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Keith, I miff easily but have a tremendous capacity for
recovery. You hadn't even begun to enter the realm or the "to be forgiven
if you kneel before me". I think that, as we've done many times
before, we have to end this at our usual impasse. I recognize the
significance of the frontal lobes, etc., but, frontal lobes or not, am
pretty convinced that no human species could do what we can with our
brains. What Mithen and the evolutionary psychologists, including Pinker,
argue about domain-specific and domain-general thinking seems plausible as an
explanation of cognitive development. It may be abstract verbiage, but
then isn't all verbiage abstract? Nobody who was around 70kya to 100kya
was able to look at anyone else and say "Hey, man, cool, you're really
cognitively fluid!" They just went on with what they had to do to keep
themselves from going extinct, just as we may soon have to do too.
Best regards, Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 4:22
PM
Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re:
[Futurework] David Ricardo, Caveman (fwd)
At 15:40 25/11/2003 -0500, you wrote:
Thanks, Pete, but I'm not sure I
really agree, especially with your argument about it all depending on the
slow accumulation of culture and about it taking a long time to invent and
diffuse things like fish hooks and needles. Sorry, but I believe Homo
sapiens is brighter and faster than that.
I was a bit miffed at
Keith's dismissal of Stephen Mithen whom I mentioned in one of my earlier
postings, so I decided to see where Mithen's ideas stand in the current
literature.
I'm sorry I miffed you -- I didn't mean
to. The trouble with Mithen and his ilk is that he is falling into the all too
common trap these days of using a whole new batch of verbalisations and
becoming hypnotised by them. All this stuff below is pretty gobbledegook
really. By all means invent a new concept. That's the way science proceeds.
But one at a time please. And then test it against experiment or
observation.
Let's keep to tangible evidence whenever possible. Let's
just say that from about 3/4 million years ago the frontal lobes of the
hominid line grew at an enormously fast evolutionary pace. (We have about 80
more brain genes than the chimp and it was probably these that were involved.)
The frontal lobes are known to be involved in controlling emotions and this
must have been of tremendous survival help. It is also known that they deal
with novel perceptions -- those for which there are no adequate "templates" in
the rear cortex and therefore need to be puzzled over. We also know that the
frontal lobes are involved in the embellishment of normal gratifications into
exquisite pleasure (both of basic urges of sex, eating, etc but also,
importantly, of intellectual ideas). These three things (among others) are
fully proven basic facts from neurological research into pathways. It is not
too much to suggest that with these additional faculties, almost anything
could happen -- and, of course, did. We don't need to suppose anything else
for the time being until the neuronal circuits of the frontal lobes are
examined in finer and finer detail -- as they will be.
Talking of
"domain general mechanisms", "domain specific mechanisms", and "cognitive fluidity" really get us
nowhere at all except to be useful conversational terms.
I think
that Pete has described the process pretty well -- as well as anybody can do
given our existing knowledge.
Keith
To do so, I
went down to my university library and picked up a couple of books, one a
book of readings, the other a text book. I'll refer to the latter in
what follows. It's Bjorklund, D.F. and A.D. Pellegrini, The Origins
of Human Nature, American Psychological Society, 2002. Like Thomas
Homer-Dixon, Bjorklund and Pellegrini give a lot of credence to Mithen's
concepts, most basically the concept that what distinguishes us from other
primate species is the ability to have attained "cognitive fluidity" and
thus being able to use the various modules of the brain
simultaneously. Specifically:
- Mithen (1996) [proposed] that hominids
evolved powerful, domain-specific modules to deal with their natural and
social worlds, but it was not until the emergence of modern humans about
100,000 years ago that Homo sapiens were able to integrate the
information-processing abilities of these modules to produce a
general-purpose intelligence. In both cases, it appears that a
domain-general mechanism is proposed as the necessary addition for the
emergence of the modem human mind. (p.144)
This, of course, begs the question of how a "domain
general mechanism" may have emerged. Here Bjorklund and Pellegrini
note:
- Domain-specific mechanisms will be favored when environments remain
relatively stable, with individuals facing recurrent problems generation
after generation. ... In contrast, domain-general mechanisms will be
favored when environments are unstable and the nature of the problems
individuals face varies over generations. Under these circumstances,
flexible, decontextualized problem-solving routines would be most adaptive
.... For example, ... the environment in which humans evolved was
characterized by frequent and noncyclic changes in climate.... This would
have resulted in unpredictable changes in habitat, requiring individuals
to be able to respond to situations unlike any their recent ancestors
faced. It is exactly in such situations that flexible, domain-general
mechanisms would be favored. (Ibid.)
One thing we do
appear to agree on is that, due to some unknown cause, the human population
declined to the near extinction level at one time. Evidence for this
is the unique similarity of DNA across all human populations. No other
primate species even comes close to us in this regard. A reference I
have suggests that the near die-out would have happened more than 70kya,
before we left Africa, and that the population may have gone as low as
2,000. Given the enormous threat faced by the human population, what
better time to get our brains in order and develop cognitively fluid
thinking! We may have had the capacity before then, but we may not
really have used it very much, or we may have used it here and there but not
consistently.
According to sources cited by Bjorklund and Pellegrini,
cognitively fluid thinking requires a long maturation process as the
individual moves from the domain-specific to the domain general. Young
children do not think that way and it is only when the brain is fully formed
in late adolescence and early adulthood that individuals become cognitively
fluid. Of course, a proportion of the population may never get
there.
It would seem, from material in Bjorkland and Pelligrini, that
we are the only human species to have become full-time cognitively fluid
thinkers. To become that requires a long maturation that takes the
brain, step by step, through a process beginning at infancy and ending at
adulthood. Not even Neanderthalers with their large brains appear to
have made it, or did so to only a very limited extent, because they matured
to adulthood much more rapidly than we do.
This brings me to the
giants upon whose shoulders Newton stood. Here, I would not include
the guy that invented the fish hook, the spear or the atl-atl. Many
groups of people would have done these things at different places and
times. More probably, Newton was referring to people who used
cognitive fluidity with exceptional grace and rationality, people like
Aristotle, the genius in India who invented the concept of zero, the Arabs
who brought that concept plus ancient Greek thought to Europe, and schoolmen
like Aquinas and Abelard who argued religion with special
elegance.
Ed
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: pete
- Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 12:33 PM
- Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David
Ricardo, Caveman (fwd)
- At 09:15 25/11/2003 -0800, Pete wrote:
- On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
- >Pete, I am an amatuer at all of this, and you have obviously
read more
- >than I have. However, what I don't understand is why, if
we had
- >essentially modern brains 160kya, did it take us 80,000 to
100,000 years
- >to demonstrate that we had those brains. I'll have to do
more reading.
- >
- It's all about the rate of accumulation of culture. Newton
famously
- said if he saw further than most men, it was because he stood on
- the shoulders of giants. The giants he refered to are easy to
- identify, but in fact there are a cadre of giants whose names
- are lost in prehistory, to whom we all owe a great debt for
- the life we live. It is hard to realize, but such things as
- fish hooks, needles and thread, baskets, nets, wooden huts,
- and many more, were revolutionary ideas, which had to wait
- for someone bright enough to not only conceive of them, and
- persist in working on them til they were effective enough to
- attract wider adoption, but I think most importantly to realize
- that innovation was a possible option, when most of the hardware
- which persists in the archaeological record appears to have been
- unchanged for _hundreds of thousands_ of years prior. The
- frequency of innovations at first must have been so low that
- each innovator would be essentially working without any living
- example that it was possible, particularly as the social unit
- was probably a small band of one to two hundred individuals
- at most. It is very much a "critical mass" issue, and was
coupled
- to the total population size. What ever it was that brought our
- population down to 10,000 individuals or less, may have
persisted,
- limiting population growth and thus the size of the "brain
trust".
- And as I also mentioned, language and lore had to develop. You
- can't have creative technological ideas if you don't have a
- cultural milieu which provides the excercise in manipulating
- concepts, something which requires a robust vocabulary. All
- these things take time, and it's hard to grasp how much time,
- when we now learn much more about many aspects of the world
- before the age of two than these people would have known at
- first as adults.
- -Pete
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Brilliantly described. Working backwards from now, if one could plot
"standard" innovations (happening today at, say, one a month), they would
probably fit on a pretty smooth exponential curve
- Keith
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: "pete" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
- To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
- Sent: Monday, November 24, 2003 11:56 AM
- Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo,
Caveman
- > On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
- >
- > >And I would take issue with you that we are now the same as
we were
- > >100/200,000 years ago. Stephen Mithen of the
University of Reading, as
- > >one example, argues that until about 70K to 80K years ago,
our brains
- > >were relatively compartmentalized; that is, we were a lot
like cats who
- > >think about mating and nothing else when mating, hunting
and nothing else
- > >when hunting, socializing and nothing else when
socializing, etc. At the
- > >time, our rather limited thoughts and actions were highly
genetically
- > >determined. Then something happened. The wiring
that controlled all
- > >that began to fall away and we became, as Mithen puts it,
"cognitively
- > >fluid"; that is, we could think across all of those little
compartments
- > >and use them all at the same time. The result was an
explosion in
- > >creativity and also an explosion in our capacity for
mischief. Not
- > >everybody agrees with Mithen. Some argue that a
"creativity gene" arose
- > >some 50K to 100K years ago.
- >
- > Despite the substantial media coverage given to
short-chronology champions
- > like Klein, and to a lesser extent Mithen, these are not the
majority
- > view in paleo-anth regarding the rise of Homo sapiens.
Molecular
- > evidence is persistent in putting the start of the clock for
our
- > particular string of ancestors at around 150-200kya, and
archaeology
- > supports this with indications of transitional but mostly
modern
- > phenotypes in northeast africa @ 160kya, and tools along the
Red
- > Sea shore around 125kya. The thinking is that culture is a
huge
- > part of what we currently are, and the accumulation of this, in
the
- > form of sophistication in language, technology, and lore, takes
a
- > long time to develop. The effect is essentially exponential,
rather
- > like population growth - we had the essential modern mental
hardware,
- > but it took in the order of 100ky for our particular string of
ancestors
- > to build up their population to the point that they were able
to
- > develop and retain the necessary cultural tools to achieve
the
- > material trappings of modernity. Consider that the
Neanderthals
- > were in europe for perhaps 300ky with essentially the same
toolkit,
- > yet were able apparently to begin absorbing the refined tools
of
- > Homo sapiens as soon as they arrived on the scene. This
indicates
- > I think the essential mobility of culture, and its
independence
- > from creative intellectual capacity.
- >
- > The strong objections to the 50kya figure also refer to the
current
- > indications of human migrations. The evidence is that we
were
- > out of africa by 100kya, and heading east and south, much
more
- > hospitable places at that time than europe, which resisted
our
- > incursion until we had developed the cultural solutions to
cold
- > weather living, perhaps as much as 40 or even 50ky later. By
that
- > time we had penetrated SEasia and were working our way
northeast
- > along the pacific rim. If Mithen's timing were correct, all
these
- > people would be deprived of his eurocentric genetic advance,
which is
- > clearly not the case.
- >
- > Whatever happened, appears to have happened
- > >to all of us alive at that time in just a few generations,
and it would
- > >seem that there weren't very many of us. As is
suggested by the unique
- > >similarity of human DNA among primate species, there may
only have been
- > >some 2,000 of us, the survivors of some natural disaster
barely managing
- > >to stay alive somewhere in Africa.
- >
- > The puzzle of our genetic lack of diversity is not resolved,
as
- > it appears to have developed while we were in africa.
Apparently
- > we chose not to, or were prevented from interbreeding with
the
- > extant Homo lineages in africa, and when we had developed a
- > distinct gracile phenotype, we appear to have displaced,
rather
- > than absorbing into each other hominid type we encountered
- > as we spread south into africa and north into the rest of
the
- > world, spreading our meager but potent genetic legacy.
- >
- > -Pete Vincent
- >
- >
- > _______________________________________________
- > Futurework mailing list
- > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- > http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
- _______________________________________________
- Futurework mailing list
- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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- Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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