Greetings Economists, On Jun 4, 2007, at 11:29 AM, Charles Brown wrote:
I'm thinking that at human origins, the altruism that gave humans the biggest adaptive advantage is not genetically, but culturally determined, or even stronger that culture _is_ essentially an altruistic influence on humans.
Doyle; I would think language began much further back than 40 50 thousand years ago. Primates had communities some tens of million years. It's only when symbolic expression took off and that seems to be the clear boundary long after the animal modern humans appeared that a great transformation could take place. I think it a caution to claim too much for language, and not enough for culture. Unless the culture exchanges and saves information, as it were spends a lot of labor in accumulating information to express, the multiplication of resources can't have been done. Harvesting information, not just making stone tools that require forethought really matters. The very beginning at the foundation of religious cults is theorizing how social knowledge is shared. Therefore how to add knowledge culturally. And therefore make a common culture which can't work unless it benefits the group as a whole otherwise the harvesting of information is no different that if one had no language to share information. It's not just sharing but storing information external to the body. Doyle
