How did man acquire a big brain? How did humanity come up with progress and what came of it Questions about how humanity acquired zoological knowledge

The human brain has roughly tripled in size over the past two million years for two reasons - the need to get food more efficiently and to cooperate more with others, scientists say.

“The growth of the human brain cannot be explained by social factors alone, as anthropologists believe today. Most likely, it was more influenced by the struggle of our ancestors with the forces of nature and the culture associated with it than by the need to cooperate with each other and defend against the aggression of other individuals and tribes of people,” they write Andy Gardner from the University of St Andrews and his colleagues.

Is the brain necessary for evolution?

One of the main mysteries in the history of human evolution is the question of how our ancestors were able to acquire such a large and “voracious” brain, consuming about a quarter of the energy produced by our body.

Most scientists believe that the culprits were tools, which allowed our ancestors to switch to meat diet, and transition to upright walking, while others believe that this happened due to the fact that they lived near volcanoes and geysers, which allowed them to cook food and extract maximum energy from it.

The problem is that our closest relatives, including chimpanzees and gorillas, spend 8-10 hours searching for food and eating it in order to feed their brain, whose volume is several times smaller than that of a human. Since none of these primate species ever invented tools, the question arises as to how man managed to do this, and whether tools and the ability to cook food were the main factors in our evolution.

As Gardner notes, there are three possible explanations for this paradox, which involve environmental, social and cultural factors. Proponents of the first idea believe that our brains grew due to the fact that it became increasingly difficult for our ancestors to get food, and apologists of the second theory believe that various social factors, including competition for the attention of females and the need to cooperate in obtaining food.

War on Nature

The third idea involves a combination of the first two - its authors believe that collective the nature of human life does not allow us to separate environmental factors from social. The authors of the article checked whether this is actually true by creating a computer model of the cradle of humanity, in which the first people evolved.

This cradle was inhabited by a large number of virtual ape-men, each of whom had a large set of characteristics, including body and brain mass, certain abilities and energy needs, which flowed from all other parameters.

Each such group of human virtual ancestors lived according to the laws that were proposed by the authors of all three theories, and developed, leaving offspring with the most a good combination individual characteristics. Scientists have followed this evolution, comparing it with how the appearance of real human ancestors changed.

As these calculations showed, human brain growth cannot be explained by just one of these theories. A combination of at least two of them is necessary, ecological and cooperative. The first accounts for approximately 60% of brain growth, the second for about 30%, and another 10% due to competition between tribes of ancient people.

All this, as the researchers note, speaks in favor of the third theory, cultural evolution humanity, and explains well why other species of primates never acquired intelligence, since in their evolution social connections and life in a society of their own kind played much greater importance.

Progress is a completely unnatural thing, but people have not yet come up with anything better, explains historian and professor at Northwestern University Joel Mokyr

How and why did the modern world come into being and the unprecedented prosperity it brought? Entire bookcases are devoted to endless explanations of this phenomenon - these are the works of historians, economists, philosophers and other thinkers. But this question can be looked at in another way: where did the belief in the benefit of progress come from?

This belief may seem obvious today, but in the distant past most people believed that history moved in a circle or followed a path determined by higher powers. The idea that people can and should consciously work to make the world a better place for them and for future generations arose largely during the two centuries between Columbus and Newton. Of course, just believing in the possibility of progress is not enough: this opportunity must also be realized. Modern world began when people decided to do it.

Why was humanity in the past not ready to accept the idea of ​​progress? The main argument was that it implied disrespect for previous generations. As the historian Carl Becker noted in a classic work, “the philosopher was unable to grasp the modern idea of ​​progress without ridding himself of ancestral worship, without abandoning the inferiority complex caused by the past, and without realizing that his own generation was more worthy than all others known to him.” " As the Great Travels and the Reformation began, Europeans increasingly began to doubt the classical works of geography, medicine, astronomy, and physics that had been the main sources of wisdom in the Middle Ages. And after these doubts came the feeling that their own generation knew more than the previous ones, and that it was wiser than them.

In the past, most societies thought very differently. For them, it was normal to imagine that all the wisdom of the world was revealed to the thinkers of the past, and in order to learn something, you need to read their works and look for answers there. In the Islamic world, wisdom was to be sought in the Koran and hadith (words and deeds attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), among the Jews - in the Torah and Talmud, in China - in commentaries on the works of Confucius, and in medieval Europe - in a small number of ancient works, especially works of Aristotle.

In Europe, respect for the classical texts began to fade in the 16th century, and in the 17th century it was discovered that many of them contained errors. If the classics are so often wrong, how can you trust them at all? The English philosopher William Gilbert, author of the famous book on magnetism, looked like a bully when he wrote in 1600 that he would not waste time quoting the ancient Greeks because their arguments and terms were not very effective.

Upon closer examination, many of the postulates of classical science fell apart. First of all, it was the belief that the earth is the center of the universe, but there were a lot of such misconceptions. Aristotle insisted that all stars were motionless and fixed in place, but in 1572 the young astronomer Tycho Brahe discovered a supernova and realized that Aristotle was wrong. Even more amazingly, Aristotle wrote that the areas around the equator were too dry for anyone to live there, but Europeans discovered that people lived well in such regions - Africa, America and India.

Further more. After 1600, Europeans developed scientific instruments that allowed them to see things that ancient authors could not have imagined. It is not surprising that they began to feel superior: Ptolemy did not have a telescope, Pliny did not have a microscope, Archimedes did not have a barometer. The classics were smart and well-educated, but European intellectuals considered themselves equally smart and more informed, and therefore able to see what the ancients did not see. Therefore, everything had to be tested using real data, and not just relying on quotes from authorities who lived 1,500 years ago. Skepticism became the basis for the search for new knowledge. Even the Bible was now being analyzed critically; Baruch Spinoza doubted its divine origin; he saw it as just another text.

Tradition did not give up without a fight. In the last decades of the 17th century, an intellectual battle unfolded between the ancients and the moderns. People seriously discussed who was better - the writers and philosophers of antiquity or the new era. This controversy was satirized by Jonathan Swift in "The Battle of the Books"; there he described an absurd physical battle between modern and ancient authors.

The question of which playwright is better - Sophocles or Shakespeare - is obviously a matter of taste. But the questions of who correctly determines the speed of falling objects, explains the circulation of blood, the planets of celestial bodies or the spontaneous generation of organisms were not, and the answers became increasingly clear. By 1700, this battle in Europe had been won, and ancient scientific and medical texts were treated with less and less respect. A leading textbook on natural philosophy, which was published in 1755 and was used for more than a century, began with the words that “it is no small surprise how little progress the knowledge of nature has made in earlier ages, compared with the enormous achievements of recent times... Philosophers of earlier eras immersed themselves in the creation of hypotheses that have no basis in nature and are unable to explain the phenomena for which they were conceived.”

This was a turning point: intellectuals began to perceive knowledge as a cumulative process. In the past, if manuscripts were destroyed, knowledge was lost. After 1500, the printing press and the proliferation of libraries made such a loss unlikely. Modern people could not only know what the ancients knew, but also constantly replenish their reserves of knowledge. The young Blaise Pascal imagined science as a person with an infinite life span, who learns tirelessly. A generation later, his compatriot Bernard de Fontenelle predicted that in the future the knowledge of truth would go much further, and that one day his own contemporaries would become ancient, and their descendants would in many ways outstrip them.

Of course, different authors meant different things by progress. Some thought about moral improvement, others - about more worthy rulers. But the central theme was economic progress and increased material prosperity, as well as religious tolerance, equality before the law and other rights.

By the 18th century, the idea of ​​economic progress was firmly ingrained in people's minds. Adam Smith noted in 1776 that production in England had increased markedly compared to previous eras. Others doubted that innovation would accelerate economic growth, feared that the forces of progress were too weak and would fade away due to rapid growth population. But it turned out that even optimists underestimated the power of technological progress: cheap steel, quality food, doubling life expectancy while cutting the working day in half, and so on.

Further, a consensus began to emerge that science and technology are the engines of economic progress. In 1780, Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend: “The rapid progress of science makes me sometimes regret that I was born so early. It is impossible to imagine the height to which in a thousand years man’s power over matter will rise.”

It is interesting that at that time not many great inventions had yet been made, and material progress for the most part remained in the future. But the optimism turned out to be undying. The historian Thomas Macaulay noted in 1830 that he saw “the wealth of nations increasing, and all the arts and crafts reaching greater and greater perfection, notwithstanding the most terrible corruption of the rulers.” He predicted further progress and the appearance of "machines based on principles as yet undiscovered in every home."

He was right. Eighteenth-century Europe had many serious technological problems that people felt needed urgent solutions: measuring longitude at sea, automating weaving, pumping water from coal mines, preventing smallpox, and quickly processing iron. By 1800, these problems had been solved, but the list went on and on: gas lamps, chlorine-bleached underwear, train travel. And also defeating gravity by launching balloons.

Belief in progress has always had opponents. Many have emphasized the costs of technological advances. In the 17th century, the Jesuit order tirelessly fought against godless innovations like Copernican astronomy and the analysis of infinitesimal quantities. During the Industrial Revolution, many authors, following Malthus, were convinced that unlimited population growth would destroy the fruits of economic growth (this was believed even in the 1960s). Today, fears of the monstrosities of genetic engineering (including, God forbid, higher intelligence, drought-resistant seeds and malaria-resistant mosquitoes) threaten to stall research and new developments in many key areas, including climate change.

Progress, as people quickly realized, always comes with risks and costs. But the alternative—whether before or now—is always worse.

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Children have no, or practically no, innate fears - all main types of fears are acquired by children and adults in the course of life. Fears and anxiety sometimes come to our souls on their own, but for some they do not take root for long, but in others they turn out to be welcome guests. The experience of fear can be attractive for both children and adults, both in a playful and in a serious form.

Mostly women pay attention to their fears and tend to experience them. Women are more likely than men to be afraid, and are more likely to attribute fear to others.

More often, however, fears and anxiety are the result social learning. Children are taught to be afraid by their parents, children play fear on their own, people begin to be afraid of something when there is some benefit and interest in it. Anxious children are raised by anxious parents.

The anxiety of one person is easily transmitted to another, like a virus. Anxious parents are more likely to produce anxious, insecure children. Watch "Normal Anxious Mom" ​​from the movie "Chocolate".

Anxious children learn anxious behavior and become stronger in anxiety, since anxious children have their own bonuses and internal benefits. Over time, anxiety becomes not only bad habit, but also a natural way of life with its own social attributes, its circle of friends and interests, supported by its books and its columns in the media. Psychologists themselves also make their contribution to the formation of fears and anxiety. Anxiety is imprinted on the body, becoming at first functional, and later anatomical negative.

The Origins of Anxiety

The causes and sources of fears are many and varied. Most often we can talk about the following:

• Template thinking, following negative cultural stereotypes,
• Education on negative models
• Internal benefit- for example, avoidance of responsibility and the convenience of being in the position of the Victim.

It is useful for a specialist to understand the sources of anxiety. If someone who is in fear and anxiety begins to do this, it does not lead to anything good. Look

Instead of delving into your fears, it’s better to:

• contact a good specialist (or),
• pass good psychological training, developing contact, responsibility And self confidence ,
• start working with yourself independently, but competently. Look How to work on yourself.

Teaching fears to children

Children have fears of the phobia type, which arise suddenly and involuntarily, but such fears in children are hardly more than 5%. Most children's fears are the result of learning, when children, on their own initiative, with the help of parents, friends, films and the media, learn to be afraid and soon become adept at being afraid. Cm. →

Using Anxiety

Anxiety is children's version mental protection. Someone who is anxious shows by this his anxiety and the fact that he already feels bad (he is already punished by his own anxiety), so in case of failure there will be fewer accusations against him (such as: “Well, I didn’t prepare for the exam!...”) As an emotion defensive type, anxiety is mastered by children when the child begins to be expected to prepare independently - that is, usually from the junior grades of school.

In addition to the function of mental protection, anxiety works as a way negative self-motivation. While disturbing, it reminds you that you still need to do something. Accordingly, if a child is completely irresponsible, then mild to moderate anxiety is useful for him; it makes him worry about at least something. However, if anxiety becomes high, it interferes with thinking and reduces results. In this case, anxiety is already a hindrance, however, here too it often serves as an explanation: “I failed the exam because I was very worried and could not concentrate!” That's all, explaining failure by increased anxiety removes responsibility for failure.