Free The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley Page A

living. For a while, it even looked as if two candidate mutations of the right age had appeared – in the gene called FOXP2, which is essential to speech and language in both people and songbirds. Adding these two mutations to mice does indeed seem to change the flexibility of wiring in their brain in a way that may be necessary for the rapid flicker of tongue and lung that is called speech, and perhaps coincidentally the mutations even change the way mice pups squeak without changing almost anything else about them. But recent evidence confirms that Neanderthals share the very same two mutations, which suggests that the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern people, living about 400,000 years ago, may have already been using pretty sophisticated language. If language is the key to cultural evolution, and Neanderthals had language, then why did the Neanderthal toolkit show so little cultural change?
    Moreover, genes would undoubtedly have changed during the human revolution after 200,000 years ago, but more in response to new habits than as causes of them. At an earlier date, cooking selected mutations for smaller guts and mouths, rather than vice versa. At a later date, milk drinking selected for mutations for retaining lactose digestion into adulthood in people of western European and East African descent. The cultural horse comes before the genetic cart. The appeal to a genetic change driving evolution gets gene-culture co-evolution backwards: it is a top-down explanation for a bottom-up process.
    Besides, there is a more fundamental objection. If a genetic change triggered novel human habits, why do its effects appear gradually and erratically in different places at different times but then accelerate once established? How could the new gene have a slower effect in Australia than in Europe? Whatever the explanation for the modernisation of human technology after 200,000 years ago, it must be something that gathers pace by feeding upon itself, something that is auto-catalytic.
    As you can tell, I like neither theory. I am going to argue that the answer lies not in climate, nor genetics, nor in archaeology, nor even entirely in ‘culture’, but in economics. Human beings had started to do something to and with each other that in effect began to build a collective intelligence. They had started, for the very first time, to exchange things between unrelated, unmarried individuals; to share, swap, barter and trade. Hence the Nassarius shells moving inland from the Mediterranean. The effect of this was to cause specialisation, which in turn caused technological innovation, which in turn encouraged more specialisation, which led to more exchange – and ‘progress’ was born, by which I mean technology and habits changing faster than anatomy. They had stumbled on what Friedrich Hayek called the catallaxy: the ever-expanding possibility generated by a growing division of labour. This is something that amplifies itself once begun.
    Exchange needed to be invented. It does not come naturally to most animals. There is strikingly little use of barter in any other animal species. There is sharing within families, and there is food-for-sex exchange in many animals including insects and apes, but there are no cases in which one animal gives an unrelated animal one thing in exchange for a different thing. ‘No man ever saw a dog make fair and deliberate exchange of a bone with another dog,’ said Adam Smith.
    I need to digress here: bear with me. I am not talking about swapping favours – any old primate can do that. There is plenty of ‘reciprocity’ in monkeys and apes: you scratch my back and I scratch yours. Or, as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, ‘One party helps another at one point in time, in order to increase the probability that when their situations are reversed at some (usually) unspecified time in the future, the act will be reciprocated.’ Such reciprocity is an important human social glue, a source of