Through /. in the 90s I learned about linux, learned to play with other OSes, tools and programming languages, which all made me better at my job back then running machines for nonprofit cancer research. When I followed the link to Old Man Murray, I hung out on their forums and made friends I've watched spread throughout the game industry (not just Valve). For years this place was what we'd now think of as reddit&the reg&hackernews combined.

Happy retirement Rob

Art's value in an early society would be the capacity to express, prior to any scientific method or reasoned understanding of that capacity, ideas that could not be framed using early simple language alone. The later discovery that certain art is pleasing to our visual or auditory senses is not the advantage, but a refinement on the advantage I get from the very practical ability to discuss something in detail without actually standing next to it.

You and I are in a small tribe. I need to describe to you how to stalk a mammoth, and I can't explain it while we're actually dodging the mammoth's tusks. Everything in my life and your life we've learned by watching other people do and by our own painful trial and error, so either you come along on the hunt but can't participate the first time, or I have to coach you in advance. We need every hand we can get to have a chance of bringing these monsters down, so I will coach you, but I don't have military tactical theory, survey maps, anatomy books, video recordings of other hunts, watches, geometry, more than two dozen words, or even a hard count of how many spears it will take to kill a mammoth.

I make a mark on a stone to be the mammoth, and I draw marks to be you, and I indicate with my hands how you are to move and when it is best to throw your spear. I do this in plain sight of the tribe, so even children too young to come on the hunt can see how it is done. Not everyone will understand right away, but I will do it before every hunt, again and again. I'm not good at describing it and you're not smart enough to get even 25% of what I'm saying. However, if this gives us even a slightly improved chance of being successful, or more likely reduces the number of our fellow tribesmen I lose to the mammoth by even one, then our tribe has a huge advantage in those situations where the extra tribesmen becomes useful in a communal tribe: all labor is divided by the total number of hands. That one preserved tribesman becomes one less woman I have to send out to hunt, which is one more who will likely live long enough to breed one more child, and in the tough times, the extra people are the difference between our small tribe breeding and inbreeding. My simple, practical 'art' has given us a non-inherited but biologically meaningful advantage.

If our early social nature was expressed in no other way than 'human see, human do' then being able to see a representation of a thing as the thing itself for the purpose of discussion is both an emergent property of our neurological biology and the most significant adaptation in our cultural history, as we can have no continuous culture without it.

I'm going to turn the tables on you a bit with a later cultural adaptation. Between the above and what's next you can infer which parts of our heritage are biological and which are social, sometimes you can make these inferences in a testable way, but I'll leave it to you to learn the science.

Our tribe is fat and happy, but there's other tribes near our territory and resources won't hold out forever. Thanks to my aggressive nature, I stay in charge of the tribe by being pretty much the most dangerous, and I have my brother and a few cousins to back me up. Now when I go to raid the next tribe over to take their women, I normally have to leave my brother or two of my cousins behind to keep the women I took last week from running off. I need more spears against the enemy, but I don't want to risk losing women.

So I tell a lie about the other tribe I was in before this one. I draw the angry face of a mammoth, and say how a few women ran off when the men were gone, and an angry mammoth stomped all over the children who had been left behind. My lie is ridiculous, but since 75% of my tribe is functionally retarded by modern standards, and the picture's pretty angry looking, now I only have to leave one cousin behind instead of two. We can fight better, and will be more successful taking women (or whatever else we want). More valuable is that the extra spears and our by-now refined hunting tactics reduce the likelihood that I lose a relative to the spears of the enemy.

Before, I needed enough manpower to coerce 100% of the tribe with violence, now with centuries of refinement I only need 10% of that manpower. Once more I've given myself a slight advantage that could be the difference when I need to survive the lean times. I'm running into a problem with this lie, because they want to know the mammoth's name, how many tusks and teeth it has, whether it loves its mommy or not, and they're only going to keep believing as long as I can answer questions as if I were a first hand witness.

Later on, I need more brainpower to direct against our tribe's enemies and nature itself, but my brother and cousins are spending all their time spinning bigger lies. What if I told people the truth in a way that encouraged them to behave in a way that benefits the tribe without requiring all of my relatives to waste their time lying? I could use their brainpower to find more truth. It might create a virtuous cycle where an increasing number of us would have some extra time for intellectual labor. Shame it takes so many centuries to refine it, though.