jar writes:
It takes intelligence to invent better tools. Or where do you think the tools come from?
Absolutely. Intellegence is needed. But does it take more intellegence to create the first variation or the subsequent improvements?
Hi jar,
I think we are probably barking up the wrong tree when we think that innovation (whether "creating the first variation" or "subsequent improvements") is in some way synonymous with intelligence.
A people who have been in the news recently are the Piraha of Brazil.
George Monbiot recently reveiwed work by Dan Everett in the Guardian:
quote:
yesterday I read a study by the anthropologist Daniel Everett of the language of the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon, published in the latest edition of Current Anthropology.(12) Its findings could scarcely be more disturbing, or more profound.
The Piraha, Everett reveals, possess the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of [and] are some of the brightest, pleasantest, most fun-loving people that I know. Yet they have no numbers of any kind, no terms for quantification (such as all, each, every, most and some), no colour terms and no perfect tense. They appear to have borrowed their pronouns from another language, having previously possessed none. They have no individual or collective memory of more than two generations past, no drawing or other art, no fiction and no creation stories or myths.
All this, Everett believes, can be explained by a single characteristic: Piraha culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of [the speaker]. What can be discussed, in other words, is what has been seen. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, in this realm at least, to exist. After struggling with one grammatical curiosity, he realised that the Piraha were talking about liminality — situations in which an item goes in and out of the boundaries of their experience. [Their] excitement at seeing a canoe go around a river bend is hard to describe; they see this almost as travelling into another dimension.
The lack of innovation in the Piraha people can hardly be laid down to lack of intelligence (after all they are not subhuman). Monbiot puts it down to their cosmology;
Everett himself doesn't really seem to make it clear. Personally, I suspect that innovation has often been nurtured by necessity, and by contact with other ethnic groups and copying/modifying their innovations. If you are completely isolated as a culture and have no immediate necessity to invent the personal digital assistant, then you end up like the Piraha. But it doesn't mean you don't have the normal intelligence of any other human.
I must admit I'm no anthropologist, but I found Everett's work interesting. There is a nice little website
here which describes the people and shows some of the pictures they have drawn with coloured crayons.
I hope some of you find this interesting too.
Best wishes,
Mick
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