What is Collective Learning? Why is it important?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Collective Learning is the capacity to share information precisely and rapidly so that information accumulates at the level of the community and species giving rise to long-term historical change.

The transformative event for our species was the appearance of new and more powerful forms of language that allow humans to share information and ideas more efficiently than any other species on Earth. As a result, humans can collaborate by sharing learned information.

Modern humans can communicate with such precision, speed, and complexity that information contributed by individual members is held more firmly within the group memory. We can even communicate about things that are not right in front of us. We can discuss the past and future and can even discuss things that may not exist. This is because we possess what Terrence Deacon has called symbolic language. Rather than using sounds or gestures to refer to one particular thing, we can use soundsas conceptual parcels that refer to whole categories of ideas and things. Furthermore, through syntax, or the careful arrangement of words according to grammatical rules, we can convey multiple possible relationships between different people, things, and ideas.

Symbolic language accounts for our remarkable ability to collaborate through collective learning, or the ability to share in great detail and precision what each individual learns through symbolic language.

What makes us unique as a species is our capacity to keep developing new forms of behavior and new ways of relating to our environment. This ecological, technological, and artistic creativity explains why we alone have a history of long-term change. Second, the source of this creativity seems to be the peculiar efficiency of human language, the fact that we can share ideas so well that they get locked within the collective memory, and begin to accumulate. This is what we call collective learning.

Collective learning generated the knowledge and technologies that allowed humans to migrate out of Africa in the Paleolithic Era into an increasingly cold and inhospitable world. The use and control of fire, for example, was crucial to survival in cold climates. Humans living in ice age climates also improved hunting techniques, made warm clothing with stitched seams, built sturdy dwellings (often made of animal products or ice), and developed sophisticated techniques to hunt the large herbivores of the steppes such as mammoth.