Civnetics
🐇🕳️ A new spin on the “Stoned Ape Hypothesis” by Bobby Azarian
Maybe a bit of mystery still exists around how traits persist from generation to generation. Certainly there are open questions regarding how human intelligence evolved so quickly.
How these cognitive advances occurred so quickly has been a subject of debate and investigation in anthropology and evolutionary biology because our standard paradigms have struggled to account for them.
A bit of persistent mystery appears to be giving space for some wild ideas. Like the one presented in this article: Early hominids ate psychedelic mushrooms and that lead to an adaptive advantage. Which the article shows has a number of challenges.
But there are also other interesting tidbits. For example, there's a fascinating idea in here that human intelligence is maintained through the selection pressure of civilization itself. It's all in the backdrop of this mushroom narrative and the discussion of Epigenetics.
Epigenetics is criticized as a mechanism for trait persistence because the effect appears to wear off after a few generations. For example, the Wiki entry on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance notes:
An example of how the environment within the womb can affect the health of an offspring is the Dutch hunger winter of 1944–45 and its causal effect on induced transgenerational epigenetic inherited diseases. During the Dutch hunger winter, the offspring exposed to famine conditions during the third trimester of development were smaller than those born the year before the famine. Moreover, the offspring born during the famine and their subsequent offspring were found to have an increased risk of metabolic diseases, cardiovascular diseases, glucose intolerance, diabetes, and obesity in adulthood. The effects of this famine on development lasted up to two generations. The increased risk factors to the health of F1 and F2 generations during the Dutch hunger winter is a known phenomenon called “fetal programming”, which is caused by exposure to harmful environmental factors in utero.
Which is just one of many examples on that entry where the effect is limited to a few generations after the initial pressure that caused the change is removed.
But if the pressure that causes the epigenetic change is persistent or recurring frequently enough it would make sense that the effect would similarly persist. You could imagine also that perhaps the spark they propose with psychedelics only needed to be an impulse. If a group of people took psychedelics which consequently caused them to establish a new regime of living like civilization and then if that regime of living reinforced a certain epigenetic change that was advantageous... then that would be a recipe for a self replicating system leading to persistent changes that otherwise would have faded away in a few generations.
The article itself tries to side step perceived issues with the original Stoned Ape hypothesis and epigenetics by establishing a theory of cultural evolution instead. I'm not sure that's necessary, but it still fits nicely with the observation above. In fact it says approximately the same thing, but specifically in the “Bayesian Brain” paradigm they prefer:
In the context of our Bayesian Brain paradigm, it is easy to imagine how a new cultural worldview could create a top-down selection pressure that could shift the genetic makeup of an entire population, favoring genomes that encode predictive models that are consistent with a more accurate and adaptive paradigm.
Of course, “favoring genomes that encode ... a more accurate and adaptive paradigm” doesn't really solve the speed at which such a thing seems to have happened since, again, there doesn't seem to be enough time for such an evolution to happen. Maybe the best explanation is a mixture of both ideas.