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

When our species turns inward to analyze itself, the two facets of ingenuity and humour are often held in high regard as examples of its unique abilities, and this theory suggests they are more closely connected than has previously been imagined or acknowledged.

While adaptability is a necessary facet of biological evolution, its expression in human beings has become accelerated into an intellectual capacity for inventing non-genetic solutions to environmental challenges, producing a versatility and ingenuity that have come to define the species. How does this ability function, then, and what has led to its unparalleled exaggeration in the human race?

According to pattern recognition theory, this abundant resourcefulness has arisen due to the presence of a simple, hardwired faculty that exists precisely to encourage it, operating via the recognition of interesting patterns. It is familiar to all, and is known as humour.

Clarke views the experience of amusement as a creative, adaptive system that has spurred the intellectual and perceptual abilities of the human race. Unlike many alternative interpretations of humour, pattern recognition is neither corrective (as many anomaly and normalization theories would claim such as Clarke’s own Information Normalization Theory), 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

Future publications in Clarke’s series on humour