"'...they also developed hands and made tools, which led to them getting big brains.'" (p. 56)
Exactly:
hands and tools before bigger brains;
manipulation before thought;
practice before theory;
"In the beginning was the deed." (Goethe, Faust);
materialism, not idealism.
Van Rijn traces brains capable of thought back to hands and tools, manual labor, but also unnecessarily speaks of "'...souls...'" being "'...given...'" at some stage in this process. (ibid.)
"Van Rijn slurped [coffee] down, disregarding a temperature that would have taken the skin off [Joyce's] palate..." (ibid.)
That is one thing that he and I do have in common. I was once told that I must have a throat of asbestos.
I hope that this blog continues to entertain and enlighten although I am aware of a growing crisis outside these walls. Will mankind survive through the present Chaos into some version of post-Western civilization?
In James Blish's Cities In Flight, the West falls. In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, English-speaking Western civilization is succeeded by Anglic-speaking Technic civilization which ends later when the Terran Empire falls.
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I wonder, thos, are hands and the ability to use them for making tools and weapons even possible before you also have the BRAIN needed for using hands like that? Such a process is not likely to have been as neat and tidy as van Rijn suggested.
As for the possible dangers posed by the coronavirus crisis, I recall Poul Anderson saying somewhere that Europe did survive the Black Death. But I hope we don't have to go thru something that horrible!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The evolution is:
animal brains;
hands and tools;
bigger brains capable of thought but not needing souls to do it with.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Here's an interesting tidbit from near the end of "The Little Monster," Jerry Parker's Spanish Uncle Antonio speaking: "I think those people of the dawn already had souls, Jerry. And they endured; they actually found the strength to love. Be proud of such forebears." But I realize this touches on matters of metaphysics and theology where we don't agree.
Ad astra! Sean
Tool use/intelligence were probably mutually reinforcing. Chimps make and use tools -- and learn from their elders to do so in particular ways.
Note that the -further- development of intelligence, past the H. Erectus stage, was probably mostly due to -social- challenges. H. Erectus was already quite successful at dealing with its environment, but you can't be too smart when dealing with other human beings! Except where intellect starts subverting its own survival -- I suspect we reached that level about 80,000 years BP at about the current average.
And of course the symbolic manipulation we perfected for use with each other in turn had effects on our ability to manipulate the social and physical environment, coming up with new models of social organization and developing insights into how our environment changes and can be changed -- modern humans were apparently the first hominids to exploit seasonal abundance by preserving foods for up to one year-cycle, for instance, which transformed the possible densities of population among hunter-gatherers.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for this interesting mini essay. That makes sense, intelligence and the ability to manipulate objects to useful ends were mutually reinforcing. Your comments fits in with Uncle Antonio's more "metaphysical" remarks.
Ad astra! Sean
How does intellect subvert its own survival. (I think it does but I am interested in details.)
Kaor, Paul!
I think the answer to your question is fairly obvious. Very intelligent people can fanatically believe in ideologies the implementing of which had disastrously ruinous consequences to both many of the fanatics themselves and their countries. Marxism and National Socialism are two obvious examples. The Nazis HAD to have actually believed in their nonsense about race when it was so costly and counterproductive to Germany. And so on!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: more generally than that. As Poul put it poetically, the purpose of life is to bring forth life — or in more prosaic terms, a human being is a DNA molecule’s way of making more DNA molecules.
Every organism is in constant competition to seize the flow of energy and turn it into copies of itself.
Intelligence can be a powerful tool for doing this — hence the fact that there are 7.5 billion human beings, an utterly unprecedented level of use of the biosphere’s energy flows for a single mammalian species. Never in the history of life has any large vertebrate had numbers like that at one time.
But intelligence can also subvert that objective by producing a consciousness that is so aware of itself and its own mortality that it ceases to be motivated by generational continuity. Eg., celibate religious orders — an elaboration of emotional attitudes that evolved to help some people achieve reproductive success by furthering that of their close relatives rather than themselves in particular.
Most mammals identify kin through a combination of physical clues (small, most importantly) and social conditioning — early exposure. Human beings use social conditioning combined with visual clues — we’re keyed to feel linked to those who look like us and suspect those who don’t, for example, but social bonding can overcome this.
This state of affairs was fine in the environment we evolved in; in a hunter-gatherer band, everyone is likely to be a close genetic relative, so altruism is generally highly functional.
In more complex settings, not necessarily so much.
Self-preservation motivation is counterproductive when what we are preserving is not just the organism but a favored self-image which is unnecessary but extremely powerful.
It’s one of the psychological mechanisms humans evolved for social action — we can identify so strongly with a group that we put its interests ahead of those of our individual self. A powerful tool but a dangerous one, like most such.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
You both helped to clarify what I was thinking. Some can both transmute their sense of kinship with a group and self preservation to such an extent that it becomes ruinous and self destructive. As the Nazis had done with "Aryans" and "subhumans."
Many other examples can be thought of, of course. The Nazis merely make for a clear case of this phenomenon.
Ad astra! Sean
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