My intent.

I try to encourage people to travel as much as they can, and for a long time, I did not know why, or what motivated me to do so, other than I had done it, and it was 'cool'. I came to Barcelona however, but this time, I had come to study. My motivation of doing so was that I would come, take some classes, and while I did so, I would party and enjoy Barcelona, the usual motivation. Nonetheless, a few classes kicked in, and everything had changed. I would no longer see life the same way. I answered a question in class, and pointed out that, yeah, I had been to many countries in my life, (17 to be exact) but I had never come to realize what brought human beings together. What made us human? We were different, we were far from any other species because of a trend that Tomasello in his Origin of Species (1999) labels as a cultural transmission. He defines it as

A moderately common evolutionary process that enables individual organisms to save much time and effort, not to mention risk, by exploiting the already existing knowledge and skills of conspecifics

(Conspecifics is defined as those in your same species).

The idea is further built upon by something called the ratchet effect, which is basically that we add on to what our ancestors have discovered, and that way, our knowledge is not limited by the fact that a human being will eventually die. But his knowledge will always live on (if considered worthy).

Tomasello gives the examples that we are basically born upon the shoulders of giants, those being our ancestors in our past. I cannot beg to agree more, but my question is not that of how we got to where we got, it is that of what has actually changed in human evolution. We have grown as human beings because of our ability to take ideas, and build upon them for centuries, but it's education that precisely accelerates that process. Everyone becomes educated on the ideas of others, and we build upon that knowledge to go towards a better future. Now, picture the idea of a wild human, what is known as a "feral child". It is in essence a child who grows up in the forest, taken care of by animals or by himself, grown to defend himself and learn to be in the wild. What then? Is nothing innate? Many examples have happened time and time again (see Chilean Dog Boy). In that example, we can quote one particular thing:

He's showing signs of depression, is aggressive and is not speaking much although he does know how to speak.

What does this tell us? We must be mad. Take a human being, and imagine he is taken away by kidnappers of a different culture, and try to force him to learn your culture. That is what was done to this Chilean kid. He was simply of a different culture, but he was forced to change. Our cultural differences are much greater than I originally expected. Many feral childs end up not adapting to the human race because they get accustomed to living in the wild. It all came down to who they were. This pushes the point of culture, and its relevance, and its get me back to the point I was trying to get across.

My intent in encouraging people to travel, to know the different cultures out there so that they get different eyes. I want people to understand the difference between their conspecifics, so they can grow to learn that a human being is not just an American, or a Chinese, or an Indian, or any culture, it is the ability to grow to be different that makes us human. That is why I know encourage people to travel. I want you to learn that we can be anybody, and no other species can do that. That is our similarity, and that is what makes us human.

qk.