In case you wondered what the U.S. Supreme Court was really good for, how about the idea that it is our spearhead into the bio-cultural unknown, doing the best it can, with such limited tools at its command, to insure our survival as a species.
Dr. Robert Boyd, 57, a theoretical biological anthropologist at UCLA, maintains that it is not genes alone that accounts for our (supposed, claimed) advance over chimps and slugs. We've had a lot of help from our human culture.
Why is that?
Because we write things down and teach them. Before that we made up stories and taught those. Before that we danced and sang. And so on.
Time-binding it's been called. Alfred Korzybski invented the term. Essentially it means that we can do something that chimps cannot. We can accumulate knowledge, wisdom, information, mistakes, lessons, etc., over generations in a way that chimps and even elephants cannot.
Check the NYT article today on Dr. Boyd below: