The Faculty of Adaptability
Humour’s Contribution To Human Ingenuity
Alastair Clarke

Human adaptability is unparalleled elsewhere in the animal kingdom. By an advanced ability to select the best possible tool for the job and to put resources to the widest possible range of applications, the ingenuity of the species has led to exponential intellectual and cultural development. This ability, claims evolutionary theorist Alastair Clarke, arises due to a facility with the recognition of patterns which, in turn, has been encouraged by the cognitive processes known popularly as humour. In short, humour has made the species what it is today.

By comparing multiple units for their appropriateness to a certain context (as in fidelity) and then assessing the widest possible range of contexts within which a single unit can be repeated (in magnitude), the faculty of humour is seen to encourage the ability to recognise and assess the best possible tools for the widest possible range of jobs. It is at this point, explains the author, that human non-mutational adaptability comes into being.

Unlike many alternative interpretations of humour, pattern recognition is neither corrective (as anomaly and normalization theories would claim), nor restricted to accelerating basic perceptual faculties, but a creative, adaptive system in its own right, encouraging the invention and discovery of new ideas and information. The book proceeds to demonstrate the scope of pattern recognition by explaining more than one hundred different sources of laughter, reinforcing the theory’s burgeoning reputation as the first truly universal theory of humour.

A bare-bones draft of this theory was originally made available as a free download from this page. The volume referred to here is the completed, unabridged version.

Future publications in the Pattern Recognition Theory Series