Rachell Powell
speaker
762 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Jan
Rachell Powell’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's a lot worse than that because
It's not just that we're unique.
We weren't even that for the vast majority of our history, right?
We were not that.
We didn't even have robust cumulative culture.
And we were human beings with all the same accoutrements, all the stuff that we would tout today, you know, language, morality, mind reading, mental time travel, like whatever, you know, imitation, all these capacities.
that we think highly cooperative, that would have gone into becoming a cumulative cultural species, all of that stuff was around for possibly hundreds of thousands of years, maybe even more.
maybe even well over a million, before our culture kind of started to become cumulative and really start to take off.
And by cumulative, I mean allowing for the retention and incremental improvement of innovations down generations.
so that you don't have to reinvent the proverbial wheel every time.
Because otherwise, what you're limited to as a species, essentially, is innovations that one individual in their own ontogeny, in their own lifetime, could just happen to stumble upon.
But they can't really build on anything, and they can't retain it.
That's going to be a highly limited species in terms of its ecological impact.
It's obviously not going to be a space-faring, detectable, extraterrestrial type of species.
And humans were that kind of species for 99% of their time.
So we had the biology.
We don't know, I think, so this is a, it's kind of a parlor, but you're right.
All the anatomy, let's put it this way, all the anatomy and everything looks like it's in place.
And you do have culture, like you have cultural traditions, you have robust forms of cooperation that allowed humans to become essentially apex predators, which is astounding for something like us.
And you had all that, but you didn't, you know...
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