The Ape That Understood The Universe by Steve Stewart-Williams

Three Point Summary | Notes on big ideas from intriguing books

Mar 28, 2023

The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. Published in 2018, it was written by evolutionary psychologist Steve Stuart-Williams.

Human beings are animals, and like all animals, we have a nature, crafted and honed by natural selection over countless generations.

—Steve Stuart Williams

Introduction: The Theory of Evolution

The basic claims of evolutionary theory are simple to state and as well established as anything else in science. Species are not static; they change and evolve over time. Every species we share the planet with today evolved from an earlier species, which itself evolved from an earlier species, and so on and so on, back into the mists of time. As we trace back the genealogies of existing species, they soon begin to converge like the branches of a tree, traced from tip to trunk. Chimpanzees and bonobos share a common ancestor around a million years ago. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and human beings share a common ancestor around seven million years ago. And we’re only just scratching the surface! Any two species share a common ancestor if you trace it back far enough: humans and tigers, tigers and goldfish, goldfish and toadstools. Ultimately, all life on Earth traces back to a simple, self-replicating molecule that appeared on the planet around four billion years ago. 2 The implications of this view of life are astounding. One implication is that all life on Earth is one big, not-so-happy family.

I. Human Nature

Differences between men and women

When we understand what the mind is designed to do – namely to pass on the genes giving rise to it – various aspects of mind and behavior suddenly make sense in an equally satisfying rush of insight. Why are more men than women interested in having multiple sex partners? Maybe it’s because the best strategy for passing on one’s genes differs for men and women: A man who has, say, five sexual partners in a year could potentially have five bouncing babies; a woman who has five sexual partners in a year would have no more babies than she would if she’d only had one partner. Why are we attracted to people with healthy skin, symmetrical faces, and youthful appearance? Maybe it’s because these traits go hand-in-hand with health and fertility, and therefore people with these preferences leave more descendants than those with a fetish for infertile, unhealthy mates. Why are people possessive of their mates and lovers? Maybe it’s because jealousy motivates people to prevent their mates from straying, thereby increasing the chances of having and raising children with them – and for men, because it also decreases the chances of ending up unknowingly raising someone else’s child. Why do people care more for their own children than the next-door neighbors’ children? Maybe it’s because our own children carry more of our genes than the next-door neighbors’ do…

Anthropologists have yet to unearth a culture where the women go to war while the men take care of the kids, where people are just as attracted to the elderly as to those in the prime of life, where people are indifferent to their spouse’s “extracurricular” sexual activities, where there’s no special bond between parents and their biological offspring, or where brothers and sisters routinely marry one another and have successful marriages. If you’ve heard otherwise, I’m afraid you’ve been misled…
Testosterone, for example, is linked to a variety of traits found more commonly in males than females, including a high sex drive, aggression, competitiveness, dominance, impulsivity, risk-taking, and status seeking.

Human Mating Psychology

Women place more importance on wealth and status, and men more on looks and youthfulness…women find traits that predict wealth and status more alluring than do men: traits such as confidence, competence, and raw, unbridled ambition. Frank Harris was only exaggerating a little when he observed that, “A man without ambition is like a woman without beauty.”

Beauty, from a Darwinian vantage point, is a certificate of good health, and courtship a process of shopping around for the best genes for our future offspring. In a sense, mate choice is a form of eugenics, and always has been.

Symmetry is an important determinant of attractiveness for men and women alike. Traits that men find appealing is the classic “hourglass” body shape: large bust, thin waist, relatively large hips…
Many studies find that, just as straight men prefer women with an hourglass figure, straight women prefer men with a V-shaped torso, an athletic physique, and a voice like a low pitched rumble…

II. Evolutionary Mismatch

We’re not adapted to the strange new world we’ve created for ourselves – this world of straight lines, right angles, and strict schedules; of cars, shaved faces, and designer jeans; of mirrors, cameras, and cities as large as ant colonies.

Humans are adapted primarily for life as hunter-gatherers living in the savanna and woodlands of Pleistocene Africa. That’s the world in which we spent most of our evolutionary history, and therefore that’s the world we’re designed to inhabit.
This places us in an awkward predicament. Biologically, we’re largely the same animal that roamed the Pleistocene savannah: a pack-hunting African ape. Culturally, though, we’re unrecognizable.

As Robert Wright observed in his book The Moral Animal, “We live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter gatherer population.” Or as S. Boyd Eaton put it, modern humans are “Stone Agers in the fast lane.”

III. Memetics and Cultural Evolution

Memes

Memetics is based on the concept of the “meme,” which Dawkins introduced in his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene. Roughly speaking, a meme is an idea. Less roughly, it’s a unit of culture…Just as genetics is the science of genes, memetics is the science of memes; it is, in essence, a collection of memes about memes (a collection of meta-memes, one might say). The core idea in memetics is that, like genes, memes are subject to natural selection, and that selection favors “selfish” memes – memes that, through accident or design, are good at getting themselves replicated and keeping themselves in circulation in the culture.
Unless you’re a bacterium, you can’t pick up genes from your friends. But you can pick up memes from your friends, or from your children, or from anybody else. Indeed, in a world of books, TV, and the Internet, you can even pick up memes from the dead.
Of course, not all minds are alike, and different memes flourish in different kinds of minds. The memes of quantum mechanics, for instance, take root only in highly intelligent minds, whereas extreme political views and fundamentalist religious beliefs seem to thrive more reliably in less intelligent ones. Personality matters as well. Novel memes do better with people high in the trait of openness, whereas misanthropic memes do better with people low in the trait of agreeableness…This leads to an interesting conclusion, namely that our genes help determine which memes we end up holding.

The writer Jonnie Hughes made this point well in his cleverly titled book On the Origin of Tepees, when he wrote: “Throughout history, we humans have prided ourselves on our capacity to have ideas, but perhaps this pride is misplaced. Perhaps ideas have us.”
If there’s any truth to this, the implications are enormous. For one thing, it puts an entirely new spin on the reasons I wrote this book: I’ve been infected with memes and they’ve turned me into their mouthpiece. Among other things, I’ve been infected with the meme meme, and right now I’m working to infect you, too. Every advocate of the meme perspective is a walking, talking advertisement for the power of contagious memes. And that’s just the beginning. With our memetic spectacles on, everything looks strikingly, frighteningly different. Universities suddenly appear as a great conspiracy of memes, designed to get infected people (professors) to pass them on to uninfected people (students). Similarly, the Internet suddenly appears as an immense and rapidly evolving vortex of information, designed to keep us glued to our computers, slavishly spreading memes.

Cumulative Culture & Collective Intelligence

A growing contingent of scholars argues that our “superpower” as a species is not our intelligence; it’s our collective intelligence and capacity for cumulative culture: our ability to stockpile knowledge and pass it down from generation to generation…

I remember once watching a David Attenborough documentary in which an orangutan rowed a boat down a river. At first, it struck me as anomalous: Here was this animal skillfully piloting a vehicle it could never have invented itself. But then it occurred to me that human beings are in exactly the same boat, metaphorically speaking. In even the simplest human societies, people use tools they could never have invented themselves. And in our modern age, we routinely use technologies so complex that most people don’t have the slightest clue how they work. It’s as if we’ve appropriated the technology of an advanced race of aliens after they mysteriously vanished – except that the aliens were never really here. All of it came from us.

Cumulative culture doesn’t just gift our species technology that none of us could have invented; it literally makes us smarter. The products of cumulative culture include not only our physical tools but also a well-stocked armory of cognitive tools: ideas and algorithms which we stamp into the gooey gray matter of our brains and which radically enhance our powers. These include, first and foremost, the words and phrases of the languages we speak.
Cumulative culture makes us smarter in another way as well: It frees us from the limitations imposed by the anatomy of our brains, furnishing us with knowledge far beyond the reach of any isolated individual.