I’ve been reading The Secret of Our Success lately, and thinking a lot about the topics touched upon in the book. One of these topics is the fact that we develop biological adaptations based on culture.

A key point made in the book, arguably the key point, is that we humans did not become the dominant species on the planet due to our exceptional raw intelligence. Rather, we got to where we are thanks of our ability to learn socially, to transmit, retain, and accumulate, with high fidelity, cultural knowledge over generations. The book suggests that this is the actual reason that we evolved larger brains, and tried to debunk a few other popular hypotheses that try to explain the same thing¹.

If this theory is correct, then the recent advancements in technology and engineering should have a profound impact on our species’ development. We evolved large brains mostly to remember knowledge passed down from ancestors and accumulated across the generations. But since the proliferation of literacy kicked off by the invention of the printing press a few hundred years ago, the importance of remembering all the cultural knowledge in our physical brains has diminished significantly. The Information Age, which allowed us to digitize and distribute knowledge at nearly zero-cost to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, just accelerated this shift even further. Today we can pretty much guarantee that once recorded, no knowledge will ever be really lost, even if no one took the effort to learn and remember it (short of some human extinction level event). This brings up a good question, which is what will we do with our large brains, if their original intended purpose is no longer necessary?

Keep in mind, according to the theory in Secret of Our Success, our brains have evolved to, first and foremost, retain information with high fidelity, so they may not be as good at other tasks. In fact, doing tasks other than remembering with our brains have been mostly selected against throughout our history. The book illustrates this with a good example. Suppose a generation of humans start with some basic tool, and every subsequent generation, through chance or deliberate innovation, a small amount of improvement is made to the tool. Then after just a few generations, the amount of accumulated knowledge would’ve overshadowed any improvements that an individual can do in a single lifetime, even if the individual is extremely talented (after all, this person is competing against multiple generations and lifetimes of people). This means that the selection pressure for retaining all the past innovations on this tool (i.e. memory) is far greater than the pressure to innovate individually, after just a few generations. This is especially true when many innovations are actually due to random chance encounters, and not raw innovative intelligence.

We have already seen some shifts in what we use our brains for. More and more people are dedicating more of their time to take risks, to try new things, to attempt innovation. This shift has been happening since the spread of the written language thousands of years ago. Partly this is due to the fact that widely adopted written text allowed for coordination at a much larger scale, but I think partly it is also due to the fact that the math of the opportunity cost of using our brains for things other than recall changed. Before the proliferation of written languages, if I decide to dedicate a significant portion of my brain to think about and do other things, the amount and quality of the cultural knowledge I retain and pass down will suffer, so I am strongly discouraged from doing so. But after the invention of written languages, the cost became much lower. I think that this might actually have been the catalyst from which entrepreneurship was born.

But as mentioned earlier, our brains have not really evolved for large amounts of risk taking and trying out new things. Luckily, we can adapt biologically (note that this is not the same as genetic adaptation, which occurs over a much longer time scale). For example, according to the book, our ability to process language was adapted from our ability to process human faces. This happened at a biological level, as the two abilities share a similar region of the brain, and experiments have shown that illiterate people are better at recognizing faces than literate people. These biological adaptations are essentially cases of repurposing hardware for alternative uses.

No doubt our brains today have already gone through some of these adaptations caused by the invention and spread of the written language, as it’s been quite some years since then. But what adaptations will the more recent Information Age bring, when everything is just a Google search away? I sincerely hope that it isn’t the retirement of our brain functions. Instead, I imagine a world of people with even more adaptations in the brain for trying new things, for innovation. Maybe even neuroplasticity, the ability for the brain to change in life, will be affected by such adaptations, where people will retain plasticity for longer. We have already managed to do amazing things, even with our “mostly dedicated to remembering” brains. Who knows what we will be able to do when our brains have fully adapted to the Information Age.