sharing created what the Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky called a noösphere, a single global realm of mind, of culture, of shared thoughts and ideas. “There is,” writes Michael Tomasello, “only one known biological mechanism that could bring about these kinds of changes in behavior and cognition in so short a time.… This biological mechanism is social or cultural transmission, which works on time scales many orders of magnitude faster than those of organic evolution.” This process, which Tomasello calls “cumulative cultural evolution,” is unique to our species.14
