How Language Enabled Innovation and Evolution

"How did 'culture' develop, exactly? Language, says evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel, was instrumental in enabling social learning -- our ability to acquire evolutionarily beneficial new behaviors by watching and imitating others, which in turn accelerated our species on a trajectory of what anthropologists call 'cumulative cultural evolution,' a bustling of ideas successively building and improving on others. It might seem, then, that protecting our ideas would have been the best evolutionary strategy. Yet that's not what happened -- instead, we embraced this 'theft,' a cornerstone of remix culture, and propelled ourselves into a collaboratively crafted future of exponential innovation."

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