How Function Breeds Culture

We’re all chimps in a hierarchy.

Only ours has Michelin stars, Olympic medals, fashion weeks, run clubs, beauty pageants and LinkedIn.

The chimps never had to build all this.

Almost every ordinary human need or behaviour seems to generate a world around itself.

And by a world, I mean the ecosystem that begins to grow around the act: its own vocabulary, standards, rituals, experts, techniques, institutions, communities and, sometimes, competitions.

Take walking.

For most people, walking is automatic. You need to get from here to there, so your legs move you there. Fairly straightforward. Except we apparently looked at walking and decided that simply getting somewhere wasn’t enough. We needed to hike, trek, race walk, measure ourselves, set records and compete.

Eating might be an even more ridiculous example. Its original purpose is almost comically simple: consume enough nutrients and energy to remain alive.

To illustrate the scale of it, imagine that humans had only seven dimensions to play with:

ingredient × preparation method × heat × flavour profile × texture × form × presentation

Give each dimension just five possibilities.

That already gives us:

5⁷ = 78,125 possible combinations.

I haven’t introduced the thousands of ingredients, regional variation, religion, technique, etiquette, restaurants, rankings, or individual taste.

And that is still a ludicrously conservative model.

But that isn’t even the strange part.

We didn’t just create thousands of different things to eat. We named them. We refined them. We argued over the correct way to make them. We passed techniques between generations. We attached dishes to nations, religions and families. We built professions around making food and others around judging it. We award stars for doing it particularly well and even have little kids dreaming about being the best chefs in the world.

At some point, the biological function gets almost buried beneath everything we’ve built around it.

Movement becomes dance. Running becomes athletics. Dressing becomes fashion. Fighting becomes martial arts.

We don’t seem particularly good at merely doing the thing.

We have to find out what else the thing can become.

Back to the chimps. Like us, they have communities with their own variations in behaviour, from how they use tools to how they groom one another, and these differences can be learned and passed through the group. So variation isn’t uniquely ours, and neither is the ability to pass behaviours beyond the individual that first performed them.

Where we seem to depart is in the scale and open-endedness of what happens next. Human culture does not simply preserve variations; it builds on them, combines them and turns them into starting points for further variation. One technique becomes several. Those techniques are taught, refined, formalised and sometimes merged with ideas from entirely different domains.

We inherit possibilities, elaborate them, and then hand those elaborations forward as raw material for whatever comes next.

Perhaps the chimps are the lucky ones. A stick, it seems, can remain a stick.

So why can’t we just hold the stick? Shelter is a good place to explore this.

At some point, basic protection stopped being sufficient. As we became better at meeting the need, a fairly modest requirement became more complicated.

A shelter that retains heat is better than one that doesn’t, and even better if it can generate heat. Sanitation matters. Ventilation matters, and seemingly all the other things in your home you can’t live without. As the problems become more complex, solving them requires greater competence.

Like the chimps, we can learn from our predecessors. The difference is what happens when those improvements keep accumulating. Eventually, the knowledge becomes complex enough that we need professions and systems to preserve, apply and regulate it: builders, engineers, standards, building codes, planning rules. Up to this point, optimisation is still fairly easy to explain through necessity. We simply got better at shelter because better shelter solved real problems.

If necessity were the whole answer, we would have stopped somewhere around here. Once shelter became warm, dry, safe and clean enough, satisfying the need should have reduced the urge to keep improving it.

But that doesn’t seem to be how we work.

As Sapolsky puts it: “If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger.”

I’m sure the engineers didn’t particularly care whether our walls were painted in Shoji White or built with hand-tumbled Olde English Buff Multi bricks. Keeping the rain out is now the bare minimum. Aesthetics and play have entered the chat, opening an entirely new branch from shelter itself, with a ridiculous number of sub-branches attached to it.

We experiment, decorate, rearrange, and develop preferences. Possibility creates choice, and choice brings along its friend comparison. If there are several ways something can be, we start to think about how it should be.

And once preferences exist, they can be shared, copied and turned into patterns.

We now have a perfectly functional shelter that also happens to look exactly how we want it to. Necessity gave us competence, possibility gave us preference, but preference on its own is still fairly individual.

It starts to get interesting when that preference is shared.

Someone else likes it too. Enough people make the same choices and individual preference starts to become collective habit. Somewhere along the way, “I like it this way” turns into “this is how we do things.”

Shelter makes this particularly easy to see. People across the world have the same basic requirement to stay protected, yet the homes and occupants can look radically different. Some organise themselves around living rooms, others around kitchens or gardens. Some hold several generations under one roof. Shoes come off at certain doors. Prayer happens in particular spaces. The good plates appear on particular occasions.

None of these are necessary for the shelter to function, but once repeated and shared, the shelter starts carrying the habits of the people inside it.

Preference asks: how do I want this to be?
Culture begins to ask: how do we do this?

None of this happens in quite such a tidy order, obviously. The branches start feeding back into one another.

Great, so we’ve built homes. Now let’s rank them.

This should be difficult given the combinatorial mess all these branches have produced, but somehow we’ve managed it anyway. Cue Architectural Digest, desirable postcodes, and an entire vocabulary for distinguishing what’s desirable and what isn’t. Shared preferences start to produce standards, and standards give us one more thing to rank.

And as those standards start attaching themselves to people, our choices stop only saying what we like and start saying something about where we belong, what we can afford and where we sit relative to everyone else.

Shelter now carries preference, identity, belonging and status as well as necessity. It becomes more than somewhere to live.

It is also scarce, ownable and valuable, which opens another branch entirely. We buy it, rent it, speculate on it, borrow against it, tax it and package its mortgages into securities.

We have travelled from keeping the rain off the primate to an asset class.

Maybe because there is no obvious stopping point. Once something can be changed, improved or used differently, what already exists becomes the starting point for whatever comes next.

The function may be finite. What we can do with it apparently isn’t.

The more of us there are engaging with these branches, learning and inheriting from them, the more room there is for something new to emerge. Someone does something differently. Someone else copies it. Someone improves it, rejects it, combines it with something else or gives it a new meaning.

That may be enough to keep the branches multiplying.

I don’t especially like the sheer magnitude of what we have built around every ordinary function, but I struggle to imagine a world in which we didn’t.

We are born into these worlds already formed, which makes it almost impossible to encounter the original need or behaviour on its own. Even attempting to escape the branches tends to create another one: minimalism becomes a style, going back to basics becomes an aesthetic, and after thousands of years spent making shelter warmer, safer and increasingly removed from the elements, we will happily pay £400 a night for the privilege of escaping all of it.

A stick, it seems, can’t just remain a stick.