Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/
Sapientization is a word used by students of human evolution to label
the essential changes that led to Homo sapiens from Homo erectus. The
exact timetable for this final step is still unknown. The process
began sometime during the long tenure of eredus and might even have
roots in the evolution of the ancestral Homo habilis. But on the final
products of sapientization there can be little disagreement: language,
symbolic thinking, and the deepening of long-term memory to store the
vast requisite information. Experts on classification have linked the
three species of Homo together on the basis of anatomical
distinctions, a sharing of certain properties of dentition and jaw
structure, and the enlarged brain with its expanded association areas.
They have clustered the man-apes together as a second genus,
Australopithecus, and linked them with Homo to form the family
Hominidae. This arrangement is a useful aid for remembering anatomical
similarities. It is also an absurd distortion. If the epigenetic rules
and outward behavioral traits were used instead of gross anatomy, and
then if the probable microscopic distinctions in brain structure were
added, Homo sapiens would almost certainly be ranked as a taxonomic
family by itself. Homo habilis and Homo erectus might also be
justifiably separated from the man-apes as a second family.
The succession of three whole mammalian families within three or four
million years, as suggested in this arrangement, represents an
extremely swift passage of evolution. One of the pivotal events was
the invention of words, sounds that summon concepts of long-term
memory. The concepts are in turn the knowledge structures of the mind
by which images are formed and shuffled to expand the stream of
consciousness.
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The traditional wisdom of linguistics is that language originated in
the form of pure symbolism and was added to the bestial sounds and
gestures of the ancestral prehumans. Animal communication is
fundamentally iconic; it imitates the object or action that is
intended or desired. The nestling songbird begs food by thrusting its
head up and opening its beak wide, while the rhesus monkey threatens
by staring and slapping its hands on the ground. More sophisticated
signals evolve in animal communication by the process of
ritualization, during which the original movement lose their original
function and become increasingly conspicuous and stereotyped. The male
of the European cormorant, a crow-sized fishing bird, courts the
females by flashing his wings and raising his head in a garish
imitation of the takeoff leap. African chameleons defend their
territories with a striking display in which the sides of the body are
pumped in and out in exaggerated respiratory movements. At the same
time, the head is wagged and jerked in ritualized thrusts. Often the
ritualization process has been carried so far that the original
function is no longer clear. In such cases the communication
superficially resembles the pure symbolism that supposedly
characterizes all human speech.
Mary LeCron Foster, a comparative linguist, has proposed that human
language originated by a ritualization process of the movements of the
mouth and tongue and of primitive sounds. Like many contemporary
students of human evolution, she believes that true human language is
only about 50,000 years old and arose in conjunction with art and the
rapid evolution of the materials-based culture. Although modern
languages change over a period of only a few thousand years in the
construction of their words and phrasing, the basic one-syllable
sounds composing the words change much less rapidly. By examining the
branches of the great Indo-European family of languages (Germanic,
Italic, Hellenic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian), linguists have deduced the
ancestral tongue, proto-Indo-European, that was spoken in the third
millennium B.C. A family tree of the words exists, and the most
persistent sounds can be identified. These primitive elements do
appear to be at least partially iconic. In the minds of the
Paleolithic inventors of language, the way the mouth is moved and the
parts of the air tract utilized might have been directly linked to the
meaning of the sound. For example, the m sound is articulated by
pressing the lips tightly together while air is forced through the
nasal passage and the vocal cords are vibrated. This sound is used in
words across many languages to denote surfaces that touch, press, and
hold together; words that mean crushing or resting against; and words
that refer to fasting, chewing, and swallowing. Familiar examples
include mouth (English), mano (hand in Spanish), and main (hand in
French). Sounds created well back of the lips and nose, in other words
with the tongue, teeth, or alveolar ridge, typically have more
internal meanings, such as the experiencing of emotion.
As languages evolved, most words lost their direct representational
content and became progressively ritualized until their iconic
beginnings were entirely erased, just as in the evolution of the most
advanced forms of animal communication. At that point the resemblance
stops. Where animals are locked into the particular repertory of their
species, note by note and gesture by gesture, human beings invent
signals and freight them with arbitrary meaning. The primitive
languages of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers might have been conjured
from iconic visions of the mouth and vocal apparatus. But an act of
will, a mere whimsy, can produce a neologism that severs the ties with
the archaic sounds.
Even so, the considerable maneuvering room of the human mind does not
leave it entirely free to create any language with equal ease. The
mind is guided by epigenetic rules, powerful enough so that the
combined languages of the world, and probably all the languages that
could evolve with any ease in the future, form only a microscopic
subset of the verbal languages that can be imagined. The rules forbid
entry into most of this theoretical domain. The child-in-the-maze, to
return to our original metaphor, is guided far more quickly to the
adult tongue than could be the case if every sound and grammatical
rule were equally easy to learn.
Since Noam Chomsky argued the evidence for the existence of innate
grammatical rules in the late 1950s, researchers have made substantial
progress in identifying such constraints and charting their effects on
language. Much of the information accumulated by the linguists is
technical in nature, but it boils down to the special ways in which
children acquire knowledge about their own language and transfer it
into the coherent sentences of speech ("transformational grammar").
These procedures are the equivalent of what we have been calling the
epigenetic rules of mental development, with special reference to the
ways words are strung together to create meaning.
The constraints on language are linked to even deeper rules that
affect our conception of reality. Philosophers use the word ontology
to refer to beliefs concerning what can and cannot exist. Recently
this most abstract of all inquiries has been turned into a scientific
pursuit. Psychologists such as Frank C. Keil have begun to investigate
the precise mental steps by which the human perception of reality is
created. They have focused their attention on the predicates of
language—those propositions that appear sensible, are automatically
acceptable, and hence are used to build up long-term memory. For
example, the predicate "is honest" may be applied to Napoleon. Whether
or not the emperor was in fact honest, and whether all the time or
just once in a while, the proposition at least makes sense. Beneath
that predicate can be placed subordinate predicates that seem to
follow as consequences or special conditions, such as "is reliable,"
"is sincere," and so on. In contrast, the predicate "is geometric" is
not permissible. It cannot be linked at any level with the "is honest"
hierarchy without violating the sense of reality. This leads to the M-
constraint of human thought, first proposed by the philosopher Fred
Sommers. Stated concisely, the rule is that two predicates cannot be
linked to three terms if each predicate has a term that makes sense
for it alone. Thus the following combination is forbidden:
\-the chair / is made by hand \-the bat / was dead \-the cow
Faced with such intolerable ambiguity, the mind rushes to sever the M-
structure. It breaks up the predicates and terms to form alternative
branching trees that do not take the M-shape. When Keil tested 300
English- and Spanish-speaking children, he found that almost all had
the M-constraint. As people grow older, they build longer and more
complex trees of predicates that serve as the scaffolding of their
thought. Without understanding the process explicitly, they follow the
M-constraint.
In some way that neither philosophers nor scientists have fathomed,
the adoption of discrete symbols has also led to deep constraints in
the way quantity is envisioned; and from this sym-bolization of
quantity, a human mathematics has been formulated. From the earliest
age at which such matters can be examined, about two and a half years,
children acquire four regularities in counting from which they never
deviate the rest of their lives:
• The isomorphism rule: when counting a group of objects, one and only
one number (or, more precisely, enumeration tag) may be assigned to
each object.
• The stable-ordering rule: numbers must be applied in an order that
does not change from one count to another.
• The cardinality rule: the last enumeration tag in a counting series
signifies a cardinal number representing the quantity of the objects
or process measured.
• The order-irrelevance rule: the assignment of objects to numbers,
although fixed for the direction of a count, is arbitrary; in other
words, the order of enumeration is irrelevant.
Other intelligent species may not necessarily think of quantity in
just the same way as human beings. They are especially likely to
differ during the earlier stages of their mental evolution. To take
one of a vast series of imaginary cases, consider the eidylons during
the hunter-gatherer period of their evolution. Counting is performed
only under strict conditions and as part of a ritual. The rules are
genetically fixed (recall that the eidylons can transmit only one
culture). As hunters bring in game, the prey are counted by the
shamans according to the following procedure: the dead animals are
enumerated in strict order according to size, with the number 1
tagging the largest, the number 2 denoting the next largest, and so
on. Thus the order-irrelevance rule of human beings is violated. If
two animals appear to be the same size, they receive the same number,
violating the isomorphism rule. In order to serve the deep religious
belief of the unity of nature, a group of the smallest prey are set
aside and counted in reverse order, violating the cardinality rule.
The arithmetic of the primitive eidylons is built solidly into their
epigenetic rules of mental development; they would have great
difficulty coping with the human way. Nevertheless, their procedures
are highly advantageous for them, just as ours are for us.
This fantasy shows that it is not at all difficult to imagine species
of mind elsewhere in the universe that work very differently from the
human mind and with greater or lesser efficiency. The human brain is
constructed to handle language, reality, and quantity in a special
human way and not in some other. The fact that much of this
particularity appears self-evident to the very minds operating within
its constraints does not diminish the sense of wonder we should feel
by distancing ourselves from our idiosyncrasy long enough to see it as
a product of organic evolution.
The origin of the epigenetic rules of higher reasoning was sa-
pientization itself: it constituted the final stage of human
evolution, which may have occurred as recently as the past fifty to
one hundred thousand years. The purely Homo sapiens epigenetic rules
were added to the surviving processes and regularities of mental
development that had evolved in Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and still
earlier ancestral species. This fundamental base includes incest
avoidance, color perception, the patterns of mother-infant bonding,
facial expressions, and the other forms of cognition and social
behavior described earlier.
The modern mind is a biological palimpsest. Over thousands of
generations the ancient script of epigenetic rules was partially
erased to make room for the new. By careful examination of the
sometimes jumbled pieces, using techniques from several scientific
disciplines, it should be possible both to read the contemporary
message and to reconstruct the history that produced it.
Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson - 1983
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067463442X/qid=1036537594/
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5apKVkuYuzA
