The Line between Natural Evolution and Human Evolution – Literature as Extragenetic Code

I like to mix things up and jump into new genres every now and then. That’s why I recently began reading Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden, a fascinating look at the evolution of human intelligence and the way the mind has adjusted to the growth of civilization. All the science I’m dealing with has got me thinking a lot about the nature of the written word as a symbol and how it has affected our species. I find it interesting that, while our brains are set up with the same basic structure as most other animals (for the most part), we were the first to put the things that appear inside of our minds into the natural world as symbols.

Books, not necessarily literature, but the things themselves, the bindings, the covers, and the smells, must be pretty strange to a dog – or any other animal for that matter. Isn’t it bizarre to think that, while a dog might look at a book and see an oddly-sliced hunk of wood fiber with dyes smeared throughout, a man will look at that same book and see a great work of art that was carefully put together in a beautiful binding, crafted with the hope that the message it holds might be carried through time to the minds of many men? How is it that we can see something that is beyond our 5 senses – beyond what is truly there?

The difference in what we see and what the dog sees demonstrates the power of perception that is held in the civilized mind…

When I say ‘civilized’, I’m making less of a distinction of intelligence than I am a distinction of evolutionary strategy – for there is no certain way to say that an animal is more intelligent simply because it is more ‘civil’. To be ‘civil’ is simply to have culture, and having a culture simply reflects an evolutionary strategy that is based on extragenetic information – that is information about ones environment that is passed on by active interaction with previous generations. To quote a classic metaphor, ‘civilized’ man is a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. We know what we know because someone knew it before us. 

Sagan points out that human offspring are not “prewired” with genetic survival skills like lizards – we can’t survive on our own in childhood and are dependent for a longer time than any other animal species (relative to our lifespan). As a result, we are forced to spend time with our elders as they take care of us, and we learn and pick up our extragenetic information at this point in our lives. Sagan covers this topic quite cleverly in his introduction, when he points out the bargain that man has made with Mother Nature through our process of natural selection:

While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short time scales. We have made a kind of bargain with nature: our children will be difficult to raise, but their capacity for new learning will greatly enhance the chances of survival of the human species.

I think it’s safe to assume that all of my readers grew up in a time after books were already popularized (I’d surely hope so at least); if that’s the case, then all of us here today were born into this world with some kind of framework of what we were to be as ‘civil’ creatures already written out in code in the books that existed at our birth. In other words, if the physical body of a man is formed based on the instructions that are coded in his DNA, then the same can be said about his mental body and the code that exists in written symbols and cultural memories. That is not to say that we are necessarily mentally shaped by books, but rather that we are shaped by our socialization, and books tend to record – or rather codify – the process of our socialization in hindsight, leaving us with a way to trace the evolutionary path of the human mind.

Our survival has been based on our ability to learn from one another, and the use of books to create a new type of inheritance separate from genetic inheritance -- our cultural inheritance -- has allowed us to evolve mentally to a point where we can see even this. I don't know about you, but I find this stuff to be chilling. In essence, the great authors of the world, through understanding and craft, are writing out the inheritance of the future generations just as Mother Nature, through the glory of chaos and natural selection, wrote our genetic inheritance. More so than ever, I feel that writers are gods.