Faithful transmission lets improvements accumulate rather than being lost and reinvented, so complexity builds across generations that no individual could reach alone.
Tomasello's argument is that the distinctively human capacity is not invention but retention: other species innovate, and the innovation dies with the innovator or degrades in copying. A ratchet that prevents backward slippage turns ordinary invention into a rising line, which is why no individual could design a modern artefact from scratch and every group possesses several.
In practice
- A team whose documentation survives departures gets better each year; one whose knowledge leaves with people rediscovers the same fixes.
- A recipe improved slightly by four generations is better than any of them could have written.
- Standing
- Not to be confused with the ratchet effect in planning, which is a different mechanism under the same metaphor.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change