The Symbolic Species

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You might find an answer in The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Species

… to get the scientific argument. I don't know enough about it to cite the papers, etc. Another book that looks at factors involved in the evolution of the human brain is The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon, http://www.amazon.com/Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Language... " The answer is memes. And the short reason why is: memes evolve much, much faster than genes, so once they existed, they got to do everything mind-related, and biological evolution no longer got to do anything. This also explains why genes aren't a suitable answer :) " Yes, memes exist, and they do quite a lot, but it's not like as soon as memes showed up, everything else went out the door! Even if we assume that memes had some ability to thwart further biological evolution, that wouldn't reverse all of the built-in stuff that existed at the point memes came on the sc…