Noam Hassenfeld
speaker
4,749 appearances
107 recordings
15 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 4d ago
Noam Hassenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 106 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 43.
Appearances
And that is a metaphor that Anton uses throughout his piece, which I find particularly sticky.
I really like thinking about evolution as gravity.
And he sees culture as this huge advantage that humans developed.
It's what allowed us to pass down our knowledge from generation to generation, to develop language and writing and technology and take over the planet for good or bad.
And we developed it successfully.
At a certain point, because we were vulnerable, right?
We had to work together as a species to fight off predators and disease and the cold and all kinds of things.
Being vulnerable wasn't the only thing that allowed us to develop culture.
But Anton basically argues that it was a big factor.
And he says birds never got there, right?
He says some biologists talk about birds as a near miss when it comes to culture.
He says Peter Godfrey Smith, who's this famous scientist and philosopher who works on octopus intelligence, he's often wondered why birds never got to culture.
And when Antone last talked to him, Peter asked him, you know, you study bird cognition.
Why have birds never got there?
And Antone basically writes that he thinks it's because birds had an even bigger advantage, which was flight.
Yeah, they were still vulnerable, obviously.
Like, you know, I guess unless you're the absolute top of the bird food chain, there's still another bigger bird trying to get you.
Right.
But yeah, flying opens up this whole dimension of space.
You know, if a predator is coming, you don't have to hide, you don't have to be strong, you don't have to outsmart them.
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