Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

by Edward Slingerland

no single human could hope to produce even the most basic component of an iPhone, or any complex cultural technology, through sheer insight or creativity. Innovations are always necessarily gradual and incremental, building on the accumulated insights of past humans. We are the cultural animal par excellence, and our ability to share the products of our individual creativity and pass them on to future generations is the key to our ecological dominance.30 Moreover, cultures as a whole can figure out the solutions to problems that are, in principle, beyond the capacity of any single individual to solve. As cultural evolutionary theorist Michael Muthukrishna and colleagues argue, we need to think of our brains not just as individual organs sitting in our heads, but as part of an extended network, nodes in a massive “collective brain.”31