Keith Henson Quotes

I think it is so important to pass down knowledge and information to younger generations.

Music was the medium through which knowledge was passed from generation to generation.

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.

My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

It is the child's understanding that teaches the adults the way of the future. They're still doing it today with modern technology.

If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.

Storytelling is a very old human skill that gives us an evolutionary advantage. If you can tell young people how you kill an emu, acted out in song or dance, or that Uncle George was eaten by a croc over there, don't go there to swim, then those young people don't have to find out by trial and error.

What he learns from the government he writes on his tongue and we learn from him.

lessons must be learned anew by each succeeding generation, and that generation is fortunate indeed which learns from other than its own bitter experience.

Through writing, Homo sapiens then became the first species to preserve learning, enabling knowledge to grow, ultimately at an exponential pace. Collective learning over time then became the source of technological improvement, a process that could move much faster than evolution.

Private communication systems have been around since the beginning of human culture.

People planted seeds into me. Older cats gave me the game. My family, especially my mother, gave me the game and I pass it on. That's what it's about. If somebody gives you mental jewelry and you wear it for so long, you want to give it to somebody else for them pass it on.

The point of human evolution is adapting to circumstance. Not letting go of the old, but adapting it, is necessary.

Everything we know, we learned from someone else!

In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.

In undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. Savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted into full social membership. For the most part, they depend upon children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing.

The point is there is more information now then you can pass along comfortably in an oral tradition, say a strictly speaking culture. That is a problem.

We have new media, new forms of connectivity, and an enormous transference of knowledge. When you study evolution, you see that when new genes meet and multiply, they create new contexts and new species. In a sense, the gene-pool of knowledge and of people connecting at all levels is literally spawning a kind of mind-pool of possibilities.

… ideas are structures built over time, each part added by a new generation.

Learn from the masses and then teach them.

Because human nature evolved in an era before collective learning accelerated, we are all fitted to living in a world that does not change much after our formative years.

I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.

The fundamental premise of sci-fi is not spaceships and lasers - it's that children can learn from the mistakes of their parents.