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1. The Mother of Invention
An Irishman who was asked the way onwards to Dublin by a
traveller made the helpful reply: "WelI, if I were YoU, I would
not start from hererr. It. is a reply which NaLure, on the
highroad of evolution, must have heard repeatedly. Imagine her
predicament some 10 million years ago. She has found her way to
the milestone which marks the chimpanzee-l-ike ancesLor of man.
rrExcuse me, God", she says Lo a passing Olympian, trbuL can you
tel-l- me which road will lead to homo sapiens?" 'rlf I were You, I
woul-d not start f rom hererr .
Why is a chimpanzee such an unpromising starting point for
human evol-ution? Because, in short, it is too good at being a
chimpanzee.
What changes - what. improvements - might we think of making
to a chimpanzee which would set it on the path to being a man?
Give it greater strength? sharper t.eeth? a better memory? a
warmer coaL of fur? in a1l those respect,s a chimpanzee is already
more than the equal of a man. Wel-l then, endow it wj-th a
cl-everer brain dh, there's a thought - for chimpanzees are
indeed less good at solving certain kinds of intel-Iectual-
problems than are human beings. But suppose we were to give a
chj-mpanzee a cleverer problem-solving brain, what exactly would
it do with it? what problems - if any - confront a chimpanzee?
We11, perhaps - who knows - the chimpanzee would use its
brain t.o learn the art of making fire but the absence of fire
is not apparenttry a problem for a chimpanzee, when, with it.s
hair-covered body, it seldom if ever has reason to feel- cold.
Perhaps it would l-earn how to build l-adders but. why should a
chimpanzee want a ladder when it already has the arms and legs to
enable it to climb the tallest tree? Perhaps, then, it would
learn to draw maps but what need has a chimpanzee of maps
when, so psychologist.s te11 us, chimpanzees already have a
remarkable capacity t.o form pictures in memory of t.heir spatial
world. The fact is that chimpanzees, as a species, have got most
of their immediate problems licked already. Being admirably
Nicholas Humphrey. Talk broadcast on BBC Radio Three, June 1979

2. adapt.ed to t.heir way of life just as they are, they would, it
Seems, have nothing much to gain from added cleverness- A
chimpanzee, blessed with Einstein's skill at problem solving,
would I Suspect carry on very much like any other chimpanzee.
No, to turn a chj-mpanzee into a man, it is nOt improvements
which are wanted. Just the opposite. It. is impairments- Human
beings have, I think, got where they are today precisel-y because
Nature, Several- million years d9o, adopted the extraordinary
policy of turning out sub-standard chimpanzees. Having first
made an animal which was relat,ively problem-free, She could not
apparently leave well alone: instead she systematically undid her
handiwork creating problems where none had previously existed.
What a piece of work was the ancestor of man! And what a
curiously incompetent piece of work he has become. Human beings
have, in a sense, gone backwards in evolution, becoming
progressively less well adapted for survival. Havj-ng created
the chimpanzee-Iike ancestor, Nature deliberatelystripped him of
some of his most precious asseLs. She reduced his strength, Look
away his fur, blunted his canine teeth, impaired his memory,
meddled with his sexual cycles And then, having produced t.his
pathetic problem-ridden creature she set him on the evolutionary
highroad with but a single talent in his knapsack - the gift of
that remarkably clever brain.
"Sweet," it is said, "are the uses Of adversity. Adversity,
inadequacy, dire necessity have been manls constant companions on
his journey. His companions but, more than Lhat, his pilots.
For, in the very act of putting problems in man's way, necessity
proved to be the mother to a series of remarkable inventions.
Man, deprived of biological answers to the problems of survival,
was left with no other opt,ion than Lo think up the answers for
himself. It was as though Nature had said to her prot6g6. "I
have made life difficult for you - now use your brain". And use
his brain man had to; and use his brain he did.
But why did Nature do it.? What. can she have hoped to
achieve by a policy which looks, on the face of it, one of
calculated meannness? It may be true that man did in the end

3. rise to the challenge and turn his latent inventiveness to good
effect. But Suppose mants invenLions had done no more than
simpty make good the losses which Nature had inflicted on him -
then he would at the end of t.he day have been no further forward
than his ancestor. A policy of one step backwards and one step
forwards is hardly something Lo be proud of.
The surprise - and the key to the success of Naturets
strategy is this: Man's inventions time and again paid unexpected
diwidends - his own solutions t.o his problems proved better than
the biological solutions of which he had been deprived. And
t.hus, in using his brain to compensaLe for his biological
deficiencies, man did more than merely regain t.he level of the
chimpanzee - he leapfrogged far ahead of him. But. note t.his
well: That leap would never have been made if it had not been for
the powerful- incentive provided by necessity.
Let. me illustrate the principle with two examples. First
the case to which I have already drawn attention - the inventj-on
of fire.
Man is, notorj-ously, a naked ape. Yet his ancestor was
undoubtedly a hairy dpe, and aII the other apes have kept their
hair. We may presume, Lherefore, that Nature had some special
reason for making man - and man alone - go naked. It must have
been some very special reason, because when man l-ost his hair he
suffered an immediate and potentially disastrous consequence: he
was exposed to the ravages of cold.
In a cl-imate where a hairy chimpanzee could live quite
comfortably man had suddenly become uniquely unproLected against
bad weather and the col-d night. air. Given this obvious cost,
where did the benefit 1ie? What hidden advant.age did Nature
expect man to derive? The answer I suggest, is that the advant.age
of nakedness lay in its very disadvantage - or, raLher, in the
way man found of coping with that. disadvantage. By taking away
manrs hair and thus, ds it were, deliberately exposing him to
co1d, Nature had given him the strongest possible incentive to
invent a way of keeping warm. And the way man found - the best
wdy, perhaps the only way - was to masLer the art of making fire.

4. Needs musL when the devil - or a col-d wind - drives.
But what, in the longer run, had been achieved? Did the
mastery of fire merely Compensate man for his nakedness? One
step backward.s - and only one step forwards? Far from it. For
with the invention of fire came a host of secondary,
unanticipated benefits. Over and above providing warmth, fires
were a source of light, they kept predators at bay, they acted as
a focus for social gaLherings, they served for cooking food, for
baking clay they even provided the means for sendj-ng smoke
signals. No, a man with a fire was by no means merely a naked
ape who had cunningly found a replacement for his hair: he had
become ki-ng of a new fire-based culture. . . In all likelihood
this culture would never have been discovered if Nature had
allowed man to retain his biological protecLion from the col-d.
My second example concerns an invention of an altogether
different kind - Lhe invention of abstract thinking.
Man is not only a naked ape, he is, compared to a
chimpanzee, a very forgetful ape. And yet it seems extremely
probable that mants ancestor had an excellent memory, indeed Ehat
he had what psychologists call "picture memory" - the capacity to
recall- in detail all that he observed. Two lines of evidence
support this cIaim.. In the first pIace, chimpanzees, when t.ested
in the laboratory, have been found to have an asLonishing
capacity to remember visual information; they can, for example,
identify up to a hundred simple patterns after being shown them
only a few times. In the second place, human beings have al-so
been found, very occasionally, Lo have this kind of capacity
but only when something has apparently gone wrong with their
braj-n- For example, picture memory may occur in epileptics, or
in patients with damage to the parj-etal lobes of the brain, or in
people whose brains are artificially stimulat,ed with electricity,
or in autist.ic children; and when it occurs in normal chil-dren,
as it sometimes does, it vanishes before t.he child is more than a
few years o1d. In ot.her words, while picture memory is possible
for man, it appears to be a pathological phenomenon - a mistake,
a throwback. We can only conclude that picture memory is

5. somet.hing which has been actively Suppressed in the course of
human evol-ut.ion. Now why should that. have been?
Again we must presume that Nature had some special reason
for making man - and man alone among the apes - lose his memory.
My suggestion as before, iS that, the advant.age of a poor memory
Iay with the disadvantage - or rather with the way man l-earned to
cope with it. By taking away his memory Nat,ure had provided man
withastrongincentivetofindsomealternativemeansofstoring
knowledge.And,intheeventrmancameupwithnothinglessthan
a who1Iy now way of thinking about the world. Instead of
picturing the world as made up of countless part,icular objects in
particular relationships to each other, he hit on the idea of
conceiving it in abstract terms - abstract categories related by
abstract rules and laws. With this approach, he now began to
think in terms of general models of the way things happen - and
could afford to 1et his experience of part.icul-ar hppenings fade
away. He no longer needed, for example, Lo remember every
instance of an individual caL catching an individuaf mouse, but
instead could formulate the abst,ract proposition: there is a
class of beings, cal-Ied aLs, which perform a class of actions, -
catching, ofl another class of beings, ca1led mice. And what,
t.hereby, had he achieved - apart from a means of combatting his
forgetfulness? I do not think it is too much to say that, in
finding a way around his loss of memory, man had layed the
foundations for the development. of human language - nay, the
foundations of philosophy.
When Nature, Et the cross-roads of human evolution, adopted
this brave policy of making man go backwards, she took of course
a heawy risk. Indeed if she had t.ried it with any less invent.ive
creature the gamble would certainly have failed. A rabbit, sdy,
deprived of its fur would simply freeze Lo death,'dD elephant,
deprived of its memory, would probably decline into a state of
t.ot.al- ignorance. And even with man t.he success of t.he gamble
depended not only on his being trusted to come up eventual-ly with
a rational- solution to his problems but on his finding t.hat.
solution afmost riqht awav. Once the biol-oqical defect had been

6. introduced there was clearly not much time to spare before it
eliminated its bearer from the face of the earth-
When Houdini was bound hand and foot and thrown into the
Iake he could, not afford t.o wait for his grandchildren to set him
free. No more could man feave it to later generations to make
good his biological def iciencies. He had - by t.he use of his
brain - to solve his problems for himsel-f withj-n his lifetime.
But man's brain, unlike a genetically programmed body, is an
organ that can make astonishing progress within the span of an
ind"ividual life. Indeed man proved - when given sufficient,
incentive to be a veritable Houdini of inventiveness.
Look around you - and take your hat off to Nature for her
daring choice of route Perhaps, when She asked t,he way, t.he
message had come down f rom Mount Olympus: rrWhom God wishes to
employ He f irst makes sadtt.
BBC Radio 3. November 1979.