Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived (24 page)

In other words, while there don’t seem to be many practical reasons why talents like music, dancing, and other arts evolved, but they did, so there must have been some powerful selective forces at work to bring them into existence, winning over the opposite sex, for example.

Zoologists have an oddly charming name they use to describe the singing or dancing or fighting that animals do to gain the attention of potential mates. They call it lekking. It’s a way of strutting your stuff, letting the creatures you are wooing—not to mention any competitors that happen to be nearby—know just how fit and cool you are. When we stand around at a party and talk, the human version of lekking is rampant and intricate. We show off the way we look and dress, revealing subtly (or not) the clothing or jewelry we wear or the gadgets we have on hand. But the real action is in how we behave. Are we funny, insightful, charming, articulate, and quick–witted? If we are, we are advertising a first–rate mind. The more talent and creativity we bring to the party, the more likely we are to be noticed. Being outstanding is a good thing when vying for the attention of others.

We cultivate these behaviors in subtle and complex ways that even we aren’t consciously aware of. Researchers have found that women, for example, laugh more when they are in the company of men. This isn’t because men are exceptionally funny, but because (subconsciously) women are encouraging men to lek so they can gather information and observe what the man has to offer. The more she laughs, the more he shares and reveals. And the more he reveals, the better she can judge what he offers in ideas, values, talent, and personality. If she likes what she sees, she may eventually offer him the benefit of her company. If not, the laughter stops and she moves on. This probably also explains the results of a 2005 study that indicated that women are attracted to men who make them laugh while men are attracted to women who find their jokes funny.

A recent study of 425 British men and women indicated that artists, poets, and other creative “types” had two to three more sexual partners than the average Brit who participated in the study. Whatever else you might conclude about bohemian lifestyles, it seems that creativity
has its attractions. Another study has found that professional dancers (and their parents) share two specific genes associated with a predisposition for being good social communicators. The theory here is that dance and song were primal ways that our ancestors bonded, prepared for battle, or celebrated, and that creative dancers not only boasted great rhythm, but great social skills, which together made them especially attractive. This would make dancing both a way to show off physical fitness
and
a healthy brain, a kind of evolutionary twofer. Could it be that charm, creativity, and rhythm all go hand in hand?

We can speculate, but the truth is it has been a struggle for scientists to take behaviors such as art, sculpture, storytelling, and music seriously because each seems, from an evolutionary point of view, so impractical. They also resist cold analysis because they are hopelessly subjective. Mostly the field of evolutionary psychology has concluded that music, song, dance, and art are best explained as accidental by–products of other forces that created the extravagant human brain. Nothing more than evolutionary filigree.

But again, Geoffrey Miller begs to differ. He argues that our elaborate human behaviors evolved for the same reasons peacock feathers did, or the rainbow colors on mandrill snouts—they represent powerful personal marketing that lets the opposite sex know how extraordinarily fit the brains of their owners are, which in turn makes them great potential mates. “The healthy brain theory,” he says, “proposes that our minds are clusters of fitness indicators: persuasive salesmen like art, music, and humor, that do their best work in courtship, where the most important deals are made.”

I believe that Miller is correct, but I also believe that advertising our cerebral fitness is good for more than landing mates, as crucially important as that is. In fact, creativity of all kinds may trump sex as
the
most central force in human relationships because, beyond sex and sexual selection, survival is also, ultimately, about power over your environment. And fit brains not only demonstrate power, they generate it.

In 1975, Amotz Zahavi, a biologist at Tel Aviv University, conceived a theory that was fascinating because on the surface it was so counterintuitive. He thought it might explain some of the exceedingly
impractical traits and behaviors we see in nature that seem to hamper animals rather than help them. Why, he asked, would peacock feathers evolve when they weigh so much and their colors risk attracting the attention of predators? Or why, when an impala senses a lion nearby, does it bound straight up in the air (something called stotting), wasting valuable seconds before it sprints in the opposite direction? Why do bowerbirds create intricate and ostentatious nests for their mates that include everything from seashells to rifle shells when a simple bundle of woven grass would do the job just as well? To answer these questions he conceived the “handicap principle.”

Zahavi already knew some of the traits and behaviors could be explained as ways to win mates. But he also knew they help establish status. The peacock isn’t simply saying, “See my remarkable feathers.” He’s also saying, “And have you noticed how strong I must be to get off the ground and fly with these enormous things weighing me down?” The point for potential mates is clear—I’m handsome
and
strong. But the same message is simultaneously sent to predators and other peacock competitors: “Don’t mess with me. I’m top dog. I know it. You know it. So let’s all just take our place in the pecking order and move on.”

In the same way, an impala’s pogo–stick bound before it sets out to escape from a predator may waste time and energy, but it also tells a stalking lion, “As you can see, I’m pretty healthy and rather quick. You might want to think twice before taking the time to chase me.” Often as not, the lion does a quick and primal cost–benefit analysis, walks away, and looks for a less challenging meal elsewhere. These are survival strategies, pure and simple.

The point is, even seemingly inefficient traits and behaviors have their purposes, though they might not be immediately obvious. It’s not always necessarily about sexual selection. Sometimes the traits make you attractive, sometimes they represent a sophisticated way to survive, sometimes they help reinforce status, and sometimes it’s all the above.

If ever there was an example of an organ that was costly, yet delivered an enormous payoff, the human brain is it—the ultimate peacock’s feathers. It devours enormous amounts of energy (far more than any other organ in the body), is outrageously complex, and subject to breaking down (with disastrous results). Yet what powerful
messages it can send about its owner, and its owner’s fitness! This makes the human brain the most elaborate example of the handicap principle in all of nature, an extravagance that expends enormous amounts of energy illustrating how extraordinary its owner is by conjuring the most surprising and creative things it can itself conceive.

How else can you explain Beethoven’s Ninth, Picasso’s
Guernica
, and sculptures from Michelangelo’s
Moses
to the great and intricate Buddha of Kamakura, Japan. Why Fred Astaire, Kabuki Theater, James Joyce, Cirque du Soleil, Steve Jobs, Gregorian chant, and
Avatar
? In short, how do you explain all the seemingly impractical yet ubiquitous examples of human creativity and inventiveness?

Because the brain is invisible, unlike peacock feathers, it reveals its fitness by generating behaviors that are extra–ordinary, surprising, and impressive. To be surprising means to be different and unexpected, again, out–standing. To be impressive the behaviors have to be something others find difficult to do. The two together define creativity. The scale of human invention is broad and deep. It can encompass everything from the merely pleasing to stunning genius.

When you think about it, the brain’s capacity for generating captivating insights and behaviors is what makes each of us the unique people we are. We use it to fabricate the traits that define us—our wit, our charm, our drive, our insight, our humor and intelligence, our talent and interests. Some of us have been blessed with truly extraordinary gifts—Shakespeare, the ultimate storyteller; Leonardo, the ultimate imagineer; Einstein, the ultimate problem solver. The rest of us stake our ground somewhere between profound genius and a good one–liner.

Why is this need and appreciation for creativity so deeply plaited into us? Because the advantage of a brain that can do surprising, remarkable, or outrageously pleasing things is that it gets attention, or rather its owner does, and that attention can be translated into fame, influence, goodwill, leadership, sex, and, in modern society, money. Look at the people we admire or reward across all cultures. Dancers, singers, thinkers, comedians, actors, political leaders, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople, even an occasional scientist or journalist. (I am not including athletes here because we don’t reward them for their intelligence, though their intelligence may certainly contribute to their success.) All of these people display unusually fit brains because
they are both inventive and able to effectively communicate their inventiveness. Whatever else we may think of them, we have to at least agree that they are not boring and or predictable. They stand out, and in standing out, they aggregate the most important human commodity of all—power.

We often think of power as a bad thing, possibly because it can be abused with depressing effect. But in nature acquiring power is crucial to survival. All living things seek it because without it they will die. Plants may acquire it in the form of nutrients from the soil and the sun. A silverback gorilla or bighorn sheep may acquire it with raw strength. With most animals power flows to them in direct proportion to how well the genes they inherited match their environment. Penguins would be powerless in the tropics, and Komodo dragons would be equally helpless in the arctic. Cheetahs maintain power with speed, wildebeests in numbers, and condors with flight.

But we humans apply our brains, not simply our genes, to acquiring power, and because we are so genial, we seek it not only to survive our physical environment, but our social one, too. Survival in a social context isn’t quite as literal as it is in a physical one. If you don’t survive physically, you die. If you don’t survive socially, it means you don’t matter, and that is, in it’s own way, also deadly.

Mattering is itself relative because in today’s world we can live in a wide variety of social circles. We can’t all matter as much as those examples I mentioned earlier, Aristotle or Confucius or Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare—people whose creativity made an indelible mark on human history. But we can matter to our city or officemates or family or Facebook friends—the modern equivalents of the tribe—and that is important because how we stand with our tribe deeply affects how we feel about ourselves. Today we can even have multiple tribes to choose from, and the World Wide Web allows us to create instant new tribes to whom we can display our cerebral fitness. The important thing is that we matter, to someone. Because if we don’t, the alternative is chronic depression, or worse.

Creativity isn’t the only way we strive to matter and gain power, but it’s the most functional, sensible way. It doesn’t require greed or jealousy, envy or outright violence, all of which can be highly effective, if immensely damaging, methods for gaining power. But these don’t reveal a fit brain. Creativity does. It is the most impressive
way to earn the attention of others. And thankfully, over the long haul, it works; otherwise it would long ago have been swept from the index of our behaviors. We would be without art, music, and dance; there would be no pyramids at Giza, no Taj Mahal, no Brahms, Voltaire, Goethe, Yeats; only brutality and violence, and therefore, very likely, no humans.

The idea that the foundations of human civilization are largely an unintended consequence of complex brains wired to draw attention to their owners is both paradoxical and startling. Brains did not evolve to be creative, they are creative by the accident of evolution. And in becoming so, the exciting and innovative sideshow that bubbled up from our primal need to matter to the opposite sex, our competitors, loved ones, and everyone else in our tribe eventually took center stage. Now, after thousands of years of our brains’ showing off, we find ourselves enmeshed in this massively complicated, rich, and remarkable thing called human culture, sometimes revealing the evil in us, sometimes the divine, but always surprising and innovated because we have become utterly incapable of living without originality. There is no getting around the conclusion that creativity, though it may once have been evolutionary filigree, has become
the
force that defines our species, and the behavior that separates us from all other living things.

As creative as we are, we haven’t yet solved the elusive question of when, or how, we managed to get this way. It’s not as though evolution one day snapped its fingers and we were smitten. The cerebral infrastructure that makes such a thing possible has been long in the making. Nevertheless, evidence of human creativity in the sense we are talking about has been scarce until quite recently, if you can consider recently within the past seventy thousand years. It’s true tools and other technologies had been around millions of years, and they require creativity, but they are not examples of self–expression or symbolic thinking the way a piece of sculpture, a painting, language, or a song are. The timing of this matters because creative self–expression of this kind only became possible when our brains reached a certain critical, but as yet undefined, level. Its emergence marks a watershed event in human evolution, arguably
the
watershed event.

Most paleoanthropologists agree, for the time being at least, that
Homo sapiens
emerged 195,000 years ago. By this they mean creatures
that were anatomically modern—they looked like us. The oldest
Homo sapiens
fossils were found in Ethiopia in 1961, but sadly no trace of symbolic thinking was found with them, no tangible demonstrations of brain fitness. This has created the underlying suspicion among scientists that though these people looked like us, they may not have
acted
altogether like us. They made tools that were incrementally better than the tools of those who came before them. They certainly lived rich and complicated social lives. But all the fossil and genetic evidence indicates that mostly they still roamed the same grasslands in East Africa, hunting game and struggling to survive, as so many of their ancestors before them.