The central creative force behind the generation of social space is the human imagination. It was not the bipedal stance, the opposable thumb, nor extended infancy that lifted man above the strict causal framework of animal existence. It was not the use of fire, the creation of tools, or even the invention of soft toilet rolls that gave man his ability to soar above the strictures of physical and genetic space. It was the development of the human imagination that gave us the freedom to create new rules, new aspirations and new worlds. It was the evolution of the imagination, feathered by language, that gave us the wings on our heads. And this takes us immediately to one of the key questions in our understanding of the origins of social space. How did the imagination evolve? How did we get wings on our heads? And the only way to answer this question is to go back to our roots in animal behaviour.
Animals are fixed to the present and tied to the past. If animal behaviour was a form of grammar, it would divide into three tenses: sensory present (how things are), individual past (the 'ontogenetic perfect' of how things have been in the past of each individual), and species past (the 'phylogenetic perfect' of how things have been in the past of the species). The significance of this to the evolution of social space is that the imagination introduces a whole new dimension to animal grammar: the subjunctive tense of how things 'might be' in the future. Now in order to see how this new tense might have evolved, we must look at these older tenses of animal grammar.
When a fledgling bird crouches low at the sight of a hawk flying overhead, it is using two tenses in its response: what I like to call ‘the sensory present’ and ‘the species past’. When it sees the hawk, its eyes pass a real-time picture of the sensory present to its central nervous system, where it is then matched with a ‘picture’ from the phylogenetic past of the bird species. Because an innate ‘picture’ of an aerial predator silhouette is held there as the result of past selection, it can match this with the incoming picture from the senses. If it fits, an inbuilt response is triggered, and the fledgling crouches. In other words, we are looking at an innate pattern of recognition and response from the species past, an active real-time picture from the sensory present, and a procedure which, for the sake of our own visual imaginations, we can call 'picture matching'.
This system of instinctive response is so effective that it is hard to see why other tenses of animal grammar then evolved. Surely, it is always better to have the prior knowledge that is entailed in the innate recognitions and responses of the species past? That way, the fledgling bird avoids learning about hawks the hard way. For, as long as the sensory present can match pictures against the key pictures picked up by its phylogenetic past, the successful responses can be triggered, and the animal will survive. In fact, why did learning, with its new and short-lived tense of the individual past, evolve at all?
There is a fundamental limitation to the protective power of innate behaviours. It is that stored information from the phylogenetic past may become inappropriate as circumstances change in the more recent present. Things change. For example, although a digger wasp must carry an innate directive to seek out a sandbank for its burrow, its genes cannot provide the specific details of an actual site because there is no way of knowing these details in advance. Only by learning these details can the wasp locate its burrow site when it returns with the food for its young. So it is in conditions like these that the capacity to learn gains a selective advantage. If the wasp can update on the shifting sands of its own environment within the brief span of its adult life, rather than relying on the much slower timescale of genetic evolution for its adaptations, then it can overcome the limitations written into the innate response. For this reason, learning is common in the animal kingdom. Because in matters such as territorial recognition, individual memory is the only solution to the shortcomings of species memory.
Fine. If instinct relies on picture matching between sensory present and species past, then what does the mechanism of learning involve? The answer is a modification to this system. As long as pictures from the sensory present can be selectively 'frozen' to make a new form of memory, then this new information can be matched against incoming sensory data in just the same way that matching occurs in instinctive behaviour. For example, once the picture of the territory surrounding the digger wasp site is frozen, its identity can be matched with further pictures coming in from the senses as the wasp comes home. The match between the frozen and real-time pictures will enable it to check and correct its course back to the burrow. So the old system has been modified to achieve a dynamic new capacity, and this means that the animal is no longer bound by the past of its species: it can learn things for itself.So what about the imagination? Where does the subjunctive tense of ‘what might be’ belong in the scheme of things? Because if a combination of instinctive and learnt behaviour allows the animal to exploit the advantages of both tenses of the animal past, what reason could there be for the evolution of yet another tense?
Well, again, the answer has to do with limitations. The thing is, learning does bring with it certain major advantages, but in some ways it also falls short. For example, if an animal faces a new and dangerous situation, and the cost of getting it wrong is death, then the price of learning this lesson afresh is clearly to be avoided. Now, in principle, an innate response from the species memory could certainly get around this problem, except that in this case, the situation is new. There has simply been no time for the new behaviour to arise (and that’s whether it arises by chance mutation in the first place). This brings us to an important question. How can the risks that come with trial and error be avoided altogether (whilst at the same time maintaining the up-to-date nature of learnt behaviour)? How can an animal learn new things, during its own lifetime, whilst avoiding the cost of that learning?
One answer is that the animal can remove itself from the direct consequences of error by spotting the mistakes of others, or by imitating the behaviour of fellow members of its group. It can, as it were, learn from its parents or fellows. An opportunist strategy that places the user one step away from the line of fire. Vicarious perhaps, but effective. Could this then be the answer to our problem of the dangers of trial and error? Perhaps. After all, imitation does work, and does sidestep certain problems. Well, just as long as the other members of the group are up to scratch on the challenges around them that is. But the trouble is, they may not be. Or, they may not want to share the advantage they have acquired. Or perhaps they are unable to pass it on because they are not there when the danger presents itself. So the fundamental question remains. Is there any way in which the challenge of the environment can be answered without the limitations of imitation and learning?
Consider the behaviour of a chimp in an experimental situation where the chimp is separated from a test (along with the inevitable banana) by a set of bars. The bars ensure that it sits outside, but also allow it to observe the situation. And from its vantage point, it sees that there is only one way to reach this banana. Namely, through the clever combination of objects that have been left on the floor inside. To reach its prize, the chimp must reach through the grill for a stick that is itself too short to reach the banana. Then it can use this stick to reach another longer stick, and use that one to gain its reward. Now, not surprisingly, chimps generally accomplish this task with ease. But what sort of mental process are they using to solve this problem? Is it just another case of learnt behaviour, or is a different order of mental process involved?
In the accounts of such experiments, it is apparently common for the chimp to pause, and stare around somewhat vacantly, between an initial failure to secure the banana, and the sudden resolution of the problem. An interval of hesitation and doubt that possibly marks what could be an internal attempt to float various possible combinations of the objects on the other side of the grill, always with the banana firmly in mind. The chimp gazes round, juggles these different alternatives in its head, arrives at a solution, acts upon it, and gets the banana.Such juggling requires an internal modelling of reality qualitatively different to the animal grammar we have considered so far. This is a mechanism that leads to an alternative view of reality that the chimp has never come across before - a new combination – in this case of tools. Such a new combination represents a radical departure from the high-fidelity, picture-making and matching of most animal behaviours. So what is the nature of this departure, and what gives this new behaviour a selective advantage?
Innate and learnt behaviours are inherently conservative. They are faithful to the 'what has been' of the species in its phylogenetic past, the 'what has recently been' of the individual in its ontogenetic past, and the 'what is' of the real-time sensory present. To see why this fidelity is critical, one only has to look at what happens when innate, learnt and real-time pictures are disturbed by forces such as mutation, memory lapse, or poor sensory reception. Basically, an animal that ceases to be faithful to its present and past is not likely to survive long.
Now, in contrast to these inborn and learnt behaviours, the imagination is inherently creative. It unlocks the existing picture-making ability of the brain, frees it from its literal-minded fidelity to the past and present, and floats its elements to the surface of a new awareness. Here they can be held and perhaps realigned, with the aim of creating a new combination consistent with the parameters set by reality outside. The process is channelled by the instincts, which give the imagination a goal to focus on; by the senses, which present the brain with an accurate picture of the problem; and by past experience, which enables the imagination to choose likely combinations and solutions. So our chimp, faced with a problem that cannot be solved through innate or learnt abilities, frees its mind from its slavish alliance to the world of 'what has been', looses off from the fixity of 'what is', and instead pictures the world of 'what might be'. Only by doing this is the chimp able to circumvent the limitation of behaviours based upon these old responses, and create radically new responses in the process.
This is where the advantage of this new behaviour lies. Although learnt behaviour is flexible when compared to innate behaviour, it still depends on direct experience (or the presence of others) for its progress in solving problems. However, this limitation does not apply to the subjunctive tense of the imagination, which can operate inside the head of its owner at one stage removed from these restrictions.Despite this advantage, we are bound to ask how such a risky thing as the imagination evolved in the first place. How could a system that makes things up 'as it goes along' develop from a system that maintains such an accurate and literal fix on natural reality? The answer is that although the chimp departs from the literal world of 'what is' when it imagines different ways of getting the banana, this freedom nevertheless begins and ends in the needs of the animal. The chimp is taking a minimal risk because both its recognition and response to the banana are held firmly in place by the directives of genetic space. (There's a banana. Go and get it now!).
This brings us to an issue that takes us away from the insights of biology, and marks the point where we move from genetic space to the relatively unexplored territory of social space. The question is this:In our own lives, how much of what we do and think is controlled by animal logic, and how much by social logic? Or to put it another way, can we explain human thought and action through the same biological insight that we use to explain chimp behaviour?