Synopsis: Accessorised evolution is the human difference.
It may sound a simple concept, but of the evolution of “accessories”, and the technologies used to make them, is considered fundamental key concept of this think tank.
Welcome to a one-finite planet video on the concept of “accessorised evolution”, which you may come to agree is the key difference between us humans and other species. This divided into chapters as follows: the can be seen a
Key points, as discussed below:
- Naming: Why “Accessories” and not “tools” or “technology”?
- Because in general use, “tools” are for making things, and technology would not include clothes or homes.
- The evolution of “Accessories” is the definitive human difference.
- Other species are to degrees intelligent and use tools, but no other species evolve their tools.
- Evolution of evolution: Accessorised evolution is a huge step.
- The first 90% of our time, almost no human progress, then unprecedented evolution even without biological evolution.
- Overall, evolution has been slow, but the process has a history of getting significant upgrades
- Only humans have all the ingredients for accessorised evolution.
- Accessories are integral to being human, our history, and our future.
- “Grokking” the further implications of accessorised evolution.
- Our nature, Population, Racism, Future, Survival
So, does this matter? Well, it can provide an answer to why people become so motivated to acquire new things. Our evolution has made it our strength to new use new things to develop new or improved abilities that would at one time have been consider superpowers. It may even be why people can be motivated by buy cars that enable them to travel at twice the speed limit or travel off-road to remote locations, even if they are unlikely to use those enhanced abilities.
More significantly, Accessorised Evolution, provides an answer to how we humans went from being not that different from other species of ape during our 300,000 years in the Paleolithic age, to being able to in just 10,000 years so significantly transform our 4-billion-year-old planet that it is suggested we are now in the Anthropocene or “human epoch”. I suggest our accelerating rate of development indicates we effectively embody the biggest step forward in evolution since sex.
What’s next? Are we headed for ever advancing accessories that give us all “Batman-like” superpowers, and need them to stop AI robots to taking over, headed for society to collapse, or a dream future where we can prosper beyond the limitations of nature alone? To answer where we will go next with this seemingly ever-increasing rate of development, it can help to understand how we got here.
Why “Accessories” and not “tools” or “technology”?
It is hard to find a single word to capture all we build to add to what it means to be human. Beyond we add as individuals like a “Batman” to have individual superpowers, also what we add collectively to humanity that makes the individual accessories possible, and ranges from mines and factories to universities and hospitals, and neither “tools” nor “technologies” seemed to capture it all.
So, it is not just the accessories that appearance in images, “accessories” is used here to be more inclusive than the terms “tools” or technology and include everything from clothing, jewellery, computing devices, houses, vehicles, tools, books, toys and even weapons, as well as bridges, communal buildings, libraries, the internet, universities, hospitals, and the medical equipment and medicines.
What is a Tool? Anthropology answer: An accessory that provides enhanced capabilities. Common use answer: An accessory that is used to make or build more accessories. This is while a store may have a “tools” section, although everything in the entire store qualifies as an accessory.
OK, these days ‘tool’ can be a derogatory term for a person as in: “I went to the store today and I saw they had a tool section. I just had to look, and sure enough there were several tools there, all standing around looking lustfully at products that they don’t need”.
But seriously, this just demonstrates meanings change. In fact, the narrower definition of ‘tools’ being a section of the hardware store is itself a very narrow use of the word tool. The first stone tools did not fit this narrower description of ‘tool’, and when researching animals’ ability to use ‘tools’ it can include an octopus using a coconut for shelter, or even a dolphin using a sponge. The reality tools are not just products sold as tools, and unlike that narrow definition, tools are not predominantly from domains that in a sexist world are mostly male. Not only is the label ‘tool’ used for ‘kitchen tools’, but the term ‘tool’ also describes mixers, blenders, and a whole host of kitchen appliances used equally by both genders. The are cameras and lenses as tools of photography, of sewing machines and more as tools for sewing, and tools for science. For almost any human activity, we have tools to enhance our abilities and give us superpowers.
The evolution of “Accessories”: the definitive human difference.
Throughout history we humans have thought of ourselves as completely apart from other species.
There are humans and there is nature. Even call a human an “animal” is considered an insult. Technically we are animals. In fact, technically we are members of the ape family, but to call someone an ape can even be consider worse than to call them an animal. In normal thinking, humans are superior to all other animals and should be considered differently from apes, even if technically we are apes. But exactly how are we so completely different? Intelligence? We may be smarter, but the more we look, the more we learn how other animals are more intelligent than we previously thought. Even something as far from us on the tree of life as an octopus, can be intelligent and can even use tools. Dogs can count and have a sense of humour, elephants as show humour and play practical jokes, can use tools, mourn the dead and show empathy. Birds can learn from each other.
But despite all this, no other species passes down knowledge of how to make their tools from generation to generation, allowing each generation add improvements. The big difference is the tools of earlier generations provide a starting point for the generations that follow. The result is the continual improvement and evolution of the “tools” to eventually extend beyond fitting simple description of “tool”. Other species do use tools, but humans have taken them from “tools” to accessories that evolve.
Evolution of evolution: mitosis to accessorised evolution & beyond.
The first 90% of our time, almost no human progress, then unprecedented evolution even without biological evolution.
Does this evolution of accessories qualify as evolution?
We humans are now having so much impact on the entire planet that there are calls for the current time to be called the Anthropocene or “human epoch”. Views over when the epoch would start range from the start of the industrial revolution to first atomic bomb, both of which could be seen to be all about our accessories.
Normally, species only change their impact on the planet when either conditions change, increasing their success, or they change through evolution, increasing their success. Now for a look what happened for humans to “evolve” through our stages of development from the “stone age”, bronze age, iron age etc through to the current “information age”.
In practice, the terminology itself keeps being reviewed, and dates change according to region, but simplistically, we humans spent around as much time in the bronze age, or be more technical and up to date, the copper/bronze ages, than it has taken for all the development since from around the time of Ancient Greeks until now. We developed writing and record keeping, plumbing, books and the Guttenberg press, cars, planes, silicon chips and the internet in around the same time as it took to progress through the copper/bronze age. Yet, just as the ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians seemed around as intelligent as people of today, there is no reason for people to have been any different from those back in copper/bronze age.
Expanding the time covered in the timeline by a factor of 10x allows also seeing the new stone age or “neolithic”, although this time is now again divided in the Mesolithic and Neolithic, at around 12,000 years ago. 12,000 years ago, is when the climate stabilised to conditions similar to those of today and allowed farming in a fixed location, as discussed in “natural climate change” as linked below, but overall humans spent just as much time in the new/middle stone age, as the entire time since the end of the stone age.
Expand the time covered by another factor of 10x, and it becomes clear we homo sapiens have spent at least 90% of our time on the planet in the Paleolithic “old stone age”!
Expand yet another factor of 10x to cover what is regarded as the entire “stone age”, and it highlights that the term Paleolithic or “old stone age”, covers a period far predating Homo Sapiens. Checking the dates, it doesn’t go back to include the very earliest human ancestors such as Australopithecus anamensis. In fact, the evolution of homo-sapiens occurs within the Paleolithic and is not linked with any specific advance.
In the history of human development, biological evolution to becoming homo-sapiens occurred during the Paleolithic, and while it is only homo-sapiens that progressed beyond the paleolithic, it is that evolution of accessories, rather than and any further steps in biological evolution that took over, taking us from very much just another species of ape during the Paleolithic, to 8 million at the end of the iron age, and surge in population 1,000 times to 8 billion dominating the world and the Anthropocene. This evolution also accelerates, as what we develop is applied to accelerate further development.
Overall, evolution has been slow, but the process has a history of getting significant upgrades.
The idea biological evolution could ever produce nature as we see it today can be very hard to accept. But then you realise how long it took. While all the developments since the neolithic become just a dot on a timeline zoomed out 1,000x to include the entire paleolithic, the time of the entire Paleolithic itself, then becomes an even smaller dot on the timeline zoomed then even more than another 1,000x times needed to include the full history of evolution. While yes, as covered in “We are not the bad guys” (linked below), most of the time the Earth would not have supported life like us anyway, but still even allowing for that, biological evolution has been incredibly slow!
For most of the almost 1 billion years of the first of the 4 Eons, the Haden Eon of “hell on Earth”, between the heat and the constant bombardment from space, it is unsurprising there is no evidence of life or little progress.
That can reproduce, meant life coming into existence was the first step or “upgrade”, as evolution is impossible without reproduction which largely defines life. Despite life already existing at the start of the Archean, “beginning”, or second of the 4 Eons 3.5 billion years ago, the only life during the entire 1.5 billion years of this second of 4 Eons were “procaryotes”, which are simplistic single cell organisms without even a nucleus.
Evolution requires change, and procaryotes reproduce only “clones” by mitosis. While mutations can occur, there is no mechanism for the combining and remixing of genes, which does limit evolution.
Evolution Phase 2: The nucleus, sex, and a 1.5-billion-year step to complex life.
The 3rd of the 4 Eons, the Proterozoic “Eon” of “earlier life”, began 2.5 billion years ago and lasted over 2 billion years making it the longest Eon. The Eon began with the next step towards complex life: Eukaryotes, that are still life with only a single cell, but a more complex cell with “organelles” and a nucleus, which are likes cells within the overall cell. But it wasn’t just 2 billion years to get fancier microbes, it was also the beginning of sex!
While the emergence of Eucaryotes cells was highly significant, it was the upgrade to evolution itself with the development of sexual reproduction of these Eucaryotes around 0.5 billion years later, which makes it 2 billion years ago, that had the biggest impact the success of life, as can be seen from the rapid increase in total biomass on Earth around 2 billion years ago.
Once Sexual reproduction began, it took over and now it is estimated, as stated by nature magazine: “that over 99.99% of eukaryotes do it, meaning that these organisms reproduce sexually“.
The first eukaryotes to engage in sex were single-celled protists that appeared approximately 2 billion years ago, over 1.3 billion years before development of the first animals with neurons capable of assessing pleasure. These bacteria (as well as their modern counterparts) engaged in genetic exchange via processes such as conjugation, transformation, and transduction, all of which fall under the umbrella of parasexuality.
Sexual Reproduction and the Evolution of Sex
Whilst asexual reproduction still was enough to produce variation and allow some evolution, it is the genetic variances being blended by sexual reproduction that is better able to produce species Darwin describes as “the fittest”.
Evolution phase 3: Complex multicellular life.
Just 0.5 billion years ago the “Cambrian Explosion” of life heralded the 4th, and the current Eon, the Phanerozoic Eon of visible life. Basically, the beginning of what most of us think of as life.
The great oxygenation meant oxygen had now reached a level that reduced radiation on the surface to levels tolerable for complex life, temperatures were now at least “more reasonable ” even if still too hot for us humans, and complex multicellular organisms we can see with our own eyes almost instantly in geological time frames became half of all life on Earth, and to us, the first time what we normally call life existed on Earth.
Multicellular quickly displaced much of the original stage 1 procaryote life and the Earth became a planet thriving more move life than ever before, or in fact ever since.
While complex life retains it share of the biosphere, over the 0.5 billion years the total biomass on Earth has fallen back to a similar total level to what it was before complex life came on the scene. This reduction of the biosphere happening as CO2 levels, which power photosynthesis that provides the food for all life, continue falling as it must if this normally too-hot-for-us-humans planet is to remain at the near record low temperatures of today we humans need to survive.
Evolution phase 4: Accessorised evolution of hybrid of biology + accessories.
I suggest the next phase of evolution, happened when we humans have become an accessories species, with not just the clothes seen in the images, but also all the other technology that defines us.
There is debate as to whether the biological human body component of accessorised humans is still evolving, but the overall, it is clear the combination of humanity + accessories has resulted in human societies now evolving faster than ever.
Just as every previous phase of evolution has dramatically changed the planet, humans as the first species to achieve accessorised evolution have transformed the planet at a rate never seen before, and to a level warranting a new epoch: The Anthropocene.
It turns out, human societies, have developed successful intergeneration transfer which allows a form of Lamarckian inheritance, and thus evolution of the society, without genetic evolution of the individuals. No other species has achieved this Lamarckian style inheritance, or evolution with genetic evolution, because no other species has managed a mechanism of intergenerational memory, where the next generation can learn study what was leant by previous generations. This is what makes humans different.
Why Humans Are Different: The Evolution Of Tools And Societies That Use Them.
Evolution phase 5: Will accessories take over?
Many predict and fear that the evolution from purely biological life to humans as a accessorised species enhanced by our technology and accessories may give way to another step where the technology can exist without the constraints of the biology.
If biology+technology can out evolve pure biology, can technology alone out evolve the combination.
What is not clear is if the motivation for technology alone to reproduce, and that is essential for the propagation of life to exist as the technology alone, or why such motivation would create an appetite for the resulting AI robots to want to eliminate humans. Humans have not intentionally sought to eliminate forms of life that existed before humans.
No other species has all the ingredients for accessorised evolution.
Other species have accessories but lack key ingredients for accessories that independently evolve.
As mentioned earlier, there are other species with accessories. Bees that have their hives as accessory and beavers have dams as accessories. But while bees and beavers can evolve into a new species that makes better hives or better dams, neither the hives nor dams evolve without evolution of the maker. In fact, while many other species construct their own homes, either for temporary use or for their whole life, there is only ever just one significant accessory of a largely fixed design for that species.
What’s the missing ingredients for other species? Why haven’t other species adopted more accessories and evolved the design of their accessories?
This evolution of accessories is the human difference. But why has no other species managed to evolve their accessories from generation to generation? The accessories only evolving as the species itself evolves biologically, is a far slower and less directed and form of evolution.
A few key factors are required for accessories to manage to improve from generation to generation:
- There must be intergenerational interaction, and ideally child-raising, so future generations can be taught what has been learnt by previous generations.
- The accessories themselves need to be durable enough to survive to function as templates for future improvements.
- The species needs to keep or collect/hoard their favoured accessories, so they are available for the future generation to use as a template.
Those are the ones that come to mind at this time.
Notably, humans have very long childhoods, are in comparison with other species, almost helpless “blank slates” at birth that need to learn and be supported by their ancestors.
While an octopus will not even knowingly meet its parents, at the other extreme birds are more like humans in that they are born without key abilities like the ability to the ability to fly. However, even parrots that live longer than humans have far shorter childhoods than humans, reducing the scope for intergenerational learning. Perhaps more importantly, neither any bird nor any other species aside from humans, keeps “templates” or other guides to instruct the young on new ways reproduce their innovations, in contrast, humans have leveraged the evolution of our accessories to evolve the education of our future generations.
Other species have intergenerational behaviour. –
Orcas are found worldwide, and while there is just one species there are multiple ecotypes, or groups that share similarities in their appearance and behaviors, including hunting strategies and prey preference.
New footage reveals key clues to understanding mysterious orca group, scientists say
The ecotypes of orcas are almost like societal groups of humans, with learned behaviours that are passed from generation to generation.
Other species share learned tool use.
Cockatoos learn how to flip open garbage bins by copying each other
- Cockatoos have been seen opening household garbage bins in suburbs across NSW
- The bin-opening behaviour spread to 44 suburbs in just two years
- The birds appear to learn these skills by watching others and copying their moves
See also:
- CNN: Why trash-raiding parrots in Sydney are smarter than ‘bin chickens’
- Science alert: Cockatoos in Australia Are Teaching Each Other How to Loot Trash Cans
Accessories are now integral to being human.
Evolution of accessories is clearly more our recipe for success than intelligence alone.
Recall that the biosphere itself is not growing, which means our population increasing by over 1,000x times since the neolithic less than 20,000 years ago, indicates we became far more competitive with other species over that relatively short time. This happened not as our intelligence evolved through the roof relative to the ancient Greeks, but as our accessories evolved from the copper age to the internet.
Nothing like that population growth had happened over the previous 300,000 since years homo sapiens appeared, but we did manage to out-compete all other human species. Given the stone age goes back 3 million years, clearly the ingredients for accessorised evolution were already present in our ancestors, but it is highly likely we evolved as the species best adapted to accessorised evolution.
We are wired by our evolution to acquire, store and use tools/accessories.
With “our” accessories having been our evolutionary advantage, the instinct to make or acquire, keep and utilise accessories is now part of us. Unlike any other species, a large focus during our lives is on acquiring the “accessories” we treasure.
Historically, “making and using accessories”, like many aspects of life, was often different depending on gender. Males acquired hardware “tools” to make and repair accessories, collected other accessions for activities such as fishing and hunting. Historically females acquired household tools for sewing and knitting to make clothing and other accessories, and a collection of accessories for cooking and maintaining the household.
Today, most of these activities are considered hobbies, and many hobbies become as much about the tools or accessories of the hobby as the end goal of the hobby. Consider photography, fishing, cooking, camping, etc
Storage: Accessorising our private spaces.
Keeping accessories, a key factor for accessorised evolution, requires a place to keep our accessories, and any private space where we can keep accessories would logically have appeal for an individual of an accessorised species.
To keep our accessories, we need private spaces that we can accessorise as our collection of accessories grows. Such spaces can range from our homes to private spaces at work or within quarters in a military camp, or also to private vehicles. The role of vehicles can be overlooked, but many vehicles, from cars, RVs, boats, private planes, thought to the fictional millennium falcon of the future, also serve as mobile private spaces to varying degrees as an extension of the home space, where we can safely keep accessories, and thus allow us to have some of our accessories with us when we travel.
For every type of private space, from cars and other vehicles through to office cubicles and our homes, there are people who accessorise that private space.
Humans Gain New Superpowers through tools and technologies.-
Every new technology starts off like a toy, as an idea that doesn’t really work yet, but over time, many progress to become useful tools.
From the first stone tools, through to mobile devices, humanity has progressed and been transformed by the tools available at the time. Humanity before the inventions of tools have such primitive capabilities in comparison with humanity today, that it seems hard to recognise both the old and new as the same species. A human equipped with a full array of the tools of todays technology would appear to a human from just a few thousand years earlier to be like a god or an alien in possession of superpowers.
It is the development of tools that has rewritten time and time again the competitiveness of humans vs other species, that has resulted in the population we see today, compared to the population of humans 100,000 years ago. The reason humans in the first 200,000 thousand years did not grow to a population of billions like we have in the last 10,000 years, is that we did not have the superpowers that we have today.
Given that the development of tools has made humans the successful species that we are today, the humans who did not love toos all died out.
Tools provide superpowers. Not just for Batman and Ironman, but potentially for everyone, or they would if the tools of Batman and Ironman were real and not just toys.
Why Everyone Loves Tools: Capability, Identity, & Fulfillment-
There is a the narrow definition of ‘tools’ from the hardware store, but the more fundamental definition includes clothes, eating utensils, and anything we make part of our life that the first humans did not have.
Everybody likes tools as they give us superpowers to get things done, pursue hobbies, and even leisure activities far better than without them. It is only the use of the word that has been more gender aligned.
Adopting and using tools is considered a key characteristic of being human. With tools we can have capabilities beyond those provided by our physiology. Early humans used tools to enable them increase their abilities to hunt, to build homes, and to prepare food. The dictionary makes specific reference to ‘a handheld device that aids in the accomplishment of a task’, but when visiting the ‘garden tools’ section, it can be seen that even a ride on mower, can be classified as a tool, despite not being handheld. Most people would also agree that even desktop computers can be regarded as tools, or at least an ‘office tool’, but we don’t normally think of a car as tool. This suggests the idea of a tool already extends beyond handheld.
Tools Extend An Enhance Human Abilities.
Tools extend the capabilities of the person with the tool. The owner of a tool has extended capabilities. Just as superheros Batman and Ironman gain extra powers through their suits and accessories, a person with a motor vehicle is capable of amazing feats.
Each task a tool enables gives new powers to the person with the tool. The ability to accomplish these tasks allows people to see themselves differently, and thus changes their sense of self and how they are perceived by others.
It has become part of human to have tools that can enable accomplishing many tasks. Possessing tools changes a persons identity to a person enable people to do more than before. From someone who can’t tackle a task, to someone who can tackle that task.
Use of tools is what has enabled humans to be so successful as a species, and as a key to success as a species, we have evolved to feel rewarded and fulfilled, by the capabilities our tools provide and scope of tasks they allow us to accomplish.
Homes and Other Possessions Are Forms Of Tools.
Everything we own becomes an accessory to who we are and a part our identity.
Tools Vs Technology.
The terms ‘technology’ and ‘tools’ can be used somewhat interchangeably.
However, it can be interpreted that the underlying technology is what makes the tools possible, and a tool is created when an embodiment of technologies enables doing something useful. When technology results in products that give people the ability to either do things they could not do before, or to do things faster or with less effort than previously.
To focus on the technology is to focus on the technical specifications, while to focus on the tool is to look at what we can achieve when using the technology, and to highlight how the technology allows us to achieve things. A technology review of a robot vacuum looks at how it works and how it compares with others, while considering the perspective of a tool might focus more on how much better having the robot vacuum, is better than using a conventional vacuum.
Toys Vs Tools.
I use the term ‘toy’ for a technology that has not yet achieved ‘tool’ status. An example would be my first robot vacuum cleaner, which did manage to vacuum, but as vacuuming still required preparation and supervision the benefit over a conventional vacuum cleaner was questionable.
I sometimes write evaluations of products I have experience with that represent different classes of “accessories”, but as I don’t try all equivalent products, the focus is usually about is whether this type of product is a ‘toy’ that achieves little that could be achieved without it, or a true ‘tool’ that allows a person to do more.
Grokking humans evolving through our accessorises.
A concept with many layers and implications.
My experience is that it took me some time for fully “grok“, or fully “understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it, and it merges with you” the implications being the accessorised species. Of course, it explains humans continually evolving at an accelerating rate even without biological evolution, but it goes much further.
Conceptually this means that the individual and communal “possessions” become part of our nature and who we are. The clothes, the mobile phones, and even our society wide accessories such as transport systems, libraries and even governments are part of who we are. in a similar way that even though the majority of cells in our body by number are bacteria that are neither made from our DNA nor biologically human, they also are still part of who we are. So it is not just the parts non-human material inside us that defines us, but also the inside us, but also our accessories.
A modern human is different from an ancient Greek human, or even a neolithic stone age human, almost entirely not because our own cells and DNA are different, but because the overall “us” which includes our accessories and our society, and its accessories, are different.
This concept defines our identity, which makes the evolution of our accessories rather important.
Accessorised evolution and population.
While for almost all the time humans have existed, there was population stability or negligible population growth, we have over these recent 10,000 years of progress continually grown in population through accessorised evolution as we continually increased our ability to compete with and displace other species. This recent history makes it is easy to forget that in nature, long-term population growth only comes as a result of long-term change. Population continually growing is not the normal state of existence.
Most of the population growth was far slower than the recent population explosion that included some additional factors, but over time it adds up. The human population has increased by a factor of over 1,000 times since, depending on the information source, the start of the copper or iron age, and this is on a planet where the total amount of life stopped increasing 500 million years ago! As discussed in pages/videos on population, only humans together with and the species we farm or cultivate, are growing in population like this, and in fact other species have been pushed to lower their numbers to make room, for us, or the species that we select as food. This is all because we have been effectively evolving faster that other species.
As the first accessorised species, it also means we might be the “Guinea pigs” for what happens when the population growth of a species puts too much pressure on other species.
Confusion between biological and accessorised evolution has caused racism.
It can be argued that one cause of racism has stemmed from confusions between accessorised evolution and biological evolution.
Throughout the recent 50,000 years, it is not that people have evolved, but our accessories, and every culture that gains access to those accessories.
Many developments that resulted in evolution of accessories within the largely continuous land mass of the Europe the Middle East and Asia spread amongst those societies, creating zones of accelerated accessorised evolution, but not to areas cut off from the spread of those ideas.
As each development accelerates the rate of further development, the difference between accessories is quickly amplified.
How often has it been that when a culture that has had access to more evolved accessories meets a culture that had been previously isolation, there has been the mistaken assumption that it is the people who are more evolved.
Without an understanding of accessorised evolution, “travellers” who often were followed by colonisers, wrongly assumed that they were now biologically more evolved than the locals in these “new territories”, when in fact, only their accessories were more evolved.
Updates.
- Nov 13, 2023: Updated introduction and “evolution of evolution“.
- April 12, 2023: Updated synopsis, and simplified page title.
- Feb 14, 2022: Updated subcategories – getting ready to omit.
