At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative

I have just started a whole shelf of new books, all vying for attention and all seeming equally interesting. One in particular, The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley would seem to have the potential for many striking anecdotes and quotations. Here is the first of what I anticipate to be many passages.

Clearly, big brains and language may be necessary for human beings to cope with a life of technological modernity. Clearly, human beings are very good at social learning, indeed compared with even chimpanzees humans are almost obsessively interested in faithful imitation. But big brains and imitation and language are not themselves the explanation of prosperity and progress and poverty. They do not themselves deliver a changing standard of living. Neanderthals had all of these: huge brains, probably complex languages, lots of technology. But they never burst out of their niche. It is my contention that in looking inside our heads, we would be looking in the wrong place to explain this extraordinary capacity for change in the species. It was not something that happened within a brain. It was something that happened between brains. It was a collective phenomenon.

Look again at the hand axe and the mouse. They are both 'man-made', but one was made by a single person, the other by hundreds of people, maybe even millions. That is what I mean by collective intelligence. No single person knows how to make a computer mouse. The person who assempled it in the factory did not know how to drill the oil well from which the plastic came, or vice versa. At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

To add to Ridley's observation, I believe it notable that whereas Homo Sapiens Sapiens have demonstrated a consistent proclivity to trade from the earliest days of the species with shells, rocks and other materials showing up in human sites far distant from where those products were originally produced, there is no such evidence of trade at Neanderthal sites. Our near cousins produced what they could with what they had. Man expanded his horizons and opportunity for material development by going beyond the immediate constraints of what was available and traded with the neighbors. The earliest evidence for the extraordinarly powerful engine for intellectual and material expansion which Hayek later characterized as the knowledge problem (The Use of Knowledge in Society). Even today and even amongst our most senior academics and policy setters, the power of trade and connectivity through prices is poorly comprehended. After language and spoken communication, trade and pricing mechanisms were the first mechanisms for connecting humanity to one another where the whole was much more productive than the parts. An early precursor of the internet if you will.

In fact, the story of humanity's survival and expansion might be told as the progression through increasingly complex means of connecting ourselves to one another: language, story-telling, writing, trade, transportation, pricing mechanisms, and the internet. Almost everything we are proud of, everything we would wish to put on humanity's resume, to use Charles Murray's metaphor, is directly tied to these force multipliers.

Interestingly, and challengelingly, almost every new connection and every new means of connection, expands freedom but also expands uncertainty. The more connectivity we have with one another, the greater the uncertainty and potential risk, but also, usually, the greater the unanticipatable progress.

The latent concern about books and the internet which many parents evince are a quotidian example of the risks and rewards that arise from greater productivity as minds meet minds.