaLure, on thehighroad of evolution, must have heard repeatedly. Imagine herpredicament some 10 million years ago. She has found her way tothe milestone which marks the chimpanzee-l-ike ancesLor of man.rrExcuse me, God", she says Lo a passing Olympian, trbuL can you

tel-l- me which road will lead to homo sapiens?" 'rlf I were You, Iwoul-d not start f rom hererr .

Why is a chimpanzee such an unpromising starting point forhuman evol-ution? Because, in short, it is too good at being achimpanzee.

What changes - what. improvements - might we think of making

to a chimpanzee which would set it on the path to being a man?

Give it greater strength? sharper t.eeth? a better memory? a

warmer coaL of fur? in a1l those respect,s a chimpanzee is alreadymore than the equal of a man. Wel-l then, endow it wj-th a

cl-everer brain dh, there's a thought - for chimpanzees areindeed less good at solving certain kinds of intel-Iectual-problems than are human beings. But suppose we were to give a

chj-mpanzee a cleverer problem-solving brain, what exactly wouldit do with it? what problems - if any - confront a chimpanzee?

We11, perhaps - who knows - the chimpanzee would use itsbrain t.o learn the art of making fire but the absence of fireis not apparenttry a problem for a chimpanzee, when, with it.shair-covered body, it seldom if ever has reason to feel- cold.Perhaps it would l-earn how to build l-adders but. why should a

chimpanzee want a ladder when it already has the arms and legs toenable it to climb the tallest tree? Perhaps, then, it wouldlearn to draw maps but what need has a chimpanzee of maps

when, so psychologist.s te11 us, chimpanzees already have a

remarkable capacity t.o form pictures in memory of t.heir spatialworld. The fact is that chimpanzees, as a species, have got mostof their immediate problems licked already. Being admirably

adapt.ed to t.heir way of life just as they are, they would, itSeems, have nothing much to gain from added cleverness- A

chimpanzee, blessed with Einstein's skill at problem solving,would I Suspect carry on very much like any other chimpanzee.

No, to turn a chj-mpanzee into a man, it is nOt improvements

which are wanted. Just the opposite. It. is impairments- Human

beings have, I think, got where they are today precisel-y because

Nature, Several- million years d9o, adopted the extraordinarypolicy of turning out sub-standard chimpanzees. Having firstmade an animal which was relat,ively problem-free, She could not

apparently leave well alone: instead she systematically undid her

handiwork creating problems where none had previously existed.What a piece of work was the ancestor of man! And what a

curiously incompetent piece of work he has become. Human beingshave, in a sense, gone backwards in evolution, becoming

progressively less well adapted for survival. Havj-ng createdthe chimpanzee-Iike ancestor, Nature deliberatelystripped him ofsome of his most precious asseLs. She reduced his strength, Look

away his fur, blunted his canine teeth, impaired his memory,

meddled with his sexual cycles And then, having produced t.hispathetic problem-ridden creature she set him on the evolutionaryhighroad with but a single talent in his knapsack - the gift ofthat remarkably clever brain.

"Sweet," it is said, "are the uses Of adversity. Adversity,inadequacy, dire necessity have been manls constant companions on

his journey. His companions but, more than Lhat, his pilots.For, in the very act of putting problems in man's way, necessityproved to be the mother to a series of remarkable inventions.Man, deprived of biological answers to the problems of survival,was left with no other opt,ion than Lo think up the answers forhimself. It was as though Nature had said to her prot6g6. "Ihave made life difficult for you - now use your brain". And use

his brain man had to; and use his brain he did.But why did Nature do it.? What. can she have hoped to

achieve by a policy which looks, on the face of it, one ofcalculated meannness? It may be true that man did in the end

rise to the challenge and turn his latent inventiveness to good

effect. But Suppose mants invenLions had done no more than

simpty make good the losses which Nature had inflicted on him -then he would at the end of t.he day have been no further forwardthan his ancestor. A policy of one step backwards and one stepforwards is hardly something Lo be proud of.

The surprise - and the key to the success of Naturetsstrategy is this: Man's inventions time and again paid unexpected

diwidends - his own solutions t.o his problems proved better thanthe biological solutions of which he had been deprived. And

t.hus, in using his brain to compensaLe for his biologicaldeficiencies, man did more than merely regain t.he level of thechimpanzee - he leapfrogged far ahead of him. But. note t.hiswell: That leap would never have been made if it had not been forthe powerful- incentive provided by necessity.

Let. me illustrate the principle with two examples. Firstthe case to which I have already drawn attention - the inventj-onof fire.

Man is, notorj-ously, a naked ape. Yet his ancestor was

undoubtedly a hairy dpe, and aII the other apes have kept theirhair. We may presume, Lherefore, that Nature had some specialreason for making man - and man alone - go naked. It must have

been some very special reason, because when man l-ost his hair he

suffered an immediate and potentially disastrous consequence: he

was exposed to the ravages of cold.In a cl-imate where a hairy chimpanzee could live quite

comfortably man had suddenly become uniquely unproLected againstbad weather and the col-d night. air. Given this obvious cost,where did the benefit 1ie? What hidden advant.age did Natureexpect man to derive? The answer I suggest, is that the advant.ageof nakedness lay in its very disadvantage - or, raLher, in theway man found of coping with that. disadvantage. By taking away

manrs hair and thus, ds it were, deliberately exposing him toco1d, Nature had given him the strongest possible incentive toinvent a way of keeping warm. And the way man found - the bestwdy, perhaps the only way - was to masLer the art of making fire.

Needs musL when the devil - or a col-d wind - drives.But what, in the longer run, had been achieved? Did the

mastery of fire merely Compensate man for his nakedness? One

step backward.s - and only one step forwards? Far from it. For

with the invention of fire came a host of secondary,

unanticipated benefits. Over and above providing warmth, fireswere a source of light, they kept predators at bay, they acted as

a focus for social gaLherings, they served for cooking food, forbaking clay they even provided the means for sendj-ng smoke

signals. No, a man with a fire was by no means merely a naked

ape who had cunningly found a replacement for his hair: he had

become ki-ng of a new fire-based culture. . . In all likelihoodthis culture would never have been discovered if Nature had

allowed man to retain his biological protecLion from the col-d.

My second example concerns an invention of an altogetherdifferent kind - Lhe invention of abstract thinking.

Man is not only a naked ape, he is, compared to a

chimpanzee, a very forgetful ape. And yet it seems extremelyprobable that mants ancestor had an excellent memory, indeed Ehat

he had what psychologists call "picture memory" - the capacity torecall- in detail all that he observed. Two lines of evidencesupport this cIaim.. In the first pIace, chimpanzees, when t.estedin the laboratory, have been found to have an asLonishingcapacity to remember visual information; they can, for example,identify up to a hundred simple patterns after being shown them

only a few times. In the second place, human beings have al-so

been found, very occasionally, Lo have this kind of capacitybut only when something has apparently gone wrong with theirbraj-n- For example, picture memory may occur in epileptics, orin patients with damage to the parj-etal lobes of the brain, or inpeople whose brains are artificially stimulat,ed with electricity,or in autist.ic children; and when it occurs in normal chil-dren,as it sometimes does, it vanishes before t.he child is more than a

few years o1d. In ot.her words, while picture memory is possiblefor man, it appears to be a pathological phenomenon - a mistake,a throwback. We can only conclude that picture memory is

somet.hing which has been actively Suppressed in the course ofhuman evol-ut.ion. Now why should that. have been?

Again we must presume that Nature had some special reason

for making man - and man alone among the apes - lose his memory.

My suggestion as before, iS that, the advant.age of a poor memory

Iay with the disadvantage - or rather with the way man l-earned tocope with it. By taking away his memory Nat,ure had provided man

with a strong incentive to find some alternative means of storingknowledge. And, in the eventr man came up with nothing less than

a who1Iy now way of thinking about the world. Instead ofpicturing the world as made up of countless part,icular objects inparticular relationships to each other, he hit on the idea ofconceiving it in abstract terms - abstract categories related by

abstract rules and laws. With this approach, he now began tothink in terms of general models of the way things happen - and

could afford to 1et his experience of part.icul-ar hppenings fadeaway. He no longer needed, for example, Lo remember everyinstance of an individual caL catching an individuaf mouse, butinstead could formulate the abst,ract proposition: there is a

class of beings, cal-Ied aLs, which perform a class of actions, -

catching, ofl another class of beings, ca1led mice. And what,t.hereby, had he achieved - apart from a means of combatting hisforgetfulness? I do not think it is too much to say that, infinding a way around his loss of memory, man had layed thefoundations for the development. of human language - nay, thefoundations of philosophy.

When Nature, Et the cross-roads of human evolution, adoptedthis brave policy of making man go backwards, she took of coursea heawy risk. Indeed if she had t.ried it with any less invent.ivecreature the gamble would certainly have failed. A rabbit, sdy,deprived of its fur would simply freeze Lo death,'dD elephant,deprived of its memory, would probably decline into a state oft.ot.al- ignorance. And even with man t.he success of t.he gamble

depended not only on his being trusted to come up eventual-ly witha rational- solution to his problems but on his finding t.hat.

solution afmost riqht awav. Once the biol-oqical defect had been

introduced there was clearly not much time to spare before iteliminated its bearer from the face of the earth-

When Houdini was bound hand and foot and thrown into the

Iake he could, not afford t.o wait for his grandchildren to set him

free. No more could man feave it to later generations to make

good his biological def iciencies. He had - by t.he use of hisbrain - to solve his problems for himsel-f withj-n his lifetime.But man's brain, unlike a genetically programmed body, is an

organ that can make astonishing progress within the span of an

ind"ividual life. Indeed man proved - when given sufficient,incentive to be a veritable Houdini of inventiveness.

Look around you - and take your hat off to Nature for her

daring choice of route Perhaps, when She asked t,he way, t.he

message had come down f rom Mount Olympus: rrWhom God wishes toemploy He f irst makes sadtt.

BBC Radio 3. November 1979.