Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 40

Although the world of biology widely accepts evolution, the topic can be hard to understand for several reasons. Leaving aside deliberate mischaracterization of evolution by those with a religious agenda, I’m talking about how being human itself obscures our view of evolution.

By this I mean that although humans evolve, we do so in some ways profoundly different from other species. For the last 100,000 years our outward, physical bodies haven’t evolved too terribly much; modern human skeletons are essentially indistinguishable from those of 100,000 years ago. And yet humanity has changed a great deal; most of us now live in massive cities, instead of as highly mobile foragers, and most of us eat foods grown on farms rather than hunted and collected from across vast landscapes. So what has changed, and how does it make evolution hard to understand?

What have changed are our minds and the cultures we carry in them. Culture, really, is the mind’s set of instructions for what the universe is like and what you’re supposed to do about it. (You can read about culture in more detail in Chapter 11.) Doing is the crux: We humans evolve proactively, inventing artifacts and cultural practices to survive in new environments, not reactively like every other species. Other species don’t even know they’re evolving through time. Consider the Arctic, which was widely colonized after about 1,500 years ago by people who invented dog sleds, whale-hunting equipment, watercraft, and the snow-house or iglu.

This purposive invention leads us, I think, to see living things the way we see our artifacts: as the finished products of some kind of intent. It’s hard to imagine that some mind didn’t make the elm tree for some purpose, because we ourselves invent and build things for specific purposes. But evolution shows that those things can come to be without any conscious plan or designer. That can be hard to reconcile with humanity’s purposeful tendencies.