The anthropologist John Hawks has published a short discussion, Crazy evolution movies, which is really about wrongful understandings of evolutionary processes. He states:
To be fair, this scenario [of the evolution of intelligent apes in Planet of the Apes within 2 or 3 millenia] is quite consistent with some people’s models of human evolution, in which human language and symbolic thinking arise suddenly in a single evolutionary spasm. Of course, those people are just wrong.
While this is true, there are phenomena which appear as all-at-once changes even though they are the result of underlying changes which come slowly and gradually or changes which serve one purpose and then suddenly are found useful in another way, sometimes in response to environmental changes. Human cultural evolution, tied to biological evolution in strange and complex ways—the time scales are dramatically different, involves aspects of human being, mostly communal, which can include rapid transitions after many generations of gradual changes. In fact, I’d think that after the evolution of general language capabilities, our use of language has sometimes gone through rapid transitions, as happened in the early Greek philosophers and more recently with scientists, especially mathematicians. See my very short discussion of an insight of John Polkinghorne, theoretical physicist and then Anglican clergyman: Shaping Our Minds to Reality. After talking about the experience of teaching new mathematical truths and attitudes (What is a vector? “‘But what is it really?’ they say.”) to young scientists, he speaks also of the difficulty physicists have in thinking in terms of quantum phenomena: “Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality.” Perhaps a “drawn out” process, but likely to be almost instant in terms of evolutionary time.
Even the physical world shows us such phase changes in which, for example, our universe showed itself as a different entity after a large drop in temperature as our universe emerged from a strange state (in current human terms) to one of thing-like being. The current state of our universe indicates that there was no slow transition, perhaps region by region, but rather an all-at-once transition from a radiation-dominated to a matter-dominated universe. The size of our universe and the finite speed of light give us tight constraints on possible scenarios if we wish to preserve cause and effect.
An example from a very specific realm of our thing-like universe, and which is easier to grasp, comes from an issue which puzzled Darwin himself. Darwin noticed that some hunting dogs had seemingly developed `gun-instincts’ in a spontaneous manner. Apparently, hunters with guns had started using dogs as retrievers only during Darwin’s lifetime and he noticed some of those dogs seemed to `naturally’ go into search patterns when a gun was fired nearby. There is no way for this sort of change to have occurred so rapidly by evolutionary processes of selection; some behavioral tendencies of these dogs were suddenly used for a new purpose, in response to an environmental change. This is strange but roughly understandable to someone who has observed dogs well enough to see the complex `scripts’ of behavior which they have as a result of their evolution as sophisticated social animals. Those scripts can be used for new purposes or maybe even mixed with other scripts or otherwise rebuilt. As a past dog-owner and trainer of those dogs, I’ve found it is surprisingly easy to accidentally teach dogs strange behaviors or strange versions of desired behavior.
Human beings and chimpanzees and perhaps some other species have some basic mental skills which allow them to keep in mind objects not physically present and to manipulate those objects in a way that can be seen as the solution to a problem. For example, a stick with a branch which is currently out of sight but was recently seen by the human or chimp thinker can be imagined as a way of reaching something placed a few feet out of reach by hand. Human beings engage in such thinking on a regular basis while chimpanzees do it in some situations in the wild but can be stimulated to do it in sophisticated ways in lab settings. This mental skill is considered by neuroscientists to be one of the foundational skills, perhaps the primary such skill, for more abstract forms of reasoning.
Human beings have much higher levels than chimpanzees of abstract reasoning skills of various sorts and we have some such skills not yet found in other creatures and not likely to be found. (Some animals and some birds and apparently some lower species have serious levels of number awareness but that’s far from the skills necessary to do double-entry accounting or number theory, though the very low-level brain structures might be similar.) Some such skills certainly existed before the appearance of `modern’ human beings, by which I mean to include some near cousins such as the Neandertals so well-defended by Hawks. There was tool design which at some points was probably partially conscious and deliberate but was likely first elicited by environmental clues, perhaps the handling of rocks already in useful shapes. There was painting and some sort of religious practice and burials. There was co-evolution of domestic animals along with our human family-lines, which probably involved some conscious decisions by the human partners at least at the later stages of this co-evolution. This all occurred along with an ongoing slow evolution of a brain complex enough to support a human mind of the sort shown by Plato or Einstein, minds capable of seeing larger scale meanings. Some such evolutionary processes are ongoing though it’s not possible to predict where we’re headed.
As I’ve claimed, in line with St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and neuroscientists such as Walter J. Freeman in recent decades, our mind-like attributes result from our active responses to what lies in our own bodies and also outside of ourselves. This assumes an evolved brain of great power. Its not clear to me how to talk about nature accidentally producing the possibility of an Einstein, but the result was that: a brain capable of forming minds which can, in principle, expand out to encapsulate all of the universe and all of the abstract being from which it was shaped. That brain existed in, again so to speak, a proto-Einsteinian form for some tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but a powerful mind such as that of Shakespeare which helped to shape a civilization can only develop when there is a complex enough human situation, technology and literature and religious beliefs and so on, to which such a mind can respond, bootstrapping itself to some extent. Civilizations formed when the pieces existed and some minds became consciously aware of the situation and the need to find a greater meaning in which that civilization could be placed. In a strong sense, our total minds, individual and communal, can be no better than our environments would allow. In Christian terms, we can think no thoughts not found in Creation, though perhaps not realized in our concrete universe. (See Intelligence vs. Intellect for a discussion of intellect as the “communal and capitalized form of live intelligence” in the words of Jacques Barzun.)
Excuse the complexity of my language, but I’m saying something complex because I’m speaking in a world where nearly everyone, explicitly dualistic or not, thinks of mind or at least truth as coming from ethereal realms. If I could simply develop ideas from the basic insight that our minds develop as we respond to our environments, counting our own bodies as environments, then I could, in principle, develop a solid and clean understanding of human being, individual and communal. Download A More Exact Understanding of Human Being to read an early effort to do exactly this.
Unfortunately, I’m writing in a civilization which has a less exact and quite inadequate understanding of mind as something we have and of knowledge as something to be put in the pre-existing slots of that mind. Truths come to us from undescribed regions and also have to fit into pre-existing slots.
I’m assuming many of my readers have inherited these wrongful ideas of mind and knowledge and even truths; I’m trying to explain why it is that I would claim a modern sort of mind, one similar to that of Richard Feynman or that of Serge Rachmaninoff, first showed itself around the sixth century before Christ when we see signs of what I’d call meta-reasoning or abstract reasoning in the assembly of ancient and more recent writings into a coherent whole as the books of Moses and other writings, the creation of Hindu theology by the Sanskrit speaking peoples, similar efforts in China, and the beginnings of systematic thinking about the world in the form of primitive natural philosophy and sophisticated forms of poetry in the region of Greece and Asia Minor. This happened because higher-level abstractions were necessary to the understanding of new forms of human relationships including those connecting human beings and physical reality.
In historical terms, and most certainly in evolutionary terms, complex civilizations came together very quickly, however long the underlying evolutionary and developmental processes took. The temperature of water drops slowly but ice can appear all of a sudden. Most phenomena in evolutionary biology don’t involve such dramatic all-at-once phase transitions, but I’m claiming that civilization and civilized minds appeared all-at-once in terms of the time-scales of evolutionary biology. In fact, most evolutionary biologists seem to support the idea that the behavioral and cultural traits of animals can go through rapid transitions though the underlying biological traits have to already exist and would have developed slowly by processes of selection. The human skills allowing symbolic thinking, the construction of complex narratives, the use of rhythmic language, and so forth evolved slowly and likely were in use by unknown geniuses many generations before Homer wrote the Iliad but there were truly revolutionary changes in the usage of these raw skills from those archaic geniuses to Homer to Virgil to Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot. The transition to Homer was very important and we may be going through another such transition as we try to understand an unbelievably complex human civilization and Einsteinian/Darwinian universe. We don’t have a clue how far these developments of evolved skills can go though I’ve speculated the basic human ability to encapsulate concrete reality in our own minds allows us, in principle, to encapsulate all that concrete, thing-like being is shaped from.
Moreover, I’ve claimed in other writings that we are now in the process of making a transition to far more complex forms of human communities and we’re going through a painfully rapid transition similar to what resulted in the dramatic appearance of a `civilized mind’ around the sixth century before Christ; it was at this time that complex communities became aware of their communal human being, first in the individual and communal self-awareness of a small number of geniuses.
As a simple pointer to what’s involved, I’ve claimed that our moral language is inadequate because it’s only as complex as earlier, premodern, stages of human communal life. For example, we’ve used Euclidean reasoning to form concepts and analogical ways of speaking about our moral lives. We think in terms of linear paths through a Euclidean sort of space. I’m speculating that the sheer mass of humanity and of the relationships most of us have to handle, personally or through others, distorts our moral spaces in a way analogous to that of mass distorting spacetime in our Einsteinian universe.
Short discussions of my writings dealing with these and other issues of being and knowledge of being, along with download links for most of them, can be found in Catalog of Major Writings by Loyd Fueston.