Essay
Plato’s Beard » Blog Archive
My argument stresses the plasticity that our brains were endowed with when this mutation occurred. Some scientists believe that skills like language have a strong genetic basis, but my theory stresses the opposite, that knowledge, picked up by our now powerful brains, is the crucial mental component. It means that we are uniquely gifted in our ability to learn from experience and to pass this on to future generations. That has a bad side: a single generation starved of knowledge, thanks to some global disaster, for example, would be cast back to the Stone Age.