High Cognitive Minds

Societies are created by minds which are similar enough to function in similar ways. In turn, societies maintain their structure by shaping the minds within them to think and act in similar ways. This is the process of socialization and acculturation.

Richard Dawkins wrote: A human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. He could have added that the process is automatic and largely unconscious and that, most of the time, it works perfectly. The very existence of societies, cultures, of whole civilizations, their stability and continuity, depends on each new generation's unquestioning acceptance of prevailing mores and customs, and that, in turn, depends on the way the human brain functions. Most children do absorb, quite unconsciously, the beliefs, the behaviors, and the standards of their culture. They are not shaped by evolution to question, to analyze, or to criticize..

But if societies are not to stagnate they must also have individuals, even if only a few, who challenge rather than accept what they see around them, who upset the established order with their ideas, their visions, their creativity. Evolution does seem to have provided those individuals sparingly but steadily throughout history. And if we are ever to have the benefits of evolution, without depending wholly on sheer chance, we must learn to recognize the signs of creative power in the young.