>> HTH.
>
> Promethean Fire - Reflections on the Origins of Mind
> Charles J. Lumsdem - E.O. Wilson -
1983http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/http://www.amazon.c.../
>
> 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.
>
> #############################################
>
> 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 -
1983http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583484256/http://www.amazon.c.../
>
>
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5apKVkuYuzA
