The Science of Discworld II

the human viewer of that wildlife scene is a cameraman for a natural history TV series. Even a mere 15 years ago, he would have had an Arriflex (or if he was paying for it himself, perhaps just a Bolex Hl6) l6mm film camera with a very precious 800 feet (260 metres) of film loaded, and perhaps another dozen film packs in his rucksack (800 feet gives about 40 minutes of filming: if you’re very good, or very lucky, five minutes of useful stuff). Now he has a video camera that would have seemed miraculous then, which can reuse and reuse a length of tape until it’s full of five-minute sequences, end to end. All the things he wished for, then, are in the apparatus in his hand now: it stays in focus, it compensates for a bit of wobble, it goes down to unbelievably low light levels (for those of us who grew up with photographic film) and it zooms over a range much wider than we ever had before.
    It’s magic, in fact.
    And in his head are a dozen alternative scenarios for the lions and zebras, which he’ll flick to instantly as the animals act to constrain their futures. He’s actually thinking about other things altogether, letting the experienced professional part of his brain do the work while he daydreams (‘I’ll get an award for this and meet interesting women’). It’s like driving on a quiet motorway: a lot of the thinking has been taken out of it.
    Our ancestors honed that ability, to consider alternative scenarios. And within any of those scenarios, the ability to make a story of what was happening was a very powerful way to remember it and to communicate it. And, particularly, to employ it as a parable, to direct your future action or that of your children. Human beings need a very long time to get that brain up-and-running, at least twice as long as their brother and sister chimpanzees. That is why three-year-old chimps are nearly adult in chimp behaviour, and can do some of the mental tricksof six- or seven-year-old children.
    But the young chimps don’t hear stories. Our children have been hearing stories since they recognised any words at all, and by three years old they are making up their own stories about what is happening around them. We are all impressed by their vocabulary skills, and by their acquisition of syntax and semantics; but we should also note how good they are at making narratives out of events. From about five years old, they get their parents to do things for them by placing those things in narrative context. And most of their games with peers have a context, within which stories are played out. The context they create is just like that of the animal and fairy stories we tell them. The parents don’t instruct the child how to do this, nor do the children have to elicit the ‘right’ storytelling behaviours from their parents. This is an evolutionary complicity. It seems very natural – after all, we are Pan narrans – that we tell stories to children, and that children and parents enjoy the activity. We learn about ‘narrativium’ very early in our development, and we use it and promote it for the whole of our lives.
    Human development is a complex, recursive behaviour. It is not simply reading out DNA ‘blueprints’ and making another working part (contrary to the new folk-biology of genes). To show you how truly remarkable our development is, despite seeming so simple and so natural, let’s have a look at some earlier parent–child behaviour.
    Keep in mind a distinction that is being imported into more and more scientific thinking, that between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’. ‘Complicated’ means a whole set of simple things working together to produce some effect, like a clock or an automobile: each of the components – brakes, engine, body-shell, steering – contributes to what the car does by doing its own thing, pretty well. There are some interactions, to be sure. When the engine is turning fast, it has a gyroscopic effect that makes the steering behave differently, and the gearbox affects how fast the engine is going at a particular car speed. To see human development as a kind of car assembly process, with the successive genetic blueprints ‘defining’ each new bit as we add them, is to see us as only complicated.
    A car being driven, however, is a complex system: each action ittakes helps determine future actions and is dependent upon previous actions. It