Only humans have symbolic communication and inheritance down through the generations

Only humans have language and custom : symbolic communication and symbolic inheritance down through the generations

by Charles Brown

http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2020/12/differentia-specifica-of-human-species.html

Differentia specifica of human species is symbolic communication and behavior - language and culture . The Differentia specifica of human species is symbolic communication and behavior - language and culture .

BY CHARLES BROWN

I write here a critique of Engels’s essay “The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” in part based on Marx’s claim that human labor is differentiated from all other species “ labor by the role of imagination “! ( (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm ) Otherwise , in his anthropological _The Origin of the Family , Private Property and the State _ , Engels is profoundly correct on the difference between the Stone Age and Civilization and other issues. My critique of Engels on this point is informed by the current biological ( human evolution) and cultural anthropological facts on origin of imagination designed stone tool use ; and the nature of language and culture as SYMBOLIC communication and behavior .

Origin of tools designed by imagination/blueprint and origin of language and culture is the issue Engels speculates concerning in “The Role of Labour in the transition from Ape to Man“. My basic difference with him is that the invention language and culture allowed labor for and with Stone tools created by imagination; not labor with hands created language and culture ( symbolic communication and behavior ; see definition of symbolic signs below ) ; I plead not guilty to the charge of philosophical idealism -smiles .

The origin of humans ( genus homo ) is the origin of language and culture , NOT the origin of habitual bipedalism and hands freed from walking on all fours . ( see pre-human , habitually bipedal primates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecine, et al. )  “Engels never finished Dialectics of Nature. Haldane, in his preface to the 1939 publication of Dialectics of Nature, regrets that it remained unpublished for a long time, and writes, “Had his remarks on Darwinism been generally known, I for one would have been saved a certain amount of muddled thinking.” One of its unfinished fragments is on the role of labor in human evolution, more specifically the evolution of the hand. It is the evolution of the hand through the process of labor—creating tools—that distinguishes humans from apes. Engels writes, “Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour.” It is not the evolution of the hand that led to our evolution as a species but the coevolution of the hand and labor as a historical process.”

The bottomline of my critique is : Language and culture , symbolic communication and symbolically guided behavior, including labor , originate 2.5 million years ago and enable homo habilis

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_habilis)

to make the first designed Stone tools .

Again : THE ORIGIN OF HUMANS IS IN THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE , SYMBOLIC COMMUNICATION , BEHAVIOR AND LEGACY-INHERITANCE

It is NOT that the ancestral bipedal species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecine, etc) to homo habilis started using its hands ( freed by bipedalism ; standing on two feet instead of four freeing the , forelimbs from being part of locomotion, originating hands ) ; and that caused them to start symbolic communication and behavior as Engels speculates .

( this is not idealist philosophical error on my part because words are , I hypothesize, originally invented in material _reproductive_ labor , childcare) .

Stone Age Foraging is a mode of direct appropriation from nature , not a mode of production; making a living by gigging smart not working hard. No planting seeds or animal husbandry, but hand to mouth from wild plants and animals . It was not that bi-pedalism and the origin of free forelimbs (hands) originated a new labor that caused the invention of tradition , names and words . It was that the invention of culture and language in childcare by mothers . I’m saying mothers invented names , words , symbolic communication to improve childcare, reproductive labor; culture and language were extended to making a living ( the Darwinian struggle for existence).

Importantly mother -child communication is inter-generational which structure is transferred to all language and culture which communicate between living and dead generations.

Foraging language / culture / customs revolutionized the hominin ( habitually bi-pedal primates, including Darwinian missing link species fossils : Sahelanthropus tchadensis , Orrorin tugenensis , Ardipithecus kadabba , Australopithecus ) struggle for existence by making it smarter, wiser, because of accumulation of knowledge over many generations . Language gives humans the capacity for dead generations to leave communications about their experiences to future living generations. Also More leisure gives more time to think and thereby work even smarter.

Symbolic communication allows : Ancestor legacy left in love of their posterity ; and ancestor veneration and sharing experiences of many dead generations of ancestors informing living in the present.

The difference between humans and all other species is that through symbolic communication , words and culture, dead generations have a certain immortality and are part of the society of living generations . Living generations share the experiences of dead generations through ancestor veneration . Thereby knowledge accumulates. All humans stand on the shoulders of giants , as the scientist Issac Newton put it venerating his scientific ancestors .

Reiteration Engels is wrong in "The Role of Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man" when he says "First labour, after it and then with it speech ..." CB : I say First long childcare , then names and speech invented by mothers to do better childcare , and then a transition to LESS toil in the struggle for existence , to smarter struggle for existence informed by ancestral experience , and more leisure as compared with primate species ancestral to homo habilis and the origin of the Stone Age . Stone tools ( and other cultural inventions that did not leave artifactual evidence) were invented to allow making a living less toilsome and more efficient . Perhaps the topic would be better named the transition in the struggle for existence in the transition from ape to man : the origin of imagination.

Stone Age society is Societas ( anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s term in _Ancient Society_ ) beginning 2.5 million years ago ; to circa 6,000 years ago with the beginning of Civitas ( Morgan ) private property, greed , slavery and heavy labor ( as Engels teaches in _The Origin of the Family , Private Property and the State _ ) . Slavery is the origin of Hard work , work ethic. With so-called civilization, hard work ethic comes to dominate cultural ideas . So, hard labour is not our Stone Age, species-being , but civilization-being, which is a small fraction of the full time of our species history.

I think Engels anachronistically projects the determining role of labor on ideas ( the historical materialist principle ) back onto the Stone Age origins of language and culture . In fact the invention of language and culture revolutionized the bipedal primates’ or hominin’s struggle for existence by making it less of a struggle . Toilsome struggle was introduced with _slave_ labor in so-called civilization where historical materialist determination originates.

Nonetheless , Marx and Engels do propose transition from the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom in the capitalist global society . Freedom is Leisure and smart work through technology . Jobs lost to technological invention should be translated into more leisure time for the masses, a May Day demand.

[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man c b Thu, 27 May 2010 05:54:49 -0700 What about the transition in labor in the transition from ape to man ? This essay uses "labor" in the sense that it is something that apes do; it is their struggle for existence , for survival in the Darwinian sense . So, it is not the same "labor" ( or is it work ?) that produces capitalist surplus value in _Capital_I, but the “labor “ more general to all animals that Marx describes in Chapter so and so , where he says the difference between the labor of spiders and bees and that of man is imagining the project as a plan first ( this implies that spiders and bees labor). “Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man (sic) and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands ( not just hands -CB) the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature ( not her genes ; her culture -CB ). He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. ( No we are dealing with labor guided by ancestor veneration, experiences of dead generations as guide to action , not dogma) . An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive ( and culture -custom guided-CB) stage . “

Marx continues : “We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will ( Other animals can’t do this , including chimpanzees, gorillas and dolphins -CB .) And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.”

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm

So, Marx’s implication ( contra Engels in “The Role of Labor “ ) is that in the transition from ape to man, labor transitioned in part by taking on more mental labor, imagination and planning , as a component. Imagination is a form of symbolic thinking . Symbolic communication, behavior and multi-intergenerational inheritance define humans , differentiate humans from all other species despite the false and exaggerated claims for chimps and gorillas by some primatologists.

Other mammals have society-sociality , but not culture. Vertebrates ( which include all mammals and primates , humans ) have collective labor , sympathy , empathy , and indexical sign communication.

Only human vertebrates have culturally guided labor and both indexical and symbolic sign communication .

So the Differentia specifica of human species is symbolic communication and behavior - language and culture .

[Marxism-Thaxis] The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man c b Thu, 27 May 2010 13:32:42 -0700 Engels: “But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation.” ^^^^^

CB: Ahhh but how ? How did the experience of repetition of use of _a_ hand by one individual get transferred to the brains of the next generation and the next , become the experience of _The_ hand ? If Patriarch uses his hands thousands of times his increasing dexterity is based on accumulated experience in that one individual's brain. The next generation's brains go back to "square one" at birth and childhood . The only way to accumulate the knowledge across generations is by mediating the learning experience with language, imagination, symbolic communication The only way to "stand on the shoulders of giants" is to receive messages from them through a system of symbols, words . ( as in those days there wasn't the technology to draw or take enough pictures) "The" hand is not the hand of an individual, but The Hand, as a concept, an organ of the species. ( Symbolic signs - words being the best example - have an _arbitrary_ relation between the sign and the thing signified . They are using something to represent something that they are not. In my class , I write my name on the board -Charles Brown . Then I point out that the marks on the board are not me; but they are used to represent me. So a name is using something to represent something it is not . There is an arbitrary relation between a name and the person named . The opposite of a symbolic sign is an _indexical_ sign . There is a necessary ( not arbitrary ) relationship between the sign and the thing signified . A favorite example is smoke and fire . Smoke is an indexical sign of fire .

Only humans have symbolic signs . Humans and all other animals communicate or read indexical signs ; humans have both -despite the exaggerated claims for chimps and gorillas by some animals rights primatologists. Symbolic and indexical signs are basic ideas of semiotics .( http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/) The arbitrary relation between symbolic signs and thing signified gives humans a DISPLACEMENT capacity . Humans can communicate with each other about events that are not in their immediate sensory field , like things that happened a week ago , or things that are on the other side of town See https://owlcation.com/stem/The-difference-between-animal-and-human-communication I CLAIM TO HAVE DISCOVERED BY LOGICAL IMPLICATION THAT THE UNIQUE DISPLACEMENT CAPACITY OF HUMANS ALLOWS ACCUMULATION OF KNOWLEDGE OVER GENERATIONS BECAUSE A LIVING GENERATION CAN SHARE THE EXPERIENCE OF DEAD GENERATIONS , SHARE _DISPLACED_ EXPERIENCES . Therefore , it was the ability to experience the displaced experiences of dead generations, symbolic thinking , that allowed the first humans to make Stone tools ( reverse of Engels’ idea) Again , Symbolic communication allows : Ancestor veneration The difference between humans and all other species is that through symbolic communication , words and culture, dead generations have a certain immortality and are part of the society of living generations . Living generations share the experiences of dead generations . Thereby knowledge accumulates. All humans stand on the shoulders of giants , as the scientist Issac Newton put it concerning his scientific ancestors .

Here is Engels’ essay The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm The following is my blog item critiquing Engels‘ essay. http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/02/more-leisure-is-homo-sapiens-species.html More Leisure is Homo sapiens species essence ; May Day demand More Leisure ( than our ancestral primate species had) is our species essence ( See "The Original Affluent Society" by my anthropological mentor and senior anthro major advisor ,Marshall Sahlins , in _Stone Age Economics_ ) . cb at 10:11 AM