Chapter five of Darwin's Unfinished Symphony is underway and hit a sentence that triggered an old, old memory.
Motivation, rather than cleverness or ability, is what explains patterns of innovation here
A long time ago, possibly even before I started my career as a learning technologist, I saw a presentation about the value of YouTube as a teaching tool. The speaker was enraptured with his own son's success in learning an obscure skill from a single, low quality, YouTube video. His argument was that it proved you could learn anything that way, and we didn't even have to worry about the quality of materials.
My gut told me something was missing, but it was at least a few hours - possibly a few days - before I realised the single most significant thing he hadn't said.
Motivation.
His son had heard about this type of throat singing and *wanted* to learn it. There were no local experts, so he sought online. This was the only resource he found. He watched it many, many times until he learned.
If he hadn't wanted to learn, he never would have looked
If he hadn't wanted to learn fervently enough to overcome the initial hurdle, he would have stopped looking when there were no easy resources
If he hadn't wanted to learn well enough to get it right, he'd have watched once and wandered off after a few strange noises.
What made the difference was never the technology. It was always his motivation. It was always him, driving himself forwards, because he *wanted* this skill.
In Aesop's fables, there's a fox who wants a bunch of grapes. He keeps trying to get them, but they're too high. Eventually he claims they're sour and he never really wanted them in the first place, and slinks off.
Obviously the fox wanted the grapes. But is he wrong to claim he never wanted them? Because he's proven he never wanted them *enough* to keep trying past a certain point. And does that alone truly earn him the somewhat judgemental moral "many people belittle or despise that which they cannot attain", or is there an argument that he's avoiding the sunk cost fallacy, and bolstering his stance by guarding against future temptation?
When motivation is survival, there are almost no limits to the extremes we push ourselves through. When motivation is indulgence, there are many limits.
A lot of the experiments discussed in the last few books I've read use food, and eating related behaviours, to ensure participation. But it's food in a high stress, unfamiliar - albeit predator free - environment, and I'm not sure how the differences impact the accuracy of the results. Chapter four discussed the evolutionary differences between three- and nine-spined stickleback fish that significantly informed their learning strategies. Well, that all came down to predators, and there were no predators in the test environment. What about babies? And hunger? If you're eating frequently, or moving through feast and famine stages, I feel like your relationship to food is going to change.
I no longer know where I'm going with this post.
Edit: I should finish chapters before saying they're missing stuff. They've not introduced predators, but they are looking at correlations between feeding success and innovative behaviour over longer periods (skinnier fish are less complacent, and try new things more). There's also some gender based observations which is discussed as related to babies.
