How Language Enabled Innovation and Evolution

"How did 'culture' develop, exactly? Language, says evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel, was instrumental in enabling social learning -- our ability to acquire evolutionarily beneficial new behaviors by watching and imitating others, which in turn accelerated our species on a trajectory of what anthropologists call 'cumulative cultural evolution,' a bustling of ideas successively building and improving on others. It might seem, then, that protecting our ideas would have been the best evolutionary strategy. Yet that's not what happened -- instead, we embraced this 'theft,' a cornerstone of remix culture, and propelled ourselves into a collaboratively crafted future of exponential innovation."
Language is not only one of the defining differentiators of our species, but also a key to our evolutionary success, responsible for the hallmarks of humanity, from art to technology to morality, argues evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel in Wired for Culture.
" Our cultural inheritance is something we take for granted today, but its invention forever altered the course of evolution and our world. This is because knowledge could accumulate as good ideas were retained, combined, and improved upon, and others were discarded. And, being able to jump from mind to mind granted the elements of culture a pace of change that stood in relation to genetical evolution something like an animal’s behavior does to the more leisurely movement of a plant.
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Having culture means we are the only species that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors rather than from the genes they pass to us. Our cultures and not our genes supply the solutions we use to survive and prosper in the society of our birth; they provide the instructions for what we eat, how we live, the gods we believe in, the tools we make and use, the language we speak, the people we cooperate with and marry, and whom we fight or even kill in a war.”


Source: dailygood.org