[WonkPauseBreakthrough-2.0]: Unlike any genetically coadapted species, technologically adapting Human kind must comprise many variously specialised individuals, and this has profound implications for how we do politics.
Genetic evolution works both upon a population’s physical traits as well as upon its behavioral traits, and we must look very closely at behaviours when we come to talk about human politics. But first, to understand Humankind in relation to ‘other’ species, the physical traits of coevolved animals come into the picture before all else, because we are the only species—and there can be no other species on this planet that satisfies this criterion (see Milford Wolpoff and multiregional hypothesis;22 also WonkPauseBreakthrough-1.2)—which uses body extensions as the foundational and continually diversifying component of ‘cultural evolution’. Nature’s coevolutionary requirement for an animal’s behaviour to remain consistent with its speci-fied niche (during times of high diversity, i.e. when the selection-pressures we call competitive exclusion apply),9 means that whatever learned behaviours turn out to be adaptive can only be established with increasing genetic support: which is to say the behaviours must become more and more instinctive.
But, even for our human lineage, the requirement for behaviour to remain consistent with the technological world we live in also means the evolution of ‘non-material culture’ is, and has always been, secondary to the evolution of this ‘material culture’: that is to say our ‘non-material’ human ideals, ideas, beliefs, values, and norms could never have evolved beyond what was needed to support the ‘material’ technologies of the day. (Essentially, the phrase ‘non-material culture’ here amounts to the many agreed upon ways humans behave; including, for the purpose of this Natural History discussion, the behavioural media by which we share our covert “thinking” behaviours.)2, 3, 4 What this material culture shapes non-material culture understanding23 does for us, in our present discussion of a twenty-first century political transformation, is it helps us to avoid the many traps of ‘ancestor worship’. In fact, we will proceed now by abandoning any expectation that our technically simple forebears’ politics were even as ‘conceptualised’ as our politics need to be today.
[that’s a mouthful, so: short pause . . . ]
The earliest concepts of leadership would have been pretty much in tune with our animal instincts, and these innate predispositions had evolved mostly, as they had for many animals, to ascertain reproductive qualifications and to choose which individuals might ‘spearhead’ the kind of coordinated attacks intrinsic to hunting or to tribal warfare. It’s easy to understand how such instincts—modified only as needed to assimilate each individual’s necessarily limited experience—would have worked well enough when the need for individual specialisations was restricted to just a few kindred skills: like the aforesaid hunting and fighting but also for basket weaving, hide-tanning, and stone-chipping. And as long as this was the extent of material-culture for our early ancestors, then choosing a leader for anything other than maximal reproductive fitness or spearheading wars and the hunt would not have been needed at all. It might even be fair to say that primate instincts, throughout our five-hundred-thousand-year tribal past, have remained not only foundational, but sufficient, for choosing our leaders.
It has only been about five thousand years since the Bronze Age, and that doesn’t appear to have been long enough to change our genetic constitutions significantly; however, in terms of the evolution of material culture, we can say this was the end of human pre-history and the start of human ‘history’. The shift to working with metal instead of stone, and the innovations required for the deeper mining and the farther transportation of metal ores, initiated an acceleration of technological diversification; and this was the beginning of history in the sense that humans living with more and more ‘conveniences’ in larger and larger ‘civilisations’ meant that records had to be kept, and so now our stories also could be written down. It’s easy to understand how this cultural acceleration was also a game changer for primitive human politics, for it meant that ‘leadership’ now required an entirely different skillset all on its own: our primate instincts had to be overlaid by a non-material culture’s checks and balances and specialty-coordination skills (and ideally an even stronger education in self-control) as material culture progressed through an ever increasing diversification of individual specialisations.12 So it was that the journey we call cultural evolution, now with its material and non-material ‘legs’ both moving in coordination, seriously got under way.
And yet, in hard times especially, our more recent post-tribal history—let’s say since we, the ‘common people’, have been allowed, once again, to choose our leaders—attests that we still have a very hard time resisting a stubborn tendency to fall back on our innate roots. Why has this leadership aspect of non-material culture, the manifest need for our many specialised behaviours to be overseen and for ways to choose an overseer, not evolved in proportion to those needs? [Where to go from here? longer pause . . . ]
At this point we’re focusing on leadership, what it is and how our leaders are chosen; but, much as material culture and non-material culture are the two ‘legs’ that make culture’s evolutionary journey possible, so leadership and education can be seen as the right and left ‘hands’ that hold the many moving parts of a culture’s political process together and in balance. This is not to say of course that a person cannot be both a leader and an educator in one body; but our ability to make this functional distinction, between the hand that educates and the hand that leads, will become more and more important as we try to put our so-established past thinking about politics on a new footing for the twenty-first century. (Footing? Sorry, am I mixing metaphors here? Or are we just revisiting now, as well-rounded arguments are supposed to do, our introductory motif: the embodied cognition theme that still serves as the fundamental ‘inner geography’ which this whole series of WonkPauseBreakthroughs rests upon; i.e. can it be other than our own bodies that serve as the models for any conceptual ‘world’ we can possibly build?) The practical workings of this ‘two-handed political process’ distinction we are making here are developed further in the attached appendix: Education and Leadership in the Twenty-First Century.
The destabilisation of globally connected democracies in the twenty-first century results from an unequal sharing of wealth. This is being made alarmingly apparent today (January 2025); but many of us find hope in the thought that, when a democracy is disrupted to the frightening degree we are now experiencing (and where the confusion of our witnessing this disintegration doesn’t lead to hopelessness), some more-curious-than-entrenched types among us (like Old Guys who have indeed “played the game” but have been watching from the sidelines for some time now) might find a whole new door to open. Can such disruption of established ideas invite a serious rethinking of how democracy, and politics in general, need to be largely reinvented to frame a workable shift in our ecological/economic/media paradigm?
So what I am suggesting here is that today’s ‘obviously’ destructive unequal sharing of wealth is also disrupting (purposefully if not with full understanding) this much earlier but ongoing genes-to-technology transition that might otherwise have been resolved less painfully. And while it is fair to say that the intuited implications of this older human reinvention of creativity itself are understandably being repudiated by those eager to not upset their vastly overloaded apple-carts, I would say further that a formal under-standing of the earlier transition is still in the wind. I propose then that we can’t go wrong by looking for a wholly new, deeply grounded and scientifically supported, understanding of what leadership means for a technologically adapting Humankind as we are forced to open new doors to understanding human wealth, democracy, and politics in general.
How about this: since, according to WonkPauseBreakthrough-2.0, ‘technologically adapting Human kind, unlike any genetically coadapted species, must comprise many variously specialised individuals‘, therefore:
[WonkPauseBreakthrough-2.1]: “The people” are not “always right”, and cannot be trusted to make decisions on variously specialised matters of policy.
Hold on! Nobody wants to go backwards to a time of hereditary rulers. I for one believe that democracy, in some form or another, is here to stay. But consider this: everybody knows the hoarding of wealth is as old as emperors, kings, and popes; so why are we seeing only now that, what I will call unregulated capitalism (so as to leave certain ‘innate reactions’ to Karl Marx out of our reckoning) must ultimately destroy globally integrated modern democracies? And here’s something else we’ve always known: under kings and popes the accumulation of wealth wasn’t always as devastating as it is now simply because: firstly, there was a sense of public attachment to state property; and secondly, in the ‘undemocratic’ innocence of humanity’s post-tribal past (remember, we’re trying to avoid ‘ancestor worship’ here), it was still generally understood that wealth came with responsibilities. We should all know this about our past, so why then does the problem seem so intractable today? For that matter, how could this ‘new idea’ of civilised democracy go so wrong, when historically—let’s say since five-thousand years ago—and also among indigenous cultures ‘prehistoric’ and even contemporary, democracy was and is the politics most natural to hunter-gatherers and small scale agriculturists?
Let’s start by imagining how these emperors, kings, and popes might simply not have been troubled by thoughts of democratic rights and freedoms. Some of them were surely pretty good, and some not so good, at their ‘job’, which let’s say amounted to: 1) putting together the comprehensive team of experts required to maintain a technologically complex civilisation; 2) listening to all these experts (we can’t expect any single potentate to understand the full details); 3) only then making decisions for the benefit of a state and its citizens; and finally, perhaps 4) reassuring a very large populace as far as it became necessary. This last responsibility, for pre-democratic kings and popes, would mostly be a matter of establishing and observing formal rituals; but we all know that this communication responsibility must become vastly more particular, and possibly more personal, now that ‘elected’ leaders are replacing their royal precursors. [Coming up on the Big Reveal now, so let’s take another short pause to lower expectations. . . ]
Ok, I personally think this is how our youthful understanding of civilised democracy has remained incomplete: If according to WonkPauseBreakthrough 2.1 “The people” are not “always right”, and cannot be trusted to make decisions on variously specialised matters of policy, then it follows that:
[WonkPauseBreakthrough-2.2]: In an electoral democracy the only political choice which we must all strive to become ‘expert’ at requires knowing the qualifications a leader must possess.
So how has this idiotic idea that a majority of “the people know best”, in matters that only a very very small minority of people have been actually educated in, been kept in circulation? Who benefits? Certainly not “the people”. The old aristocracy (with responsibilities in theory) was right to fear “the rabble”, and “the people” were also right to mistrust an aristocracy which, far too often, put their wealth ahead of public responsibility; because, after all, who’s in charge of seeing that theory is put into practice?
It should be obvious by now that only those who are already wealthy enough to control the narrative can benefit from a story that gives them “freedom” to do whatever the hell they like; all the while, with childlike logic, telling “the people” that this ‘libertarianism’ is their freedom too, because of course the people are a bunch of know-it-alls. And what are we to make of ‘leaders’ who fail to correct this narrative? Who fail to address Climate Change? Who fail to ‘level the playing field’ (with taxes, regulations, and aid for the needy)? They can escape ALL responsibility by just saying, “The voters know best”! But as I said, this is our “youthful” understanding of civilised democracy; and as cultural evolution’s material culture shapes non-material culture rule demands, it was the arrival of a new technological ‘leg’, the development of social media (with its power to support the lie that everybody’s opinion is “equal”), that has brought this wealth-controls-the-narrative problem to a head in these early days of the twenty-first century.
And democracy will remain immature and incomplete until we start teaching in civics class, and at an early age: how and why humanity’s individual specialisation strategy is unprecedented in the animal world; how and why the people are not always and in everything right; and how and why all those who have a vote must become ‘expert’ in only one small and commonly visited corner of Humankind’s vast cultural domain, i.e. knowing the qualifications that a ‘leader’ must possess. For my part, I will offer an inaugural (?) suggestion that these qualifications for a twenty-first century leader are pretty much what I’ve listed above for history’s most progressive emperors, kings, and popes (and since we are rejecting ancestor worship, we need to acknowledge that these early codes of good leadership were “tried and true” only through the occasional luck of inheritance). Once more, with a little post potentate modification, these qualifications are: the ability to 1) put together the comprehensive team of expert advisors required to maintain a technologically complex civilisation; to 2) understand and listen to all these experts; to only then 3) make decisions for the maximum benefit of a state and its citizens in a connected world of other states; and finally, and most overlooked but important for an electoral democracy, to 4) not just reassure, but inform the electorate, whether campaigning or governing, in words that avoid polarisation and inflexible promises.
It might be easy to get the impression here, since I’m saying in essence that we, the variously specialised voters, can’t be trusted in our ‘majority voice’ to decide uniquely specialised matters of policy, but we can only be trusted on the matter of leadership, that therefore we should expect our elected leaders to ‘talk down’ to us. This most certainly does not follow; because, not only will there be some of us who are more specialised in the subject matter than the leaders themselves, but also, and most pertinently, because we the electorate can’t properly do our one common job of “determining the qualification of a leader” without hearing for ourselves the depth, the subtlety, and the inclusivity of a leader’s thought processes through his/her speech. Whether we all understand its full implications or not.
This is also where the broader study, and narrower practice, of other non-material human attributes come in; the study of how and why our human ideals, ideas, beliefs, values, and norms must now evolve beyond our prehistoric primate instincts, and the practising of them up to a level that can support a twenty-first-century material culture increasingly dominated by: outer-space rocket science, inner-space bioengineering, and a nanotechnology that allows for universal media access. I’m not going to tell you that running a globally connected civilisation “isn’t rocket science”, because metaphorically and sometimes literally it is. But choosing our leaders on the other hand—whether at federal, state/provincial, municipal, or even social-network levels—no, that’s not rocket science, it’s simply maturity. Twenty-first century maturity. [Gotten a bit wound up so: pause . . . ]
Just one more thing: when we now, as a twenty-first century society, begin this urgent discussion about what every single voter must become expert at (i.e. recognising a qualified leader), it’s likely to come up that education for leadership itself might be a good thing to think about. I submit that, while the capacity to ‘wonk’ (or at least to understand wonky talk) is critical (see my suggested qualification -2), nevertheless this kind of education is and always has been readily available, so the takeaway here is that it’s just as critical that a qualified leader knows how to effectively ‘pause’ his/her tendency to wonk. And so how might this wonk-pause education proceed when, by definition, silence cannot be ‘professed’? I’ll bet some readers noticed back in A Wonk’s Pause-2 that WonkPauseBreakthrough-1.1 was missing from the list, right? Was I just bad at math? Well no, because here it is now at the utter end: Since, according to WonkPauseBreakthrough-1.0, our ‘inner-life’ has a stronger resemblance to our ‘outer reality’ than Nature’s genes have to their outer reality (organisms), leading us to become easily ‘attached’ to our thoughts, it follows that [WonkPauseBreakthrough-1.1]: non-thinking cannot be taught; it must be practised.
And no, by claiming this breakthrough I’m not stealing the Buddha’s thunder: Buddha just means “the Awakened”, which is all of us at some point. Awakening is the one and only “breakthrough” every wonk has to make in-dependently.
The good news is that those who practise non-thinking themselves can, through attention to not just a potential leader’s comportment, but also through his/her completeness (Wholesomeness) of thought and speech, eventually recognise it in others.
[Pause, indefinite.]
APPENDIX
Education and Leadership in the Twenty-First Century
We instinctively know the difference between educating and leading, and each of us blends these everyday functions in our own unique ‘styles’, usually not bothering to make the distinction while in the moment of natural human exchange. I am making the claim here that even when we are communicating at the institutional level these two functions tend to be blurred for the most part, and that our politics will become more effective when we maintain the distinction. For example:
Leaders
An elected ‘leader’ is somebody delegated to make decisions for an electorate; decisions which the electorate is not qualified to make as a unit because its ‘education’ is naturally disparate. Leaders themselves must be specially educated to coordinate the disparate educations of their advisors.
Advisors
In the ‘political advisors’ tradition we have the educator/leader distinction made most clearly within a leader’s ‘inner circle’ itself. And here the distinction is not only ‘well understood’, but it has always been deemed essential in order to avoid the risk of a coup d’état. So what happens when we expand the leadership circle to include the entire voting public? Because that’s what’s been happening throughout the twentieth century and we’re seeing its failures, in fact the failure of leadership itself, in the twenty-first.
Lobby Groups
It’s well understood that lobbying, in the sense of trying to bring our ideas, preferences, and outright needs to the attention of those in power—and in the most practical terms this phrase, ‘those in power’, refers to higher levels of institutionalised leadership—is an educational (and outreach) practice that must never assume the power to make decisions (to lead) at that ‘higher level’. (This of course is not to say that leadership isn’t also displayed in a natural or even an institutional way within lobby groups.) So here we have a fairly ‘well understood’ case of making this educator/leader functionality distinction which I am suggesting we can usefully apply more widely (if more subtly as well) to our politics in general.
Political Parties
Here we’re a bit into the weeds again. It’s hard to imagine having political parties at all if they don’t break along policy lines. But I think elections are just as often fought upon a party leader’s personal or intellectual appeal. In fact, as a Canadian, I might point to Pierre Elliott Trudeau as an early example of a leader running more on the qualities of team-building, listening (well, much comprehensive reading anyway), decisiveness (“Just watch me!”) and communicating with a certain wonkish thoroughness. Maybe political parties just need to keep their policies more flexible than they do under the “people chose (read, took responsibility for) my policies” paradigm; and run more on their leader’s ability to adapt to (and truly care about) changing needs, and less upon making dodgy “people voted for it” promises.
Referenda
In a referendum, leadership has already made the decision to consult The People on a very specific matter of policy, and this matter (Brexiting the EU; Quebec remaining in Canada) often has something to do with a people’s ‘identity’. The voting itself follows only after a comparatively extended period wherein people get a comparatively non-specialised education in the possible consequences of their choice. This political procedure is in some ways outside the argument I’m offering here because 1) it’s not about choosing leaders; 2) while The People are indeed voting on policy, the outcomes of their choice may still be ‘determined’ by a regular political process involving decisions by chosen leaders (taking account of their expert advisors and invested lobbyists); and 3) The People becoming “educated” as a result of this choosing process might even be seen as the point of the exercise: a sense of community is strengthened.
“The People”
“The People” are not the leaders they elect. So what are ‘leaders’ and their wealthy media-owning ‘bosses’ trying to get away with when they say The People are “always right”? Seems to be a good way to shirk responsibility, no? To get The People to accept this you’d have to appeal to—no, that doesn’t describe what’s goin on: to “vigorously stoke” I should say—a People’s natural animal instinct to all get what we want all the time, yes? Subtlety is something only a small portion of The People have ever demonstrated, or even aspired to. That’s the heavy lifting we expect our educators and leaders to work at. So it makes all kind of sense to take this load off at least, which amounts to every adult choosing among hundreds of possible policy initiatives put forward by hundreds of advisors who study thousands of the specialties necessary to our species, and only to our species, which have evolved over the last five-thousand or so years. If we “The variously specialised People” no longer carry this impossible load, then our animal instincts only have to be adjusted to allow for two very un-Natural specialties in each human adult’s technologically complex life: i) the human function he/she is specially trained for (although in actual fact there can be, and often is, more than one such individual specialisation), and ii) the choosing of leaders on whom we’ve unloaded this making of decisions based on the coordination of all momentarily interacting specialties. So now, on the people’s part, this choosing of leaders will be based not on the leaders’ policies (which ideally should change easily in a changing world), but on their personal (and for the most part their cognitively acquired) qualifications to lead. Such as, again:
The ability to 1) put together the comprehensive team of expert advisors required to maintain a technologically complex civilisation; to 2) understand and listen to all these expert advisors (including lobby groups too, but keeping in mind their vested interests); to only then 3) make decisions for the maximum benefit of a state and its citizens (always keeping in mind their connections to a wider Human and Natural world); and finally to 4) not just reassure, but inform the electorate, whether campaigning or governing, in words that avoid polarisation and inflexible promises. [Notice here that listening (qualification 2) requires the ability and patience to understand ‘Wonkish’, and that making widely beneficial, and especially ‘breakthrough’, decisions (qualification 3) requires the ability to pause one’s highly educated Inner Wonk.]
***
Notes and Citations:
2) When a meditator calls what he or she is doing a ‘subjective science’ this is not just a bit of a stretch, it’s a contradiction in terms. So I hope to assure you there is real objective research going on in real universities now that suggests what I have written about this in this blog, drawing from my own experience, has some merit. (How the Body Shapes the Mind, Shaun Gallagher, Published online, Feb. 1, 2006; also: The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch, November 13, 1992 by The MIT Press.) Fortunately however, what I am saying here about comparing Natural and Human Intelligence doesn’t require you to accept my introspective ‘evidence’ for a literal interpretation of what Dogen calls ‘the bodymind’. Really, this development for me was important mainly as a way to give a sense of ‘substance’ to the supposedly unique creativity of Mankind so that we can understand that the ‘substantial creativity’ of Nature Selection is not just equivalent to ours but, in one particular I talk about later, it’s even more efficient.
Here are some other writers who have explored the body-mind connection: — Bargh, Jan. 2014, p. 34. Brain areas that respond to textures also light up when someone is having a “rough” or “smooth” social interaction. (Box insert, “Why Some Social Science Studies Fail”.) — Gottlieb, Anthony. Aug. 30, 2016, A Dream of Enlightenment, Ch. 6. ‘The Best of all Possible Compromises’. — Fernando, Chrisantha. Aug. 2013. From Blickets to Synapses: Inferring Temporal Causal Networks by Observation. Cognitive Science, Vol. 37, Issue 8, pp. 1426-1470. — That robots, like children, learn from “the shape of the body and the kinds of things it can do” has been recently demonstrated by Angelo Cangelosi of the University of Plymouth in England and Linda B. Smith, a developmental psychologist at Indiana University Bloomington. Source: Diana Kwon, Scientific American, March 2018 (volume 318, number 3), “Self-Taught Robots” pp. 26-31. — Colarossi, Jul./Aug. 2013, pp. 17-19, — Merleau-Ponty, 1967, pp. 356-374. — Kwant, 1967, pp. 383, 387. — Berman, July 2004, p. 132.
3) Lawrence Shapiro, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Embodied Cognition, Jun 25, 2021.
4) Here is my six-layer anatomy of behavioural intelligence from Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice (referred to as DDEC in the rest of these notes):1 Except in the heart and the gut, smooth muscle tensions and other autonomic body responses are literally e-motional. Thus emotional affect meanings of objects and events arise involuntarily from prevailing states of body chemistry, and they are associated with direct input from the superficial senses as well as with voluntary motions and tensions of the skeletal muscles. Then, forming five more layers of felt intelligence, ‘motional effects’, whether overt, covert, innate or learned, evolve into whole ‘ecosystems’ of meaning when: 2 postures and programs adapted for direct survival impart reaction meaning to objects and events; 3 the body’s ‘measuring’ of extension, distance, and resistance to movement or deformation imparts exploration meaning to objects and events; 4 the action of moving and rearranging the ‘parts’ previously explored imparts manipulation meaning to objects and events; 5 our mirror neuron reflection, or personification of ‘other selves’, imparts imitation meaning to objects and events; and 6, by transposing all these direct interactions to altogether separate ‘closed behavioural fields’, particularly in the mouth and throat (language: essay 35) but perhaps also in the eyes and face (imagination: essay 43), for meta-level manipulation and composition (thus a covert displacement of meaning-4 objects and events), motor-program-traces are abstracted and associated as mental constructs to articulate formal meaning: we call this “thinking”. [The last three layers are clearly highly developed for, and the last layer—experienced as indirect mediation—is probably unique to, technological intelligence.] Also see: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/07/20/old-buddhas-gift-part-3-young-buddha-gets-absurd/ and https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/07/21/old-buddhas-gift-part-4-young-buddha-explores-the-subtle-body/
9) The idea that two similar species cannot coexist if their ecological niches completely overlap, also called the competitive exclusion principle, or Gause’s Law, lies at the core of the science of population evo-ecology in the same way that Occam’s Razor lies at the core of evolving cultures and languages. Of course neither of these principles are in fact “laws”, because evolution in both creativities is always testing the limits of what’s possible; but still, the One Species, One Niche principle has profound implications for our understanding of Humans and Nature, where the human technological ‘strategy’, by its very nature, subverts the principle. See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2020/07/27/one-species-one-niche-why-humans-destroy-nature/
12) We technological animals must become specialised in countless diverse ways compared to any other social animal. Even ants. The average citizen doesn’t follow science close enough to sort truth from misinformation in today’s social media free-for-all; that’s why we invented governments. So by what political sophistry can the oxymoronic idea, that a diverse citizenry is ultimately the responsible party in specialized matters of science, be justified when our elected ‘leaders’ mandated to heed the science don’t tell us the truth, just because we, not knowing the truth, may disagree with them when it comes for an election? All the average citizen in a democracy needs to know at election time is: which leader is most trustworthy? (And without democracy there can be no trust, and therefore no social animal in the first place.) At this pivotal time in Human and indeed Natural history it is truly alarming that the primal covenant between citizen and government is being compromised by a modern democracy’s assumption that “the people know best” in all cases. This is no truer today for the ‘Climate War’ than it was true for the threat of wars and pandemics in the past! Like it or not, those who put themselves forward as political leaders assume this pledge to heed the experts. And, notwithstanding the pressure from economic interests, notwithstanding the illusory escape of deferring to ‘the people’, the political leaders of the day will be held responsible by future generations for their failure to inform the public about, and to take the required action to address, the defining challenges of our time. Like Global Warming. Also see: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/06/04/a-short-diversion-from-essay-selections-after-the-2022-ontario-election-the-meaning-of-leadership-for-human-beings/
22) “Multiregional evolution is a model to account for the pattern of human evolution in the Pleistocene. The underlying hypothesis is that a worldwide network of genic exchanges, between evolving human populations that continually divide and reticulate, provides a frame of population interconnections that allows both species-wide evolutionary change and local distinctions and differentiation.” Am J Phys Anthropol 112: 129±136, 2000. Milford Wolpoff’s contribution to this model was to point out that, since technology can be transferred from one population to another, therefore any human populations that did not interbreed could not become separate species, because genetic differences would send even randomly disadvantaged populations on the path to extinction. I’ve claimed this as my “WonkPauseBreathrough-1.2” only because I happened upon the idea a few years before he and his colleagues expressed it in print. Their printed words of course (which I haven’t actually seen because the ‘news’ came to me through an article by Stephen J. Gould in Natural History Magazine; and I failed to save or find elsewhere) have an advantage over my unrecorded thoughts. So… according to the one species one niche rule, that we’re applying here to cognitive ‘evolution’, my claim to an identical ‘conception’ must go ‘extinct’.
23) Charles Darwin himself proposed that, in the course of natural selection, “structure follows function”, but he was referring here to behavioural changes that were made necessary by a changing environment which then selected for structural adaptations. In this discussion I am referring to the ‘cultural establishment’ (evolution) of new behaviour that are necessitated by the ‘adoption’ of new technologies. (Think in terms of what the iphone has done to our social interactions in the last eighteen years.)
