The Arts (Art)

by David Turell , Friday, August 22, 2008, 20:38 (5725 days ago) @ Carl

This touches a point of interest, and that is the effect of cumulative knowledge on humans. We are the first species that we know of that can pass knowledge to future generations in any manner except through direct observation. We can experience the words of Newton or Shakespeare directly. This allows us to leverage the benefits that we already receive from evolution, and explains the exponential curve of human progress. - Another way of looking at this observation of Carl's is that we are the first species that doesn't have to work primarily at the instinctual level, and this is because of 'words'. We have language, the ability to think with word meanings. We are "The Ape That Spoke", the title of John McCrone's book, 1991, in which he discusses the development of the human mind, and his opinion that the development of language is what made our mental capacity grow as it did , just as Carl observed.