http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2018/09/life-liberty-and-pursuit-of-happiness.html
Thursday, March 31, 2022
The true right to Life/make a living
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2018/09/life-liberty-and-pursuit-of-happiness.html
later in life i discovered 1)Biologist Antoinette Brown Blackwell's correct and essential critique of Darwin and Spenser's human social theory of competition and savage rivalry within the human species and ( Social Darwinism) ; 2) the essay anthropologist Marshall Sahlins forgot to tell us about on the origin of human society in males regulating themselves in sexuality, abolition of "Alpha-male" primate institution . These theories are in cooperation with each other
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-origin-of-society-by-marshall.html http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-origin-of-society-by-marshall.html http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/our-mother-nature-antoinette-blackwell.html
"Blackwell chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather than struggle and savage rivalry. She criticized Darwin for basing his theory of evolution on "time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species".[7] She wrote that Spencer scientifically subtracts from the female and Darwin as scientifically adds to the male.[6]" wikipedia
FIT in the sense of bodily fit for success in the struggle for existence ( the Darwinian term of art for longevity in an individual organism ) surviving , getting enough to eat , not getting eaten , not falling out of a tree or off a cliff , not freezing to death , not overheating to death BEFORE REPRODUCING , BEFORE BEING FERTILE, passing on one’s genes to next generations .
Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 Despite apparent superficial similarities between animal and human societies, the difference between them is profound: “Human social life is culturally, not biologically, determined.” The triumph of intellect over instinct — of altruism over individualism — was demonstrably basic to our evolution.
5. The Origin of Society1 This discussion of the early phases of human society considers events that occurred a million years ago, in places not specifically determined, under circumstances known only by informed speculation. It will therefore be an exercise in inference, not in observation. This means juxtaposing the social life of man’s closest relations — monkeys and apes — on the one side, with the organization of known primitive societies on the other. The gap that remains is then bridged by the mind. No living primate can be directly equated with man’s actual simian ancestor, and no contemporary primitive people is identical with our cultural ancestors. In both instances only generalized social traits — not particular, specialized ones — can be selected for historical comparison.
On the primate side one must rely primarily on the few field reports of free-ranging groups and on certain pioneer studies of captive animals. These have covered the anthropoid apes, especially the gibbon and the chimpanzee (which are more closely related to man) as well as the New and Old World monkeys. On the human side the nearest contemporary approximations to the original cultural condition are societies of hunters and gatherers, pre-agricultural peoples exacting a meager livelihood from wild food resources. This cultural order dominated the Old Stone Age (one million to 10,000 or 15,000 years ago).
Confidence in the comparative procedure which equates modern hunters and gatherers with the actual protagonists of the Stone Age is fortified by the remarkable social congruence observed among these peoples, even though they are historically as separated from one another as the Stone Age is distant from modern times. They include the Australian aborigines, the Bushmen of South Africa, the Andaman Islanders, the Shoshoni of the American Great Basin, the Eskimo, and Pygmy groups in Africa, Malaya and the Philip pines. Comparison of primate sociology with the findings of anthropological research immediately suggests a startling conclusion: The way people act, and probably have always acted, is not the expression of inherent human nature. There is a quantum difference, at points a complete opposition, between even the most rudimentary human society and the most advanced subhuman primate one. The discontinuity implies that the emergence of human society required some suppression, rather than a direct expression, of man’s primate nature. Human social life is culturally, not biologically, determined. This is not to slander the poor apes, to suggest that their social behavior is necessarily innate and unlearned. Yet it is clearly the product of their nature, of animal needs and reactions, physiological processes and psychological responses.
1 MARSHALL D. SAHLINS, “The Origin of Society,” in Scientific American, 203, No. 3 (1960), pp. 76-86. Reprinted with permission of the author and the publisher. Copyright © 1960 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved. Dr. Sahlins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. 59
Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 Their social life therefore varies directly with the organic constitution of the individual and the horde. In an unchanging environment the social characteristics of a given subhuman primate species are unchanging, unless or until the species is organically transformed. The same cannot be said about human social arrangements. We are all one species, but our social orders grow and diversify, even within a constant environment, and they do so quite apart from the minor biological (racial) differences that develop among different peoples.
This liberation of human society from direct biological control was its great evolutionary strength. Culture saved man in his earliest days, clothed him, fed him and comforted him. In these times it has become possible to pile form on form in great social edifices that undertake to secure the survival of millions of people. Yet the remarkable aspect of culture’s usurpation of the evolutionary task from biology was that in so doing it was forced to oppose man’s primate nature on many fronts and to subdue it. It is an extraordinary fact that primate urges often become not the secure foundation of human social life, but a source of weakness in it. The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality. The powerful social magnet of sex was the major impetus to subhuman primate sociability. This has long been recognized. But it was the British anatomist Sir Solly Zuckerman — whose attention to the matter developed from observation of the almost depraved behavior of baboons in zoos — who made sexuality the key issue of primate sociology. Subhuman primates are prepared to mate at all seasons, and although females show heightened receptivity midway through the menstrual cycle, they are often capable of sexual activity at other times.
Most significantly for the assessment of its historic role, year-round sex in higher primates is associated with year-round heterosexual social life. Among other mammals sexual activity, and likewise heterosexual society, is frequently confined to a comparatively brief breeding season. Of course other important social activities go on in the subhuman primate horde. Group existence confers advantages, such as defense against predation, which transcend the gratification of erotic urges. In the evolutionary perspective the intense, long-term sexuality of the primate individual is the historic complement of the advantages of horde life. Nor, in considering subhuman primate sexuality, should attention be confined to coitus. The evidence grows that certain Old World monkeys—the closely related baboon, rhesus monkey and Japanese monkey — do have seasonal declines in breeding without cessation of horde life. But sex enters into subhuman primate social relations in a variety of forms, and heterosexual copulation is only one of them. Sexual mounting is involved in the establishment of dominance, which grows out of chronic competition for food, mates, and other desirable objects. It is a common element of youthful play; indeed, the female higher primate is unique among female mammals in displaying the adult sexual pattern prior to puberty. The familiar primate trait of mutual grooming — the pulling and licking out of parasites and other objects from the coat of another animal — often appears to be a secondary sexual activity. Sex is more than a force of attraction between adult males and females; it also operates among the young and between individuals of the same sex. Promiscuity is not an accurate term for it; it is indiscriminate. And while we might deem some of the forms perversions, to a monkey or an ape they are all just sociable.
60 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65
Sex is not an unmitigated social blessing for primates. Competition over partners, for example, can lead to vicious, even fatal, strife. It was this side of primate sexuality that forced early culture to curb and repress it. The emerging human primate, in a life-and-death economic struggle with nature, could not afford the luxury of a social struggle. Co-operation, not competition, was essential. Culture thus brought primate sexuality under control. More than that, sex was made subject to regulations, such as the incest tabu, which effectively enlisted it in the service of co-operative kin relations. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex — in the interest of the economic adaptation of the group.
The evolution of the physiology of sex itself provided a basis for the cultural reorganization of social life. As Frank Beach of Yale University has pointed out, a progressive emancipation of sexuality from hormonal control runs through the primate order. This trend culminates in mankind, among whom sex is controlled more by the intellect — the cerebral cortex — than by glands. Thus it becomes possible to regulate sex by moral rules; to subordinate it to higher, collective ends. The consequent repression of primate sexuality in primitive as well as more developed societies has taken striking forms. In every human society sex is hedged by tabus: on time, place (the human animal alone demands privacy), on the sex and age of possible partners, on reference to sex in certain social contexts, on exposing the genitalia (particularly for females), on cohabitation during culturally important activities which range in different societies from war and ceremony to brewing beer. By way of an aside, it is notable that the repression of sex in favor of other ends is a battle which, while won for the spe- -cies, is still joined in every individual to this day.
(CHARLES BROWN: In other words, humans still have hetero-sexual imstinct )
In Sigmund Freud’s famous allegory, the conflict between the self-seeking, sexually inclined id and the socially conscious superego re-enacts the development of culture that occurred in the remote past. The design of many of these tabus is obvious: the disconcerting fascination of sex and its potentially disruptive consequences had to be eliminated from vital social activities. Thus the incest tabu is a guardian of harmony and solidarity within the family — a critical matter for hunters and gatherers, for among them the family is the fundamental economic as well as social group. At the same time, the injunction on sexual relations and marriage among close relatives necessarily forces different families into alliance and thus extends kinship and mutual aid.
It has been said that kinship, with its economic aspect of co-operation, became the plan for primitive human society. “Kinship” here means a cultural form, not a biological fact. Apes are of course genetically related to each other. But apes do not and cannot name and distinguish kinsmen, and they do not use kinship as a symbolic organization of behavior. On the other hand, cultural kinship has virtually nothing to do with biological connection. No one, for example, can be absolutely certain who his father is in a genetic sense, but in all human societies fatherhood is a fundamental social status. Almost all societies adhere, implicitly or explicitly, to the dictum of the Napoleonic code in this respect: the father of the child is the husband of the mother.
( CB: But often mothers brother acts as father)
Many hunters and gatherers carry kinship to an extreme that is curious to us. By a device technically known as classificatory kinship they ignore genealogical differences between collateral and lineal kin at certain points, lumping them terminologically and in social be- 61 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 -havior. Thus my father’s brother may be “father” to me, and I act accordingly
(CB: So , it does have to do with buology , but more circuitous biological connection)
. Close kinship may be extended indefinitely by the same logic: My father’s brother’s son is my “brother,” my grand father’s brother is my “grandfather,” his son is my “father,” his son my “brother,” and so on. As one observer remarked of the Australian aborigines: “It is impossible for an Australian native to have anything whatever to do with anyone who is not his relative, of one kind or another, near or distant.” The subhuman primate horde varies in size among different species, ranging from groups in the hundreds among certain Old World monkeys to the much smaller groups, often smaller than 10, characteristic of anthropoid apes. The horde may stay together all the time, or it may scatter during daytime feeding into packs of various sorts — mate groups of males and females, females with young, males alone — and come together again at night resting places. Monkeys seem inclined to scatter in this way more than apes. There are typically more adult females than adult males within the hordes sometimes, as in the case of the howler monkey, three times as many. This may be in part due to a faster maturation rate for females. It may also reflect the elimination of some males in the course of competition for mates. These males are not necessarily killed. They may lead a solitary life outside or on the fringes of the horde, attempting all the while to attach themselves to some group and acquire sexual partners. The progressive emancipation of sex from hormonal control in the primate order that was noted by Beach seems to be paralleled by a progressive development from promiscuous mating to the formation of exclusive, permanent heterosexual partnerships between specific animals. Among certain New World monkeys, females with their young corn- -prise a separate pack within the horde, and only when a female is in heat does she forsake this group for males. She does not become attached to a specific male, but, wearing them out in turn. goes from one to another. The Old World rhesus horde and mate relations are similar except that a receptive female is taken over primarily by dominant males, a step in the direction of exclusiveness. In the anthropoid gibbon the trend toward exclusiveness is fully developed: the entire horde is typically composed of an adult male, a permanent female consort and their young. As yet it is not safe to state unequivocally that such progressive change runs through the entire primate order. It does appear that the higher subhuman primates presage the human family more than do the lower. The primate horde is practically a closed social group. Each horde has a territory, and local groups of most species defend their ground (or trees) against encroachment by others of their kind. The typical relation between adjacent hordes is that of enmity, especially, it seems, if food is short. Their borders are points of social deflection, and contact between neighbors is often marked by belligerent vocal cries, if it does not erupt into fatal violence. Territorial relations among neighboring human hunting-and-gathering bands (a term used technically to refer to the cohesive local group) offer an instructive contrast. The band territory is never exclusive. Individuals and families may shift from group to group, especially in those habitats where food resources fluctuate from year to year and from place to place. In addition, a great deal of interband hospitality and visiting is undertaken for purely social and ceremonial reasons. Although bands remain autonomous politically, a general notion of tribalism, based on similarity in lan- 62 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 -guage and custom and on social collaboration, develops among neighboring groups. These tendencies are powerfully reinforced by kinship and the cultural regulation of sex and marriage. Among all modern survivors of the Stone Age, marriage with close relatives is forbidden, while marriage outside the band is at least preferred and sometimes morally prescribed. The kin ties thereby created become social pathways of mutual aid and solidarity connecting band to band. It does not seem unwarranted to assert that the human capacity to extend kinship was a necessary social condition for the deployment of early man over the great expanses of the planet. Another implication of interband kinship deserves emphasis: Warfare is limited among hunters and gatherers. Indeed, many are reported to find the idea of war incomprehensible. A massive military effort would be difficult to sustain for technical and logistic reasons. But war is even further inhibited by the spread of a social relation — kinship — which in primitive society is often a synonym for “peace.” Thomas Hobbes’s famous fantasy of a war of “all against all” in the natural state could not be further from the truth. War increases in intensity, bloodiness, duration and significance for social survival through the evolution of culture, reaching its culmination in modern civilization. Paradoxically the cruel belligerence that is popularly considered the epitome of human nature reaches its zenith in the human condition most removed from the pristine. By contrast, it has been remarked of the Bushmen that “it is not in their nature to fight.” The only permanent organization within the band is the family, and the band is a grouping of related families, on the average 20 to 50 people altogether. Bands lack true government and law; the rules of good order are synonymous with customs of proper behavior toward kinsmen. In certain ways this system of etiquette is even more effective than law. A breach of etiquette cannot go undetected, and punishment in the form of avoidance, gossip and ridicule follows hard upon offense. The primitive human family, unlike the subhuman primate mate group, is not based simply on sexual attraction. Sex is easily available in many band societies, both before and outside marriage, but this alone does not necessarily create or destroy the family. The incest tabu itself implies that the human family cannot be the social outcome of erotic urges. Moreover, sexual rights to a wife may even be waived in the interest of securing friendly relations with other men, as in the famous Eskimo custom of wife lending. This, incidentally, is only one cultural device among many for enlisting marriage and sex in the creation of wide social alliance. In remarkable contrast to subhuman primate unions, often created and maintained in violence, marriage is in band society a means of securing peace. Adultery and quarrels over women are not unknown among primitive peoples. But such actions are explicitly considered antisocial. Among monkeys and apes, on the other hand, comparable events create the social order. Marriage and the family are institutions too important in primitive life to be built on the fragile, shifting foundations of “love.” The family is the decisive economic institution of society. It is to the hunter and gatherer what the manor was to feudal Europe, or the corporate factory system is to capitalism: it is the productive organization. The primary division of labor in band economy is that between men and women. The men typically hunt and make weapons; the women gather wild plants and take care of the home and children. Marriage then is an alliance between the two essential social elements of production. These fac- 63 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 -tors complement each other — the Eskimos say: “A man is the hunter his wife makes him” — and they lock their possessors in enduring marital and familial relations. Many anthropologists have testified that in the minds of the natives the ability to cook and sew or to hunt are much more important than is beauty in a prospective spouse. The economic aspect of primitive marriage is responsible for many of its specific characteristics. For one thing, it is the normal adult state; one cannot economically afford to remain single. Hence the solitary subhuman primate male has no counterpart in the primitive band. The number of spouses is, however, limited by economic considerations among primitives. A male ape has as many mates as it can get and defend for itself; a man, no more than he can support. In fact, marriage is usually monogamous among hunters and gatherers, although there are normally no rules against polygamy. Culture, reflecting the compulsions of economics, thus dramatically altered human mating and differentiated the human family from its nearest primate analogues. “Peck orders” of dominance and sub ordination are characteristic of sub human primate social relations. Chronic competition for mates and perhaps food or other desirable objects establishes and maintains such hierarchies in every grouping of monkeys and apes. Repeated victory secures future privileges for a dominant animal; subordinates, by conditioned response, withdraw from or yield access to anything worth having. As Henry W. Nissen of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology has observed, “the bigger animal gets most of the food; the stronger male, most of the females.” In most species males tend to dominate over females, although in certain anthropoid apes, notably the chimpanzee and the gibbon, the reverse can occur. A difference in what has been called dominance quality seems to arise between primate suborders: in New World monkeys, dominance is “tenuous”; in Old World monkeys it may become “rough” and “brutal”; in apes, while clearly apparent, it is not so violently established or sustained. In all species, however, dominance affects a variety of social activities, including play, grooming and interhorde relations as well as sex and feeding. Compared both to subhuman primate antecedents and to subsequent cultural developments, dominance is at its nadir among primitive hunters and gatherers. Culture is the oldest “equalizer.” Among animals capable of symbolic communication, the weak can always collectively connive to overthrow the strong. On the other side, political and economic means of tyranny remain underdeveloped among hunters and gatherers. There is some evolutionary continuity in dominance behavior from primate to primitive; among hunters and gatherers leadership, such as it is, falls to men. Yet the supremacy of men in the band as a whole does not necessarily mean the abject subordination of women in the home. Once more the weapon of articulate speech must be reckoned with; the Danish anthropologist Kaj Birket-Smith observes: “A census would certainly show a higher percentage of henpecked husbands among the Eskimos than in a civilized country (except, perhaps, the U. S.!); most Eskimos have a deeply rooted respect for their wives’ tongues.” The men who lead the band are the wiser and older. They are not, however, respected for their ability to commandeer limited supplies of desired goods. On the contrary, generosity is a necessary qualification for prestige; the man who does most for the band, who sacrifices most, will be the one most loved and heeded by the rest. The test of status among hunters and gatherers is usually the reverse of that among monkeys and apes; 64 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 it is a matter of who gives away, not who takes away. A second qualification for leadership is knowledge — knowledge of ritual, tradition, game movements, terrain and the other things that control social life. This is why older men are respected. In a stable society they know more than the others, and to be “old-fashioned” is a great virtue. Knowledge of itself breeds little power. The headmen of a band can rule only by advice, not by fiat. As a Congo Pygmy leader bluntly remarked to an anthropologist, there is just no point in giving orders, “as nobody would heed them.” The titles of reference given leaders of hunting and gathering bands speak eloquently of their powers: the Shoshoni leader is “the talker,” and his Eskimo counterpart is “he who thinks.” In a primitive band each family is a more cohesive, stronger polity than the band as a whole, and each is free to manage its own affairs. Birket-Smith said: “There is no rank or class among the Eskimos, who must therefore renounce that satisfaction, which Thackeray calls the true pleasure of life, of associating with one’s inferiors.” The same may be said of other primitive societies. The leveling of the social order that accompanied the development of culture is related to the fundamental economic change from the selfish — literally rugged — individualism of the primate to co operative kin dealings. Monkeys and apes do not co-operate economically; monkeys cannot even be taught by humans to work together, although apes can. Nor is food ever shared except in the sense that a subordinate animal may be intimidated into handing it over to a dominant one. Among primitives, on the other hand, food sharing follows automatically from the division of labor by sex. More than that, the family economy is a pooling of goods and services — “communism in living” as a famous 19th-century anthropologist called it. Mutual aid is extended far beyond the family. It is a demand of group survival that the successful hunter be prepared to share his spoils with the unsuccessful. “The hunter kills, other people have,” say the Yukaghir of Siberia. In a band economy goods commonly pass from hand to hand, and the circulation gains momentum in proportion to the degree of kinship among households and the importance of the goods for survival. Food, the basic resource, must always be made available to others on pain of ostracism; the scarcer it becomes, the more readily it must be given away, and for nothing. In addition, food and other things are often shared to promote friendly relations, utilitarian considerations notwithstanding. There was a time in human affairs when the only right of property that brought honor was that of giving it away. The economic behavior of primitives obviously does not conform to the stereotype of “economic man” by which we organize and analyze our own economy. But it does conform to a realm of economics familiar to us, so familiar that no one bothers to talk about it and it lacks an economic science: kinship-friendship economics. There is much to be learned about primitive economics here, and it would not be a mere exercise in analogy, for our kin life is the evolutionary survival of relations that once encompassed society itself. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co- operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species.
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-origin-of-society-by-marshall.html http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-origin-of-society-by-marshall.html http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2014/05/our-mother-nature-antoinette-blackwell.html
"Blackwell chose to highlight balance and cooperation rather than struggle and savage rivalry. She criticized Darwin for basing his theory of evolution on "time-honored assumption that the male is the normal type of his species".[7] She wrote that Spencer scientifically subtracts from the female and Darwin as scientifically adds to the male.[6]" wikipedia
FIT in the sense of bodily fit for success in the struggle for existence ( the Darwinian term of art for longevity in an individual organism ) surviving , getting enough to eat , not getting eaten , not falling out of a tree or off a cliff , not freezing to death , not overheating to death BEFORE REPRODUCING , BEFORE BEING FERTILE, passing on one’s genes to next generations .
Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 Despite apparent superficial similarities between animal and human societies, the difference between them is profound: “Human social life is culturally, not biologically, determined.” The triumph of intellect over instinct — of altruism over individualism — was demonstrably basic to our evolution.
5. The Origin of Society1 This discussion of the early phases of human society considers events that occurred a million years ago, in places not specifically determined, under circumstances known only by informed speculation. It will therefore be an exercise in inference, not in observation. This means juxtaposing the social life of man’s closest relations — monkeys and apes — on the one side, with the organization of known primitive societies on the other. The gap that remains is then bridged by the mind. No living primate can be directly equated with man’s actual simian ancestor, and no contemporary primitive people is identical with our cultural ancestors. In both instances only generalized social traits — not particular, specialized ones — can be selected for historical comparison.
On the primate side one must rely primarily on the few field reports of free-ranging groups and on certain pioneer studies of captive animals. These have covered the anthropoid apes, especially the gibbon and the chimpanzee (which are more closely related to man) as well as the New and Old World monkeys. On the human side the nearest contemporary approximations to the original cultural condition are societies of hunters and gatherers, pre-agricultural peoples exacting a meager livelihood from wild food resources. This cultural order dominated the Old Stone Age (one million to 10,000 or 15,000 years ago).
Confidence in the comparative procedure which equates modern hunters and gatherers with the actual protagonists of the Stone Age is fortified by the remarkable social congruence observed among these peoples, even though they are historically as separated from one another as the Stone Age is distant from modern times. They include the Australian aborigines, the Bushmen of South Africa, the Andaman Islanders, the Shoshoni of the American Great Basin, the Eskimo, and Pygmy groups in Africa, Malaya and the Philip pines. Comparison of primate sociology with the findings of anthropological research immediately suggests a startling conclusion: The way people act, and probably have always acted, is not the expression of inherent human nature. There is a quantum difference, at points a complete opposition, between even the most rudimentary human society and the most advanced subhuman primate one. The discontinuity implies that the emergence of human society required some suppression, rather than a direct expression, of man’s primate nature. Human social life is culturally, not biologically, determined. This is not to slander the poor apes, to suggest that their social behavior is necessarily innate and unlearned. Yet it is clearly the product of their nature, of animal needs and reactions, physiological processes and psychological responses.
1 MARSHALL D. SAHLINS, “The Origin of Society,” in Scientific American, 203, No. 3 (1960), pp. 76-86. Reprinted with permission of the author and the publisher. Copyright © 1960 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved. Dr. Sahlins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. 59
Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 Their social life therefore varies directly with the organic constitution of the individual and the horde. In an unchanging environment the social characteristics of a given subhuman primate species are unchanging, unless or until the species is organically transformed. The same cannot be said about human social arrangements. We are all one species, but our social orders grow and diversify, even within a constant environment, and they do so quite apart from the minor biological (racial) differences that develop among different peoples.
This liberation of human society from direct biological control was its great evolutionary strength. Culture saved man in his earliest days, clothed him, fed him and comforted him. In these times it has become possible to pile form on form in great social edifices that undertake to secure the survival of millions of people. Yet the remarkable aspect of culture’s usurpation of the evolutionary task from biology was that in so doing it was forced to oppose man’s primate nature on many fronts and to subdue it. It is an extraordinary fact that primate urges often become not the secure foundation of human social life, but a source of weakness in it. The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality. The powerful social magnet of sex was the major impetus to subhuman primate sociability. This has long been recognized. But it was the British anatomist Sir Solly Zuckerman — whose attention to the matter developed from observation of the almost depraved behavior of baboons in zoos — who made sexuality the key issue of primate sociology. Subhuman primates are prepared to mate at all seasons, and although females show heightened receptivity midway through the menstrual cycle, they are often capable of sexual activity at other times.
Most significantly for the assessment of its historic role, year-round sex in higher primates is associated with year-round heterosexual social life. Among other mammals sexual activity, and likewise heterosexual society, is frequently confined to a comparatively brief breeding season. Of course other important social activities go on in the subhuman primate horde. Group existence confers advantages, such as defense against predation, which transcend the gratification of erotic urges. In the evolutionary perspective the intense, long-term sexuality of the primate individual is the historic complement of the advantages of horde life. Nor, in considering subhuman primate sexuality, should attention be confined to coitus. The evidence grows that certain Old World monkeys—the closely related baboon, rhesus monkey and Japanese monkey — do have seasonal declines in breeding without cessation of horde life. But sex enters into subhuman primate social relations in a variety of forms, and heterosexual copulation is only one of them. Sexual mounting is involved in the establishment of dominance, which grows out of chronic competition for food, mates, and other desirable objects. It is a common element of youthful play; indeed, the female higher primate is unique among female mammals in displaying the adult sexual pattern prior to puberty. The familiar primate trait of mutual grooming — the pulling and licking out of parasites and other objects from the coat of another animal — often appears to be a secondary sexual activity. Sex is more than a force of attraction between adult males and females; it also operates among the young and between individuals of the same sex. Promiscuity is not an accurate term for it; it is indiscriminate. And while we might deem some of the forms perversions, to a monkey or an ape they are all just sociable.
60 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65
Sex is not an unmitigated social blessing for primates. Competition over partners, for example, can lead to vicious, even fatal, strife. It was this side of primate sexuality that forced early culture to curb and repress it. The emerging human primate, in a life-and-death economic struggle with nature, could not afford the luxury of a social struggle. Co-operation, not competition, was essential. Culture thus brought primate sexuality under control. More than that, sex was made subject to regulations, such as the incest tabu, which effectively enlisted it in the service of co-operative kin relations. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex — in the interest of the economic adaptation of the group.
The evolution of the physiology of sex itself provided a basis for the cultural reorganization of social life. As Frank Beach of Yale University has pointed out, a progressive emancipation of sexuality from hormonal control runs through the primate order. This trend culminates in mankind, among whom sex is controlled more by the intellect — the cerebral cortex — than by glands. Thus it becomes possible to regulate sex by moral rules; to subordinate it to higher, collective ends. The consequent repression of primate sexuality in primitive as well as more developed societies has taken striking forms. In every human society sex is hedged by tabus: on time, place (the human animal alone demands privacy), on the sex and age of possible partners, on reference to sex in certain social contexts, on exposing the genitalia (particularly for females), on cohabitation during culturally important activities which range in different societies from war and ceremony to brewing beer. By way of an aside, it is notable that the repression of sex in favor of other ends is a battle which, while won for the spe- -cies, is still joined in every individual to this day.
(CHARLES BROWN: In other words, humans still have hetero-sexual imstinct )
In Sigmund Freud’s famous allegory, the conflict between the self-seeking, sexually inclined id and the socially conscious superego re-enacts the development of culture that occurred in the remote past. The design of many of these tabus is obvious: the disconcerting fascination of sex and its potentially disruptive consequences had to be eliminated from vital social activities. Thus the incest tabu is a guardian of harmony and solidarity within the family — a critical matter for hunters and gatherers, for among them the family is the fundamental economic as well as social group. At the same time, the injunction on sexual relations and marriage among close relatives necessarily forces different families into alliance and thus extends kinship and mutual aid.
It has been said that kinship, with its economic aspect of co-operation, became the plan for primitive human society. “Kinship” here means a cultural form, not a biological fact. Apes are of course genetically related to each other. But apes do not and cannot name and distinguish kinsmen, and they do not use kinship as a symbolic organization of behavior. On the other hand, cultural kinship has virtually nothing to do with biological connection. No one, for example, can be absolutely certain who his father is in a genetic sense, but in all human societies fatherhood is a fundamental social status. Almost all societies adhere, implicitly or explicitly, to the dictum of the Napoleonic code in this respect: the father of the child is the husband of the mother.
( CB: But often mothers brother acts as father)
Many hunters and gatherers carry kinship to an extreme that is curious to us. By a device technically known as classificatory kinship they ignore genealogical differences between collateral and lineal kin at certain points, lumping them terminologically and in social be- 61 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 -havior. Thus my father’s brother may be “father” to me, and I act accordingly
(CB: So , it does have to do with buology , but more circuitous biological connection)
. Close kinship may be extended indefinitely by the same logic: My father’s brother’s son is my “brother,” my grand father’s brother is my “grandfather,” his son is my “father,” his son my “brother,” and so on. As one observer remarked of the Australian aborigines: “It is impossible for an Australian native to have anything whatever to do with anyone who is not his relative, of one kind or another, near or distant.” The subhuman primate horde varies in size among different species, ranging from groups in the hundreds among certain Old World monkeys to the much smaller groups, often smaller than 10, characteristic of anthropoid apes. The horde may stay together all the time, or it may scatter during daytime feeding into packs of various sorts — mate groups of males and females, females with young, males alone — and come together again at night resting places. Monkeys seem inclined to scatter in this way more than apes. There are typically more adult females than adult males within the hordes sometimes, as in the case of the howler monkey, three times as many. This may be in part due to a faster maturation rate for females. It may also reflect the elimination of some males in the course of competition for mates. These males are not necessarily killed. They may lead a solitary life outside or on the fringes of the horde, attempting all the while to attach themselves to some group and acquire sexual partners. The progressive emancipation of sex from hormonal control in the primate order that was noted by Beach seems to be paralleled by a progressive development from promiscuous mating to the formation of exclusive, permanent heterosexual partnerships between specific animals. Among certain New World monkeys, females with their young corn- -prise a separate pack within the horde, and only when a female is in heat does she forsake this group for males. She does not become attached to a specific male, but, wearing them out in turn. goes from one to another. The Old World rhesus horde and mate relations are similar except that a receptive female is taken over primarily by dominant males, a step in the direction of exclusiveness. In the anthropoid gibbon the trend toward exclusiveness is fully developed: the entire horde is typically composed of an adult male, a permanent female consort and their young. As yet it is not safe to state unequivocally that such progressive change runs through the entire primate order. It does appear that the higher subhuman primates presage the human family more than do the lower. The primate horde is practically a closed social group. Each horde has a territory, and local groups of most species defend their ground (or trees) against encroachment by others of their kind. The typical relation between adjacent hordes is that of enmity, especially, it seems, if food is short. Their borders are points of social deflection, and contact between neighbors is often marked by belligerent vocal cries, if it does not erupt into fatal violence. Territorial relations among neighboring human hunting-and-gathering bands (a term used technically to refer to the cohesive local group) offer an instructive contrast. The band territory is never exclusive. Individuals and families may shift from group to group, especially in those habitats where food resources fluctuate from year to year and from place to place. In addition, a great deal of interband hospitality and visiting is undertaken for purely social and ceremonial reasons. Although bands remain autonomous politically, a general notion of tribalism, based on similarity in lan- 62 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 -guage and custom and on social collaboration, develops among neighboring groups. These tendencies are powerfully reinforced by kinship and the cultural regulation of sex and marriage. Among all modern survivors of the Stone Age, marriage with close relatives is forbidden, while marriage outside the band is at least preferred and sometimes morally prescribed. The kin ties thereby created become social pathways of mutual aid and solidarity connecting band to band. It does not seem unwarranted to assert that the human capacity to extend kinship was a necessary social condition for the deployment of early man over the great expanses of the planet. Another implication of interband kinship deserves emphasis: Warfare is limited among hunters and gatherers. Indeed, many are reported to find the idea of war incomprehensible. A massive military effort would be difficult to sustain for technical and logistic reasons. But war is even further inhibited by the spread of a social relation — kinship — which in primitive society is often a synonym for “peace.” Thomas Hobbes’s famous fantasy of a war of “all against all” in the natural state could not be further from the truth. War increases in intensity, bloodiness, duration and significance for social survival through the evolution of culture, reaching its culmination in modern civilization. Paradoxically the cruel belligerence that is popularly considered the epitome of human nature reaches its zenith in the human condition most removed from the pristine. By contrast, it has been remarked of the Bushmen that “it is not in their nature to fight.” The only permanent organization within the band is the family, and the band is a grouping of related families, on the average 20 to 50 people altogether. Bands lack true government and law; the rules of good order are synonymous with customs of proper behavior toward kinsmen. In certain ways this system of etiquette is even more effective than law. A breach of etiquette cannot go undetected, and punishment in the form of avoidance, gossip and ridicule follows hard upon offense. The primitive human family, unlike the subhuman primate mate group, is not based simply on sexual attraction. Sex is easily available in many band societies, both before and outside marriage, but this alone does not necessarily create or destroy the family. The incest tabu itself implies that the human family cannot be the social outcome of erotic urges. Moreover, sexual rights to a wife may even be waived in the interest of securing friendly relations with other men, as in the famous Eskimo custom of wife lending. This, incidentally, is only one cultural device among many for enlisting marriage and sex in the creation of wide social alliance. In remarkable contrast to subhuman primate unions, often created and maintained in violence, marriage is in band society a means of securing peace. Adultery and quarrels over women are not unknown among primitive peoples. But such actions are explicitly considered antisocial. Among monkeys and apes, on the other hand, comparable events create the social order. Marriage and the family are institutions too important in primitive life to be built on the fragile, shifting foundations of “love.” The family is the decisive economic institution of society. It is to the hunter and gatherer what the manor was to feudal Europe, or the corporate factory system is to capitalism: it is the productive organization. The primary division of labor in band economy is that between men and women. The men typically hunt and make weapons; the women gather wild plants and take care of the home and children. Marriage then is an alliance between the two essential social elements of production. These fac- 63 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 -tors complement each other — the Eskimos say: “A man is the hunter his wife makes him” — and they lock their possessors in enduring marital and familial relations. Many anthropologists have testified that in the minds of the natives the ability to cook and sew or to hunt are much more important than is beauty in a prospective spouse. The economic aspect of primitive marriage is responsible for many of its specific characteristics. For one thing, it is the normal adult state; one cannot economically afford to remain single. Hence the solitary subhuman primate male has no counterpart in the primitive band. The number of spouses is, however, limited by economic considerations among primitives. A male ape has as many mates as it can get and defend for itself; a man, no more than he can support. In fact, marriage is usually monogamous among hunters and gatherers, although there are normally no rules against polygamy. Culture, reflecting the compulsions of economics, thus dramatically altered human mating and differentiated the human family from its nearest primate analogues. “Peck orders” of dominance and sub ordination are characteristic of sub human primate social relations. Chronic competition for mates and perhaps food or other desirable objects establishes and maintains such hierarchies in every grouping of monkeys and apes. Repeated victory secures future privileges for a dominant animal; subordinates, by conditioned response, withdraw from or yield access to anything worth having. As Henry W. Nissen of the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology has observed, “the bigger animal gets most of the food; the stronger male, most of the females.” In most species males tend to dominate over females, although in certain anthropoid apes, notably the chimpanzee and the gibbon, the reverse can occur. A difference in what has been called dominance quality seems to arise between primate suborders: in New World monkeys, dominance is “tenuous”; in Old World monkeys it may become “rough” and “brutal”; in apes, while clearly apparent, it is not so violently established or sustained. In all species, however, dominance affects a variety of social activities, including play, grooming and interhorde relations as well as sex and feeding. Compared both to subhuman primate antecedents and to subsequent cultural developments, dominance is at its nadir among primitive hunters and gatherers. Culture is the oldest “equalizer.” Among animals capable of symbolic communication, the weak can always collectively connive to overthrow the strong. On the other side, political and economic means of tyranny remain underdeveloped among hunters and gatherers. There is some evolutionary continuity in dominance behavior from primate to primitive; among hunters and gatherers leadership, such as it is, falls to men. Yet the supremacy of men in the band as a whole does not necessarily mean the abject subordination of women in the home. Once more the weapon of articulate speech must be reckoned with; the Danish anthropologist Kaj Birket-Smith observes: “A census would certainly show a higher percentage of henpecked husbands among the Eskimos than in a civilized country (except, perhaps, the U. S.!); most Eskimos have a deeply rooted respect for their wives’ tongues.” The men who lead the band are the wiser and older. They are not, however, respected for their ability to commandeer limited supplies of desired goods. On the contrary, generosity is a necessary qualification for prestige; the man who does most for the band, who sacrifices most, will be the one most loved and heeded by the rest. The test of status among hunters and gatherers is usually the reverse of that among monkeys and apes; 64 Marshall D Sahlins, 1960, The Origin of Society. In (ed) Peter B Hammond, Physical Anthropology and Archaeology (1964), The Macmillan Company, New York, USA. pp 59-65 it is a matter of who gives away, not who takes away. A second qualification for leadership is knowledge — knowledge of ritual, tradition, game movements, terrain and the other things that control social life. This is why older men are respected. In a stable society they know more than the others, and to be “old-fashioned” is a great virtue. Knowledge of itself breeds little power. The headmen of a band can rule only by advice, not by fiat. As a Congo Pygmy leader bluntly remarked to an anthropologist, there is just no point in giving orders, “as nobody would heed them.” The titles of reference given leaders of hunting and gathering bands speak eloquently of their powers: the Shoshoni leader is “the talker,” and his Eskimo counterpart is “he who thinks.” In a primitive band each family is a more cohesive, stronger polity than the band as a whole, and each is free to manage its own affairs. Birket-Smith said: “There is no rank or class among the Eskimos, who must therefore renounce that satisfaction, which Thackeray calls the true pleasure of life, of associating with one’s inferiors.” The same may be said of other primitive societies. The leveling of the social order that accompanied the development of culture is related to the fundamental economic change from the selfish — literally rugged — individualism of the primate to co operative kin dealings. Monkeys and apes do not co-operate economically; monkeys cannot even be taught by humans to work together, although apes can. Nor is food ever shared except in the sense that a subordinate animal may be intimidated into handing it over to a dominant one. Among primitives, on the other hand, food sharing follows automatically from the division of labor by sex. More than that, the family economy is a pooling of goods and services — “communism in living” as a famous 19th-century anthropologist called it. Mutual aid is extended far beyond the family. It is a demand of group survival that the successful hunter be prepared to share his spoils with the unsuccessful. “The hunter kills, other people have,” say the Yukaghir of Siberia. In a band economy goods commonly pass from hand to hand, and the circulation gains momentum in proportion to the degree of kinship among households and the importance of the goods for survival. Food, the basic resource, must always be made available to others on pain of ostracism; the scarcer it becomes, the more readily it must be given away, and for nothing. In addition, food and other things are often shared to promote friendly relations, utilitarian considerations notwithstanding. There was a time in human affairs when the only right of property that brought honor was that of giving it away. The economic behavior of primitives obviously does not conform to the stereotype of “economic man” by which we organize and analyze our own economy. But it does conform to a realm of economics familiar to us, so familiar that no one bothers to talk about it and it lacks an economic science: kinship-friendship economics. There is much to be learned about primitive economics here, and it would not be a mere exercise in analogy, for our kin life is the evolutionary survival of relations that once encompassed society itself. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co- operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species.
Human Origin in the Stone Age
I need to do an “Anti-Duhring “ on this
https://evolutionaryanthropology.quora.com/https-www-quora-com-Why-is-the-cultural-explanation-on-the-origins-of-humankind-not-convincing-answer-Quintin-Gumucio?ch=17&oid=64899700&share=0fbfccd2&srid=6MG9J&target_type=post
“If by cultural you mean the explanation(s) given by Anthropology they are not as much unconvincing as they are tentative and open to various theories and interpretations.”
CB: Actually there is substantial agreement among anthropologists of human origins in Africa from 2.5 million to 200,000 years ago
I hone it down to culture giving the human genus a population explosion of genus homo compared with the allopatric , fellow primate and mammal and vertebrate species in Africa, such that Genus Homo expanded into Eurasia , and then the Western Hemisphere ( while remaining in , not vacating Africa or Asia ).
And: http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/decisive-battle-between-early-culture.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/only-humans-have-symbolic-communication.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/05/culturally-inherited-adaptations-give.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2020/12/differentia-specifica-of-human-species.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/01/let-beauties-beautify-you-you-beast.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/01/remix-of-blackwell-concrete-abstract.html
That follows from the complex nature of a process that took millions of years and for which the empirical basis is scattered and scarce. This epistemological sense of uncertainty depends on how the various strands of research approach and manage a plethora of concepts such as: - broad-spectrum and Neolithic revolutions - competitive inclusion - convergent evolution - descent with modification, natural selection
CB : with humans Sexual Selection was probably more important in making bigger and bigger brains
- molecular homologies - hunting and gathering, food production, the use of fire.
CB: 2.5 million years of the Old Stone Age is direct appropriation of wild food, _not_planting seeds or husbanding animals - inclusive and individual fitness. - knuckle-walking, bipedalism, orthograde posture - language acquisition, symbolism.
CB: This should be # 1; it is the Differentia specifica of Genus Homo - nomadism, sedentism
CB:Stone Age , 2.5 million years long is very nomadic - Oldovan and Acheulian tools, microliths
CB: stone tools MADE BY DESIGN, IN STYLES ; Oldivan and Acheulian are styles .
- Paleolithic and Mesolithic - reproductive productivity, estrus, uterine groups, microband
CB: Genus homo population explodes relative to other African primates , mammals , ; thus having the highest Darwinian fitness of these species closely related on the Phylogenetic, Tree of Life
Etc. etc. Thus there is not currently one single totally convincing explanation of the origins of humankind.
CB: Yes there is . The beginning of the Stone Age because the tools made by design mean the tool makers had symbolic communication, language and culture , the Differentia specifica of the human genus .
Tony : "All the same there is a widespread consensus that this kind of analytic, crticial and naturalistic evolutionary perspective is the only valid one for modern science.”
The linguistic evidence also strongly supports the ‘out of Africa’ hypothesis [See here Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen]. Indeed, in many cases the linguistic evidence is more definitive than the genetic….as language doesn’t have sex…and so is less prone to mixing."
CB: Thanks I didn’t know that . However , the mitochondrial evidence doesn’t mix sexes , as you said . Also, how does Greenberg get linguistic evidence from 200,000 years ago ??! Agree, with out of Africa specifically Darwinist evolutionism / critiqued by Blackwell/ human natural history
Bottomline is that this estimates the time and place of human origin. IMPORTANTLY, FOSSIL EVIDENCE IN AFRICA NOW CORROBORATES THE DNA EVIDENCE . About 200,000 years ago in East Africa https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0903207106
Tony: "Actually, no. The DNA evidence used to establish the Out of Africa hypothesis (the so-called ‘Eve’ hypothesis) uses *both* mitochondrial DNA…*and* nuclear sex-chromosome (Y) DNA. In fact, I’ve had my own DNA checked in this way (by the National Geographic Genome Project…costs about $100 per test; so doing both maternal and paternal tests cost approx. $200…or at least that was the cost from over a decade ago). By the way, a fine and fairly concise and accessible discussion of the linguistic argument is to be found in Merritt Ruhlen’s, ‘The Origin of Language’; overall a good primer of comparative and historical linguistics. T
Thanks, Tony, hadn’t heard that before Although ,The dna evidence is Mitochondria dna which is only through one sex, the mother ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve (also mt-Eve, mt-MRCA) is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all living humans. In other words, she is defined as the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman. In terms of mitochondrial haplogroups, the mt-MRCA is situated at the divergence of macro-haplogroup L into L0 and L1–6. As of 2013, estimates on the age of this split ranged at around 155,000 years ago,[note 3] consistent with a date later than the speciation of Homo sapiens but earlier than the recent out-of-Africa dispersal.[4][1][5] The male analog to the "Mitochondrial Eve" is the "Y-chromosomal Adam" (or Y-MRCA), the individual from whom all living humans are patrilineallydescended. As the identity of both matrilineal and patrilineal MRCAs is dependent on genealogical history (pedigree collapse), they need not have lived at the same time. As of 2013, estimates for the age Y-MRCA are subject to substantial uncertainty, with a wide range of times from 180,000 to 580,000 years ago[6][7][8] (with an estimated age of between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the estimate for mt-MRCA.).[2][9] The name "Mitochondrial Eve" alludes to the biblical Eve, which has led to repeated misrepresentations or misconceptions in journalistic accounts on the topic. Popular science presentations of the topic usually point out such possible misconceptions by emphasizing the fact that the position of mt-MRCA is neither fixed in time (as the position of mt-MRCA moves forward in time as mitochondrial DNA(mtDNA) lineages become extinct), nor does it refer to a "first woman", nor the only living female of her time, nor the first member of a "new species".[note 4]
Tony:Historical linguistics is a deep, complex and, of course, fascinating subject. In truth, however, the origins of human language can be pushed back very, very far. I don’t think anyone can claim to set precise dates on any of it, but the idea – according to Ruhlen – is that there is good evidence to suggest a more or less single origin (though this might be analogous to the genetic ‘Eve’ paradox itself) for all human language from which all other languages have evolved by common descent. The reconstruction of ‘proto’ languages of Dene-Caucasian and Eurasiatic , or at least some few foundational words of such, have already been proffered. Indeed, it has been suggested that the ‘click’ languages the central African San peoples et al might, in fact, represent just such an echo of this foundational proto-language (though again, like the mitochondrial genetic argument, this would likely represent a ‘latest common ancestor’ of all present-day language)
Charles :Yes My hypothesis is that there is symbolic communication at homo habilis and the origin of the Stone Age, 2.5 million years ago ; Not articulate speech but singing , whistling , clicking . music with instruments ( among first tools) , dance, drawing ; because it defines us, genus Homo http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/09/origin-of-language-human-dancer_27.html http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/only-humans-have-symbolic-communication.html http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/several-hypotheses-on-human-evolution.html Culture -custom is symbolically constituted behavior : http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/anthropological-definition-of-culture.html
C JACK:"You seemed to have missed the most obvious means to communicate--gesture. Gesture is still integrated with speech in our communicative routines, and for sighted people with hearing, acquiring and using speech to communicate is actually tri-modally audio-visual-kinestethic. "
Charles Brown says Dance is gesture , whole body gesture , includes hand sign language .
C JACK" says "What does it represent? What does it communicate? Bees dance to communicate. I don't know humans that do. Gestural routines for communicating would mostly incorporate the upper body, especially arms and hands. Speaking also creates gestures visible on the face. These are dynamic and integrated with vocal speech now. "
Charles Brown says ,Lower body can make signs as much as lower body . Also lower body and lower body in combinations can make words just like fingers do in sign language . Whole body can be seen further away than than fingers . A language/words / symbolic signs can be made from anything by conventionally establishing binary oppositions as with Morse Code . A left leg up is the opposite of right leg up. Binary oppositions are the cells of language. Computer language cell is the “on\off” binary opposition. See structural linguistics and anthropology on binary oppositions.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/binary-opposition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition
Then there’s music , sound made with instruments or voice . As it’s sound , it is obviously a candidate for the language system from which speech ( sound symbols ) derives .
Different musical notes and rhythms ( like indigenous drummers) can be made into a system of binary oppositions which are the cells of symbolic communication systems .
Then there are smoke signals .
Abstract Since the discovery of the first man-ape, many have assumed that the earliest humans were hunters and that this was associated with a “killer instinct.” The myth of “man the hunter” was repeated in the 1960s in anthropology texts and popular literature. In the 1970s it was adopted by sociobiologists to explain human nature. “Man the hunter” is used to explain not only human biology but also human morality. The morals described, however, often reflect ancient beliefs and appear to be new ways of justifying old morality codes. The newest version of this myth is presented in a recent book, Demonic Males. I will discuss various accounts of this myth and the evidence used to justify them, and will specifically critique the arguments presented in Demonic Males. Citing Literature
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251205750_Donna_L_Hart_Robert_W_Sussman_Man_the_hunted_primates_predators_and_human_evolution_expanded_edition https://phys.org/news/2008-08-controversial-theory.html Despite popular theories to the contrary, early humans evolved not as aggressive hunters, but as prey of many predators. "Humans are no more born to be hunters than to be gardeners," argues Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, in the newly-updated version of the controversial book "Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution." The soft cover book, released in July by Westview Press, includes a new chapter aimed at quieting critics and responding to new evidence that has appeared since the book's original publication in 2005. In the original volume, Sussman poses a new theory, based on the fossil record and living primate species, that primates have been prey for millions of years, a fact that greatly influenced the evolution of early man. The book won the 2006 W.W. Howells Award for the best book in biological anthropology written for a wide audience. Both versions are co-authored by Donna L. Hart, Ph.D., a member of the faculty of Pierre Laclede Honors College and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The controversial ideas proposed by the original "Man the Hunted" raised many eyebrows in the academic community and beyond. "We wrote this update to answer some of the criticisms and to provide more evidence for our view of early man as prey," Sussman says. The book's new chapter addresses such topics as evidence of additional predators found in the fossil record since the first book's publication, evidence of predation by eagles, cannibalism, cut and tooth marks, scavenging and cooperation. "One major alternative theory that has gained more attention since we wrote the original book is that early man was not a hunter, but was a scavenger instead," Sussman says. "We have found that while early man may have done some scavenging, it was opportunistic. Very little of early human's diet came from meat." Sussman and Hart argue that early man did not have the capacity to detoxify rotting meat nor the ability to chase off competing animal scavengers. "Not one of the more than 250 living primate species is a scavenger," says Sussman. "They are not scavengers because they avoid decomposing food." Sussman and Hart also address the topic of cannibalism, which they claim is "beyond rare," and atypical, strange human behavior. "It just hardly ever happens," Sussman says. The philosophical question of how a new scientific paradigm gets accepted is also discussed. "Once a paradigm becomes established within a scientific community, most practitioners become technicians working within the parameters of the theory but rarely questioning the validity of the theory itself," Sussman writes. Changing the currently popular Man the Hunter theory is difficult for that reason. Though Sussman realizes there will still be critics of the Man the Hunted theory, he believes the book's new version will help to quiet some of that. Early man may have hunted, but was not a hunter. He may have scavenged, but was not a scavenger. Humans evolved mainly as a plant-eating species that ate some animal protein collected opportunistically, Sussman and Hart claim. "We are not saying that our theory is absolutely correct and will never be disproven," he says "But we are saying that the evidence we have today best fits the theory of Man the Hunted than of Man the Hunter." Background on the original 'Man the Hunted.' Sussman's book, "Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution," poses a new theory, based on the fossil record and living primate species, that primates have been prey for millions of years, a fact that greatly influenced the evolution of early man. He co-authored the book with Donna L. Hart, Ph.D., a member of the faculty of Pierre Laclede Honors College and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The book is scheduled to be released in late February. Our intelligence, cooperation and many other features we have as modern humans developed from our attempts to out-smart the predator, says Sussman. Since the 1924 discovery of the first early humans, australopithicenes, which lived from seven million years ago to two million years ago, many scientists theorized that those early human ancestors were hunters and possessed a killer instinct. Through his research and writing, Sussman has worked for years to debunk that theory. An expert in the ecology and social structure of primates, Sussman does extensive fieldwork in primate behavior and ecology in Costa Rica, Guyana, Madagascar and Mauritius. He is the author and editor of several books, including "The Origins and Nature of Sociality," "Primate Ecology and Social Structure," and "The Biological Basis of Human Behavior: A Critical Review." The idea of "Man the Hunter" is the generally accepted paradigm of human evolution, says Sussman, who served as past editor of American Anthropologist and is currently editor of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology. "It developed from a basic Judeo-Christian ideology of man being inherently evil, aggressive and a natural killer. In fact, when you really examine the fossil and living non-human primate evidence, that is just not the case." And examine the evidence they did. Sussman and Hart's research is based on studying the fossil evidence dating back nearly seven million years. "Most theories on Man the Hunter fail to incorporate this key fossil evidence," Sussman says. "We wanted evidence, not just theory. We thoroughly examined literature available on the skulls, bones, footprints and on environmental evidence, both of our hominid ancestors and the predators that coexisted with them." Since the process of human evolution is so long and varied, Sussman and Hart decided to focus their research on one specific species, Australopithecus afarensis, which lived between five million and two and a half million years ago and is one of the better known early human species. Most paleontologists agree that Australopithecus afarensis is the common link between fossils that came before and those that came after. It shares dental, cranial and skeletal traits with both. It's also a very well-represented species in the fossil record. "Australopithecus afarensis was probably quite strong, like a small ape," Sussman says. Adults ranged from around 3 to 5 feet and they weighed 60-100 pounds. They were basically smallish bipedal primates. Their teeth were relatively small, very much like modern humans, and they were fruit and nut eaters. But what Sussman and Hart discovered is that Australopithecus afarensis was not dentally pre-adapted to eat meat. "It didn't have the sharp shearing blades necessary to retain and cut such foods," Sussman says. "These early humans simply couldn't eat meat. If they couldn't eat meat, why would they hunt?" It was not possible for early humans to consume a large amount of meat until fire was controlled and cooking was possible. Sussman points out that the first tools didn't appear until two million years ago. And there wasn't good evidence of fire until after 800,000 years ago. "In fact, some archaeologists and paleontologists don't think we had a modern, systematic method of hunting until as recently as 60,000 years ago," he says. "Furthermore, Australopithecus afarensis was an edge species," adds Sussman. They could live in the trees and on the ground and could take advantage of both. "Primates that are edge species, even today, are basically prey species, not predators," Sussman argues. The predators living at the same time as Australopithecus afarensis were huge and there were 10 times as many as today. There were hyenas as big as bears, as well as saber-toothed cats and many other mega-sized carnivores, reptiles and raptors. Australopithecus afarensis didn't have tools, didn't have big teeth and was three feet tall. He was using his brain, his agility and his social skills to get away from these predators. "He wasn't hunting them," says Sussman. "He was avoiding them at all costs." Approximately 6 percent to 10 percent of early humans were preyed upon according to evidence that includes teeth marks on bones, talon marks on skulls and holes in a fossil cranium into which sabertooth cat fangs fit, says Sussman. The predation rate on savannah antelope and certain ground-living monkeys today is around 6 percent to 10 percent as well. Sussman and Hart provide evidence that many of our modern human traits, including those of cooperation and socialization, developed as a result of being a prey species and the early human's ability to out-smart the predators. These traits did not result from trying to hunt for prey or kill our competitors, says Sussman. "One of the main defenses against predators by animals without physical defenses is living in groups," says Sussman. "In fact, all diurnal primates (those active during the day) live in permanent social groups. Most ecologists agree that predation pressure is one of the major adaptive reasons for this group-living. In this way there are more eyes and ears to locate the predators and more individuals to mob them if attacked or to confuse them by scattering. There are a number of reasons that living in groups is beneficial for animals that otherwise would be very prone to being preyed upon." Source: Washington University in St. Louis Feedback to editors Related Deja vu all over again? Human genome project has lessons to learn, suggests anthropologist Feb 15, 2013 Modern life's pressures may be hastening human evolution Apr 13, 2009 Recommended Load comments (0) How giant viruses mature: New evidence from the medusavirus provides insight 1 hour ago 5,000-year population history of Xinjiang brought to light in new ancient DNA study 1 hour ago New human reference genome opens unexplored regions 1 hour ago Study shows gaps in how STEM organizations collect demographic information 1 hour ago Heat and drought slow down tropical tree growth 2 hours ago Blue Origin launches its fourth crew to final frontier 3 hours ago How is haze formed? Soot as a surprising source of haze-building hydroxyl radicals 3 hours ago Easy test can see if breeding bulls have the right stuff 3 hours ago Spiderweb galaxy field: Feasting black holes caught in galactic spiderweb 3 hours ago Structure of a bacterial 'drug pump' reveals new way to counter hospital-borne infection 3 hours ago Quantum 'shock absorbers' allow perovskite to exhibit superfluorescence at room temperature 3 hours ago GET IN TOUCH Contact us OUR PRODUCTS Tech Xplore Medical Xpress Science X OTHER PUBLICATIONS Android app iOS app RSS feeds EXTRAS Help FAQ LEGAL About Terms of use Privacy policy Science X Account Sponsored Account Newsletter Archive © Phys.org 2003 - 2022 powered by Science X Network Sent from my iPhone On Mar 31, 2022, at 12:57 PM, Charles Brown wrote:
Origin of language : Human the Dancer From: Charles Brown Date: March 15, 2014 at 1:41:38 PM EDT
Origin of language :Human the Dancer
To: rwsussma@artsci.wustl.edu Subject: Man the Dancer Dear Professor Sussman,
Man the Dancer by the late Professor Sussman
I have just come across your book _Man the Hunted_ as I am teaching anthropology in Wayne County Community College District based on my graduate work forty years ago. I am so gratified to have your thesis thoroughly debunking the Man the Hunter and savage myth.
Before seeing your section on Man the Dancer, I had been hypothesizing , seriously, that language most like originated as dance, or body language for the reason that, as you know better than I, vision was long the primary sense of primates before the genus homo. Why would our symboling faculty arise first using the sense of hearing instead of sight ?
So, before the vocal organs, humans most likely had a whole alphabet based in not only hand made symbols , but motions from every part of the body, certainly including legs, many postures, i.e. HuMan the Dancer, is a likely candidate for the original human especially given language and culture define our species origin. As to language in the medium of sound, early "music" was most likely invented before the vocal chords evolved, don't you think ? tap tap tap tappity tappity tappity, whistle whistle whostle, using dozens of original instruments,sound makers. All they needed was the concept of symbol as an arbitrary representation and binary opposition.
I think human society originates in dancing and singing, and I'm not kidding. Especially, since differential fertility is more important than differential mortality in determining fitness. Thanks for your work. Charles Brown ba '72 ma '75 ethnology University of Michigan Detroit, Michigan
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 30, 2022, at 8:01 PM, Charles Brown wrote:
Yes
My hypothesis is that there is symbolic communication at homo habilis and the origin of the Stone Age, 2.5 million years ago ; Not articulate speech but singing , whistling , clicking . music with instruments ( among first tools) , dance, drawing ; because it defines us, genus Homo
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/09/origin-of-language-human-dancer_27.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/only-humans-have-symbolic-communication.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/several-hypotheses-on-human-evolution.html
Culture -custom is symbolically constituted behavior :
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/anthropological-definition-of-culture.html
On Mar 30, 2022, at 2:59 PM, Tony Black wrote:
Historical linguistics is a deep, complex and, of course, fascinating subject. In truth, however, the origins of human language can be pushed back very, very far. I don’t think anyone can claim to set precise dates on any of it, but the idea – according to Ruhlen – is that there is good evidence to suggest a more or less single origin (though this might be analogous to the genetic ‘Eve’ paradox itself) for all human language from which all other languages have evolved by common descent. The reconstruction of ‘proto’ languages of Dene-Caucasian and Eurasiatic , or at least some few foundational words of such, have already been proffered.
Indeed, it has been suggested that the ‘click’ languages the central African San peoples et al might, in fact, represent just such an echo of this foundational proto-language (though again, like the mitochondrial genetic argument, this would likely represent a ‘latest common ancestor’ of all present-day language)
T
From: a-list-request@lists.riseup.net On Behalf Of Charles Brown (via a-list Mailing List)
Sent: March 30, 2022 1:23 PM
To: Tony Black
Cc: a-list ; marxism-thaxis@lists.riseup.net
Subject: Re: [a-list] Human origin
Thanks I didn’t know that . However , the mitochondrial evidence doesn’t mix sexes , as you said .
Also, how does Greenberg get linguistic evidence from 200,000 years ago ??!
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 30, 2022, at 12:53 PM, Tony Black wrote:
Actually, no. The DNA evidence used to establish the Out of Africa hypothesis (the so-called ‘Eve’ hypothesis) uses *both* mitochondrial DNA…*and* nuclear sex-chromosome (Y) DNA. In fact, I’ve had my own DNA checked in this way (by the National Geographic Genome Project…costs about $100 per test; so doing both maternal and paternal tests cost approx. $200…or at least that was the cost from over a decade ago).
By the way, a fine and fairly concise and accessible discussion of the linguistic argument is to be found in Merritt Ruhlen’s, ‘The Origin of Language’; overall a good primer of comparative and historical linguistics.
T
From: Charles Brown
Sent: March 30, 2022 11:36 AM
To: Tony Black ; a-list ; marxism-thaxis@lists.riseup.net
Subject: Re: [a-list] Human origin
Thanks, Tony, hadn’t heard that before
Although ,The dna evidence is Mitochondria dna which is only through one sex, the mother ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve (also mt-Eve, mt-MRCA) is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all living humans. In other words, she is defined as the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman.
In terms of mitochondrial haplogroups, the mt-MRCA is situated at the divergence of macro-haplogroup L into L0 and L1–6. As of 2013, estimates on the age of this split ranged at around 155,000 years ago,[note 3] consistent with a date later than the speciation of Homo sapiens but earlier than the recent out-of-Africa dispersal.[4][1][5]
The male analog to the "Mitochondrial Eve" is the "Y-chromosomal Adam" (or Y-MRCA), the individual from whom all living humans are patrilineallydescended. As the identity of both matrilineal and patrilineal MRCAs is dependent on genealogical history (pedigree collapse), they need not have lived at the same time. As of 2013, estimates for the age Y-MRCA are subject to substantial uncertainty, with a wide range of times from 180,000 to 580,000 years ago[6][7][8] (with an estimated age of between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the estimate for mt-MRCA.).[2][9]
The name "Mitochondrial Eve" alludes to the biblical Eve, which has led to repeated misrepresentations or misconceptions in journalistic accounts on the topic. Popular science presentations of the topic usually point out such possible misconceptions by emphasizing the fact that the position of mt-MRCA is neither fixed in time (as the position of mt-MRCA moves forward in time as mitochondrial DNA(mtDNA) lineages become extinct), nor does it refer to a "first woman", nor the only living female of her time, nor the first member of a "new species".[note 4]
History
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 29, 2022, at 7:57 PM, Tony Black wrote:
The linguistic evidence also strongly supports the ‘out of Africa’ hypothesis [See here Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen]. Indeed, in many cases the linguistic evidence is more definitive than the genetic….as language doesn’t have sex…and so is less prone to mixing.
T
From: a-list-request@lists.riseup.net On Behalf Of Charles Brown (via a-list Mailing List)
Sent: March 29, 2022 6:18 PM
To: marxism-thaxis@lists.riseup.net; a-list
Subject: [a-list] Human origin
I need to do an “Anti-Duhring “ on this
https://evolutionaryanthropology.quora.com/https-www-quora-com-Why-is-the-cultural-explanation-on-the-origins-of-humankind-not-convincing-answer-Quintin-Gumucio?ch=17&oid=64899700&share=0fbfccd2&srid=6MG9J&target_type=post
“If by cultural you mean the explanation(s) given by Anthropology they are not as much unconvincing as they are tentative and open to various theories and interpretations.”
CB: Actually there is substantial agreement among anthropologists of human origins in Africa from 2.5 million to 200,000 years ago
I hone it down to culture giving the human genus a population explosion of genus homo compared with the allopatric , fellow primate and mammal and vertebrate species in Africa, such that Genus Homo expanded into Eurasia , and then the Western Hemisphere ( while remaining in , not vacating Africa or Asia ).
And: http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/decisive-battle-between-early-culture.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/only-humans-have-symbolic-communication.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/05/culturally-inherited-adaptations-give.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2020/12/differentia-specifica-of-human-species.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/01/let-beauties-beautify-you-you-beast.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/01/remix-of-blackwell-concrete-abstract.html
That follows from the complex nature of a process that took millions of years and for which the empirical basis is scattered and scarce. This epistemological sense of uncertainty depends on how the various strands of research approach and manage a plethora of concepts such as:
- broad-spectrum and Neolithic revolutions
- competitive inclusion
- convergent evolution
- descent with modification, natural selection
CB : with humans Sexual Selection was probably more important in making bigger and bigger brains
- molecular homologies
- hunting and gathering, food production, the use of fire.
CB: 2.5 million years of the Old Stone Age is direct appropriation of wild food, _not_planting seeds or husbanding animals
- inclusive and individual fitness.
- knuckle-walking, bipedalism, orthograde posture
- language acquisition, symbolism.
CB: This should be # 1; it is the Differentia specifica of Genus Homo
- nomadism, sedentism
CB:Stone Age , 2.5 million years long is very nomadic
- Oldovan and Acheulian tools, microliths
CB: stone tools MADE BY DESIGN, IN STYLES ; Oldivan and Acheulian are styles .
- Paleolithic and Mesolithic
- reproductive productivity, estrus, uterine groups, microband
CB: Genus homo population explodes relative to other African primates , mammals , ; thus having the highest Darwinian fitness of these species closely related on the Phylogenetic, Tree of Life
Etc. etc.
Thus there is not currently one single totally convincing explanation of the origins of humankind.
CB: Yes there is . The beginning of the Stone Age because the tools made by design mean the tool makers had symbolic communication, language and culture , the Differentia specifica of the human genus .
“All the same there is a widespread consensus that this kind of analytic, crticial and naturalistic evolutionary perspective is the only valid one for modern science.”
CB: Agree, specifically Darwinist evolutionism / critiqued by Blackwell/ human natural history
“If by cultural you mean the explanation(s) given by Anthropology they are not as much unconvincing as they are tentative and open to various theories and interpretations.”
CB: Actually there is substantial agreement among anthropologists of human origins in Africa from 2.5 million to 200,000 years ago
I hone it down to culture giving the human genus a population explosion of genus homo compared with the allopatric , fellow primate and mammal and vertebrate species in Africa, such that Genus Homo expanded into Eurasia , and then the Western Hemisphere ( while remaining in , not vacating Africa or Asia ).
And: http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/decisive-battle-between-early-culture.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/only-humans-have-symbolic-communication.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/is-human-nature-social-or-selfish.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/05/culturally-inherited-adaptations-give.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2020/12/differentia-specifica-of-human-species.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/01/let-beauties-beautify-you-you-beast.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2017/01/remix-of-blackwell-concrete-abstract.html
That follows from the complex nature of a process that took millions of years and for which the empirical basis is scattered and scarce. This epistemological sense of uncertainty depends on how the various strands of research approach and manage a plethora of concepts such as: - broad-spectrum and Neolithic revolutions - competitive inclusion - convergent evolution - descent with modification, natural selection
CB : with humans Sexual Selection was probably more important in making bigger and bigger brains
- molecular homologies - hunting and gathering, food production, the use of fire.
CB: 2.5 million years of the Old Stone Age is direct appropriation of wild food, _not_planting seeds or husbanding animals - inclusive and individual fitness. - knuckle-walking, bipedalism, orthograde posture - language acquisition, symbolism.
CB: This should be # 1; it is the Differentia specifica of Genus Homo - nomadism, sedentism
CB:Stone Age , 2.5 million years long is very nomadic - Oldovan and Acheulian tools, microliths
CB: stone tools MADE BY DESIGN, IN STYLES ; Oldivan and Acheulian are styles .
- Paleolithic and Mesolithic - reproductive productivity, estrus, uterine groups, microband
CB: Genus homo population explodes relative to other African primates , mammals , ; thus having the highest Darwinian fitness of these species closely related on the Phylogenetic, Tree of Life
Etc. etc. Thus there is not currently one single totally convincing explanation of the origins of humankind.
CB: Yes there is . The beginning of the Stone Age because the tools made by design mean the tool makers had symbolic communication, language and culture , the Differentia specifica of the human genus .
Tony : "All the same there is a widespread consensus that this kind of analytic, crticial and naturalistic evolutionary perspective is the only valid one for modern science.”
The linguistic evidence also strongly supports the ‘out of Africa’ hypothesis [See here Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen]. Indeed, in many cases the linguistic evidence is more definitive than the genetic….as language doesn’t have sex…and so is less prone to mixing."
CB: Thanks I didn’t know that . However , the mitochondrial evidence doesn’t mix sexes , as you said . Also, how does Greenberg get linguistic evidence from 200,000 years ago ??! Agree, with out of Africa specifically Darwinist evolutionism / critiqued by Blackwell/ human natural history
Bottomline is that this estimates the time and place of human origin. IMPORTANTLY, FOSSIL EVIDENCE IN AFRICA NOW CORROBORATES THE DNA EVIDENCE . About 200,000 years ago in East Africa https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0903207106
Tony: "Actually, no. The DNA evidence used to establish the Out of Africa hypothesis (the so-called ‘Eve’ hypothesis) uses *both* mitochondrial DNA…*and* nuclear sex-chromosome (Y) DNA. In fact, I’ve had my own DNA checked in this way (by the National Geographic Genome Project…costs about $100 per test; so doing both maternal and paternal tests cost approx. $200…or at least that was the cost from over a decade ago). By the way, a fine and fairly concise and accessible discussion of the linguistic argument is to be found in Merritt Ruhlen’s, ‘The Origin of Language’; overall a good primer of comparative and historical linguistics. T
Thanks, Tony, hadn’t heard that before Although ,The dna evidence is Mitochondria dna which is only through one sex, the mother ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve (also mt-Eve, mt-MRCA) is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all living humans. In other words, she is defined as the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman. In terms of mitochondrial haplogroups, the mt-MRCA is situated at the divergence of macro-haplogroup L into L0 and L1–6. As of 2013, estimates on the age of this split ranged at around 155,000 years ago,[note 3] consistent with a date later than the speciation of Homo sapiens but earlier than the recent out-of-Africa dispersal.[4][1][5] The male analog to the "Mitochondrial Eve" is the "Y-chromosomal Adam" (or Y-MRCA), the individual from whom all living humans are patrilineallydescended. As the identity of both matrilineal and patrilineal MRCAs is dependent on genealogical history (pedigree collapse), they need not have lived at the same time. As of 2013, estimates for the age Y-MRCA are subject to substantial uncertainty, with a wide range of times from 180,000 to 580,000 years ago[6][7][8] (with an estimated age of between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the estimate for mt-MRCA.).[2][9] The name "Mitochondrial Eve" alludes to the biblical Eve, which has led to repeated misrepresentations or misconceptions in journalistic accounts on the topic. Popular science presentations of the topic usually point out such possible misconceptions by emphasizing the fact that the position of mt-MRCA is neither fixed in time (as the position of mt-MRCA moves forward in time as mitochondrial DNA(mtDNA) lineages become extinct), nor does it refer to a "first woman", nor the only living female of her time, nor the first member of a "new species".[note 4]
Tony:Historical linguistics is a deep, complex and, of course, fascinating subject. In truth, however, the origins of human language can be pushed back very, very far. I don’t think anyone can claim to set precise dates on any of it, but the idea – according to Ruhlen – is that there is good evidence to suggest a more or less single origin (though this might be analogous to the genetic ‘Eve’ paradox itself) for all human language from which all other languages have evolved by common descent. The reconstruction of ‘proto’ languages of Dene-Caucasian and Eurasiatic , or at least some few foundational words of such, have already been proffered. Indeed, it has been suggested that the ‘click’ languages the central African San peoples et al might, in fact, represent just such an echo of this foundational proto-language (though again, like the mitochondrial genetic argument, this would likely represent a ‘latest common ancestor’ of all present-day language)
Charles :Yes My hypothesis is that there is symbolic communication at homo habilis and the origin of the Stone Age, 2.5 million years ago ; Not articulate speech but singing , whistling , clicking . music with instruments ( among first tools) , dance, drawing ; because it defines us, genus Homo http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/09/origin-of-language-human-dancer_27.html http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/only-humans-have-symbolic-communication.html http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/several-hypotheses-on-human-evolution.html Culture -custom is symbolically constituted behavior : http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/anthropological-definition-of-culture.html
C JACK:"You seemed to have missed the most obvious means to communicate--gesture. Gesture is still integrated with speech in our communicative routines, and for sighted people with hearing, acquiring and using speech to communicate is actually tri-modally audio-visual-kinestethic. "
Charles Brown says Dance is gesture , whole body gesture , includes hand sign language .
C JACK" says "What does it represent? What does it communicate? Bees dance to communicate. I don't know humans that do. Gestural routines for communicating would mostly incorporate the upper body, especially arms and hands. Speaking also creates gestures visible on the face. These are dynamic and integrated with vocal speech now. "
Charles Brown says ,Lower body can make signs as much as lower body . Also lower body and lower body in combinations can make words just like fingers do in sign language . Whole body can be seen further away than than fingers . A language/words / symbolic signs can be made from anything by conventionally establishing binary oppositions as with Morse Code . A left leg up is the opposite of right leg up. Binary oppositions are the cells of language. Computer language cell is the “on\off” binary opposition. See structural linguistics and anthropology on binary oppositions.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/binary-opposition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_opposition
Then there’s music , sound made with instruments or voice . As it’s sound , it is obviously a candidate for the language system from which speech ( sound symbols ) derives .
Different musical notes and rhythms ( like indigenous drummers) can be made into a system of binary oppositions which are the cells of symbolic communication systems .
Then there are smoke signals .
Abstract Since the discovery of the first man-ape, many have assumed that the earliest humans were hunters and that this was associated with a “killer instinct.” The myth of “man the hunter” was repeated in the 1960s in anthropology texts and popular literature. In the 1970s it was adopted by sociobiologists to explain human nature. “Man the hunter” is used to explain not only human biology but also human morality. The morals described, however, often reflect ancient beliefs and appear to be new ways of justifying old morality codes. The newest version of this myth is presented in a recent book, Demonic Males. I will discuss various accounts of this myth and the evidence used to justify them, and will specifically critique the arguments presented in Demonic Males. Citing Literature
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251205750_Donna_L_Hart_Robert_W_Sussman_Man_the_hunted_primates_predators_and_human_evolution_expanded_edition https://phys.org/news/2008-08-controversial-theory.html Despite popular theories to the contrary, early humans evolved not as aggressive hunters, but as prey of many predators. "Humans are no more born to be hunters than to be gardeners," argues Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, in the newly-updated version of the controversial book "Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution." The soft cover book, released in July by Westview Press, includes a new chapter aimed at quieting critics and responding to new evidence that has appeared since the book's original publication in 2005. In the original volume, Sussman poses a new theory, based on the fossil record and living primate species, that primates have been prey for millions of years, a fact that greatly influenced the evolution of early man. The book won the 2006 W.W. Howells Award for the best book in biological anthropology written for a wide audience. Both versions are co-authored by Donna L. Hart, Ph.D., a member of the faculty of Pierre Laclede Honors College and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The controversial ideas proposed by the original "Man the Hunted" raised many eyebrows in the academic community and beyond. "We wrote this update to answer some of the criticisms and to provide more evidence for our view of early man as prey," Sussman says. The book's new chapter addresses such topics as evidence of additional predators found in the fossil record since the first book's publication, evidence of predation by eagles, cannibalism, cut and tooth marks, scavenging and cooperation. "One major alternative theory that has gained more attention since we wrote the original book is that early man was not a hunter, but was a scavenger instead," Sussman says. "We have found that while early man may have done some scavenging, it was opportunistic. Very little of early human's diet came from meat." Sussman and Hart argue that early man did not have the capacity to detoxify rotting meat nor the ability to chase off competing animal scavengers. "Not one of the more than 250 living primate species is a scavenger," says Sussman. "They are not scavengers because they avoid decomposing food." Sussman and Hart also address the topic of cannibalism, which they claim is "beyond rare," and atypical, strange human behavior. "It just hardly ever happens," Sussman says. The philosophical question of how a new scientific paradigm gets accepted is also discussed. "Once a paradigm becomes established within a scientific community, most practitioners become technicians working within the parameters of the theory but rarely questioning the validity of the theory itself," Sussman writes. Changing the currently popular Man the Hunter theory is difficult for that reason. Though Sussman realizes there will still be critics of the Man the Hunted theory, he believes the book's new version will help to quiet some of that. Early man may have hunted, but was not a hunter. He may have scavenged, but was not a scavenger. Humans evolved mainly as a plant-eating species that ate some animal protein collected opportunistically, Sussman and Hart claim. "We are not saying that our theory is absolutely correct and will never be disproven," he says "But we are saying that the evidence we have today best fits the theory of Man the Hunted than of Man the Hunter." Background on the original 'Man the Hunted.' Sussman's book, "Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution," poses a new theory, based on the fossil record and living primate species, that primates have been prey for millions of years, a fact that greatly influenced the evolution of early man. He co-authored the book with Donna L. Hart, Ph.D., a member of the faculty of Pierre Laclede Honors College and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The book is scheduled to be released in late February. Our intelligence, cooperation and many other features we have as modern humans developed from our attempts to out-smart the predator, says Sussman. Since the 1924 discovery of the first early humans, australopithicenes, which lived from seven million years ago to two million years ago, many scientists theorized that those early human ancestors were hunters and possessed a killer instinct. Through his research and writing, Sussman has worked for years to debunk that theory. An expert in the ecology and social structure of primates, Sussman does extensive fieldwork in primate behavior and ecology in Costa Rica, Guyana, Madagascar and Mauritius. He is the author and editor of several books, including "The Origins and Nature of Sociality," "Primate Ecology and Social Structure," and "The Biological Basis of Human Behavior: A Critical Review." The idea of "Man the Hunter" is the generally accepted paradigm of human evolution, says Sussman, who served as past editor of American Anthropologist and is currently editor of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology. "It developed from a basic Judeo-Christian ideology of man being inherently evil, aggressive and a natural killer. In fact, when you really examine the fossil and living non-human primate evidence, that is just not the case." And examine the evidence they did. Sussman and Hart's research is based on studying the fossil evidence dating back nearly seven million years. "Most theories on Man the Hunter fail to incorporate this key fossil evidence," Sussman says. "We wanted evidence, not just theory. We thoroughly examined literature available on the skulls, bones, footprints and on environmental evidence, both of our hominid ancestors and the predators that coexisted with them." Since the process of human evolution is so long and varied, Sussman and Hart decided to focus their research on one specific species, Australopithecus afarensis, which lived between five million and two and a half million years ago and is one of the better known early human species. Most paleontologists agree that Australopithecus afarensis is the common link between fossils that came before and those that came after. It shares dental, cranial and skeletal traits with both. It's also a very well-represented species in the fossil record. "Australopithecus afarensis was probably quite strong, like a small ape," Sussman says. Adults ranged from around 3 to 5 feet and they weighed 60-100 pounds. They were basically smallish bipedal primates. Their teeth were relatively small, very much like modern humans, and they were fruit and nut eaters. But what Sussman and Hart discovered is that Australopithecus afarensis was not dentally pre-adapted to eat meat. "It didn't have the sharp shearing blades necessary to retain and cut such foods," Sussman says. "These early humans simply couldn't eat meat. If they couldn't eat meat, why would they hunt?" It was not possible for early humans to consume a large amount of meat until fire was controlled and cooking was possible. Sussman points out that the first tools didn't appear until two million years ago. And there wasn't good evidence of fire until after 800,000 years ago. "In fact, some archaeologists and paleontologists don't think we had a modern, systematic method of hunting until as recently as 60,000 years ago," he says. "Furthermore, Australopithecus afarensis was an edge species," adds Sussman. They could live in the trees and on the ground and could take advantage of both. "Primates that are edge species, even today, are basically prey species, not predators," Sussman argues. The predators living at the same time as Australopithecus afarensis were huge and there were 10 times as many as today. There were hyenas as big as bears, as well as saber-toothed cats and many other mega-sized carnivores, reptiles and raptors. Australopithecus afarensis didn't have tools, didn't have big teeth and was three feet tall. He was using his brain, his agility and his social skills to get away from these predators. "He wasn't hunting them," says Sussman. "He was avoiding them at all costs." Approximately 6 percent to 10 percent of early humans were preyed upon according to evidence that includes teeth marks on bones, talon marks on skulls and holes in a fossil cranium into which sabertooth cat fangs fit, says Sussman. The predation rate on savannah antelope and certain ground-living monkeys today is around 6 percent to 10 percent as well. Sussman and Hart provide evidence that many of our modern human traits, including those of cooperation and socialization, developed as a result of being a prey species and the early human's ability to out-smart the predators. These traits did not result from trying to hunt for prey or kill our competitors, says Sussman. "One of the main defenses against predators by animals without physical defenses is living in groups," says Sussman. "In fact, all diurnal primates (those active during the day) live in permanent social groups. Most ecologists agree that predation pressure is one of the major adaptive reasons for this group-living. In this way there are more eyes and ears to locate the predators and more individuals to mob them if attacked or to confuse them by scattering. There are a number of reasons that living in groups is beneficial for animals that otherwise would be very prone to being preyed upon." Source: Washington University in St. Louis Feedback to editors Related Deja vu all over again? Human genome project has lessons to learn, suggests anthropologist Feb 15, 2013 Modern life's pressures may be hastening human evolution Apr 13, 2009 Recommended Load comments (0) How giant viruses mature: New evidence from the medusavirus provides insight 1 hour ago 5,000-year population history of Xinjiang brought to light in new ancient DNA study 1 hour ago New human reference genome opens unexplored regions 1 hour ago Study shows gaps in how STEM organizations collect demographic information 1 hour ago Heat and drought slow down tropical tree growth 2 hours ago Blue Origin launches its fourth crew to final frontier 3 hours ago How is haze formed? Soot as a surprising source of haze-building hydroxyl radicals 3 hours ago Easy test can see if breeding bulls have the right stuff 3 hours ago Spiderweb galaxy field: Feasting black holes caught in galactic spiderweb 3 hours ago Structure of a bacterial 'drug pump' reveals new way to counter hospital-borne infection 3 hours ago Quantum 'shock absorbers' allow perovskite to exhibit superfluorescence at room temperature 3 hours ago GET IN TOUCH Contact us OUR PRODUCTS Tech Xplore Medical Xpress Science X OTHER PUBLICATIONS Android app iOS app RSS feeds EXTRAS Help FAQ LEGAL About Terms of use Privacy policy Science X Account Sponsored Account Newsletter Archive © Phys.org 2003 - 2022 powered by Science X Network Sent from my iPhone On Mar 31, 2022, at 12:57 PM, Charles Brown
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
My hypothesis is that there is symbolic communication at homo habilis and the origin of the Stone Age, 2.5 million years ago ; Not articulate speech but singing , whistling , clicking . music with instruments ( among first tools) , dance, drawing ; because it defines us, genus Homo
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/09/origin-of-language-human-dancer_27.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/only-humans-have-symbolic-communication.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/several-hypotheses-on-human-evolution.html
Culture -custom is symbolically constituted behavior :
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/anthropological-definition-of-culture.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/04/he-need-to-convey-information-using.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/09/origin-of-language-human-dancer_27.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/01/only-humans-have-symbolic-communication.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/03/several-hypotheses-on-human-evolution.html
Culture -custom is symbolically constituted behavior :
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2021/12/anthropological-definition-of-culture.html
http://take10charles.blogspot.com/2022/04/he-need-to-convey-information-using.html
https://www.midwesternmarx.com/lenins-materialism--empirio-criticism/v-i-lenin-materialism-empirio-criticism-commentary-and-analysis-123-by-thomas-riggins
11/17/2021 V. I. Lenin - Materialism & Empirio-Criticism. Commentary and Analysis (1/23). By: Thomas Riggins 0 COMMENTS
Picture This is a famous work of Lenin's which outlines what Marxist philosophy is all about. It was written over a century ago and we might ask ourselves what is still valid in this classic. Have new philosophical developments in the last hundred years or so made this work outmoded? I'm going to post some reflections on the book, section by section, and anyone who wants to read along and comment is welcome to do so. I hope to post three times a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday, starting today (Wednesday) with:
THE PREFACES: Why did Lenin write this book? He tells us because a number of people calling themselves "Marxists" have been attacking "orthodox" Marxism ("dialectical materialism") and calling it outmoded and wanting to supplement it with new ideas borrowed from bourgeois philosophy. This is still going today in the 21st century as well.
Engels is specifically attacked as being "antiquated" and his views on dialectics are said to be a species of "mysticism." None of the books that Lenin attacks are of much interest today and the names of the authors have mostly been forgotten. Perhaps you will recall the name of A.A. Bogdanov and certainly the name Lunacharsky will ring a bell as he later became the first Commissar of Enlightenment (Minister of Education) under the Bolsheviks.
Lenin is not opposed to criticism of the views of Marx and Engels. He mentions approvingly Mehring's critique of "antiquated views of Marx" which was undertaken from a dialectical materialist standpoint. Any historians out there reading this are encouraged to send in comments about just what these views were and where Mehring made them as Lenin does not discuss them in the Prefaces. Franz Mehring (1846-1919) was the author of the “classical” biography of Karl Marx (published in 1918 and which all good Communists have read and studied): Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (Karl Marx. Geschichte seines Lebens). This is the "most comprehensive and interesting historical study of Marx”—Louis Althusser.
Besides defending the "orthodox" view from "heretics", Lenin also wanted to know what drove ostensible Marxists to bourgeois philosophy. What, he asks, "was the stumbling block to these people" that made them desert the orthodox position.
Well, as I mentioned above, in our own day we have a similar problem. Engels is still attacked and efforts are made to cut Marx away from Engels and Well, as I mentioned above, in our own day we have a similar problem. Engels is still attacked and efforts are made to cut Marx away from Engels and make Engels some sort of hack. We also have ordinary language Marxists, existentialist Marxists, phenomenological Marxists, postmodern Marxists, etc., etc.
This coming Friday I'll look at "In lieu of an Introduction." I'm using Vol. 14 of the CW for the text. The book itself seems to be out of print. You should find a copy online (Lenin Internet Archive is the place to look). If you google "materialism and empirio-criticism" the first entry you get should be an on-line copy of the book so if you don't have a hard copy you can still read it.
Ленин живет в наших сердцах
Author Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Check out the following completed 'Commentary and Analysis' Series from Dr. Riggins:
Engels' Anti-Dühring Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder Lenin's State and Revolution Short's Mao: A Life
V. I. Lenin - Materialism & Empirio-Criticism. Commentary and Analysis (2/23). By: Thomas Riggins
11/19/2021 V. I. Lenin - Materialism & Empirio-Criticism. Commentary and Analysis (2/23). By: Thomas Riggins 0 COMMENTS
Picture "In Lieu of an Introduction"
It really is an introduction, about sixteen pages in which Lenin compares the so-called Marxists he is about to criticize to Bishop George Berkeley who is, wrongly I think, considered by many to have been a subjective idealist-- i.e., someone who thinks the existence of "external" objects is dependent on the human mind.
Lenin says, for example, "Denying the 'absolute' existence of objects, that is the existence of things outside human knowledge, Berkeley bluntly defines the view point of his opponents as being that they recognise the 'thing-in-itself.'"
This is an unfortunate sentence, using as it does both Kantian terminology eighty years in advance of its creation and substituting the term "human knowledge" for Berkeley's term "mind."
A few pages later, Lenin corrects himself with a more nuanced view of Berkeley's position. "Deriving 'ideas' from the action of a deity upon the human mind, Berkeley thus approaches objective idealism: the world proves to be not my idea but the product of a single supreme spiritual cause that creates both the 'laws of nature' and the laws distinguishing 'more real' ideas from less real, and so forth."
Actually, Berkeley is an objective idealist as he holds that the objects that we see existing in the world truly have an independent existence from human beings and the world could be just as it is even if there were no humans in existence. Lenin also believes this. What differentiates them is Berkeley has an extra entity which Lenin does not have-- i.e., a spiritual being "God" in whose Mind everything exists. Except for this, Lenin and Berkeley have pretty much the same world view (minus dialectics) when it comes to the "real" existence of the external world. Anyone who doubts this need only read "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous" [1713]. In his desire to smash his contemporary philosophical opponents, Lenin has come near to not giving Berkeley his due. He is much more sophisticated than the people Lenin is opposing.
Berkeley's philosophy of "to be is to be perceived" (esse est percipi) is wrongly thought to require that if p exists, then some human consciousness must be perceiving p. This is nicely expressed by Ronald Knox (1888-1957, Cf. Wikipedia)
There was a young man who said, "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad." REPLY Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd: I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours faithfully, GOD.
Better is Lenin's interpretation of the views of Hume and Diderot. His reading of Hume is filtered through Thomas Huxley (Darwin's bulldog -- a nickname due to his spirited defense of Darwin) and his 1879 book Hume from which he quotes: "'Realism and idealism are equally probable hypotheses' (i.e., for Hume). Hume does not go beyond sensations. 'Thus the colours red and blue, and the odour of a rose, are simple impressions.... A red rose gives us a complex impression, capable of resolution into the simple impressions of red colour, rose-scent, and numerous others.' Hume admits both the 'materialist position' and the 'idealist position;' the 'collection of perceptions' may be generated by the Fichtean 'ego’[all that is is the Ego-tr] or may be a 'signification' and even a 'symbol' of a 'real something.' This is how Huxley interprets Hume." This is more or less how Hume is still interpreted and he is also still very popular in English speaking philosophical fora and lurks in the background of modern bourgeois philosophical "materialism" and "realism."
In the same generation as Hume, Lenin appreciates the materialism of the French philosopher Diderot, and puts forth (in passing which I have capitalized) an important principle in the following quote. "And Diderot, who came very close to the standpoint of contemporary materialism (THAT ARGUMENTS AND SYLLOGISMS ALONE DO NOT SUFFICE TO REFUTE IDEALISM, AND HERE IT IS NOT A QUESTION FOR THEORETICAL ARGUMENT) notes the similarity of the premises both of the idealist Berkeley, and the sensationalist Condillac" (a French version of Locke from whom both he, Berkeley and Hume ultimately derive). We shall see later how important the passage I capitalized will become.
Lenin likes the way Diderot uses the example of a self-conscious piano to explain his views. Such a piano would be able to play on its own the "airs" played upon it. All the problems about the origin of our sensations-- internal, external, etc., Diderot is quoted as saying, would be solved by "a simple supposition which explains everything, namely, that the faculty of sensation is a general property of matter, or a product of its organisation."
Now to conclude. This little introduction was just to give some background before Lenin takes up the cudgel against the "Marxist" idealists of his own day. We shall see that they all, to a greater or lesser extent, are influenced by the ideas of the Physicist Ernst Mach (remembered today not for his philosophy but for the Mach number-- object speed divided by the speed of sound: Speed of sound = Mach1, Mach 5 = hypersound, supersonic— the “boom” a jet fighter makes when it it hits this speed). "For the present," then, Lenin says, "we shall confine ourselves to one conclusion: the 'recent' Machists have not adduced a single argument against the materialists that had not been adduced by Bishop Berkeley."
Next: Chapter One Section One "Sensation and Complexes of Sensations"
11/22/2021 V. I. Lenin - Materialism & Empirio-Criticism. Commentary and Analysis (3/23). By: Thomas Riggins 0 COMMENTS
Picture Chapter One "The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectical Materialism Section One "Sensation and Complexes of Sensations" Lenin begins by stating the basic idea of the theory of knowledge (epistemology) of the two bêtes noires of empirio-criticism Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. This idea is, that what we experience when we experience "the external world" is what goes on in our own brain-- id est, the "elements" making up the "external world" are actually INTERNAL complexes of sensations.
Lenin says, "Mach explicitly states... that things or bodies are complexes of sensations, and that he quite clearly sets up his own philosophical point of view against the opposite theory which holds that sensations are "symbols" of things (it would be more accurate to say images or reflections of things). The latter theory is ”philosophical materialism.”
Lenin bases his view on that of Engel's in his work Anti-Dühring. Engel's uses the term Gedanken-Abbilder which Lenin translates as "mental images" or "mental pictures." "Picture" in German, however is das Bild (which can also mean "image") and since Engel's didn't use the term Gedanken-Bilder, I will not use "picture" but "image" (das Abbilder). Engels believes that really existing external things produce "thought-images" in the human brain. I like the German word used for the English "brainwave"-- i.e., der Gedankenblitz, pl., die Gedankenblitzen, literally "thought-wave, waves."
So the question, as I see it, is what is the relation of our Gedankenblitzen to the real world when we experience what we take to be an external world. Are they the reflections of external reality, or is external reality simply deduced and constructed out of the Gedankenblitzen? Lenin says, "Anybody who reads Anti-Duhring and Ludwig Feuerbach with the slightest care will find scores of instances when Engels speaks of things and their reflections in the human brain, in our consciousness, thought, etc. Engels does not say that sensations or ideas are 'symbols' of things, for consistent materialism must here use 'image', picture, or reflection instead of 'symbol', as we shall show in detail in the proper place." Well, we shall see. At this point, anyway, it would appear I could be a "consistent" materialist as long as I held that my Gedankenblitzen symbols were produced by actually existing external objects independent of the human brain. We will reconsider this when we get to the "proper place."
Lenin says that Mach goes on to explain that we have experiences of certain complexes of sensation that are so intense and consistent that we have become "habituated" (Mach must have gotten this term from Hume) to ascribe the origin of these experiences to an external reality. For Mach, this particular thought wave is no proof of an actually existing external world. We are not justified in going beyond the reality of our own sensations.
Remember Diderot and his piano from earlier? Lenin says that he represents "the real views of materialists." Which "views do not consist in deriving sensations from the movement of matter or in reducing sensations to the movement of matter, but in recognising sensation as one of the properties of matter in motion. On this question Engels shared the standpoint of Diderot." This is not clear to me. If sensation is a property of "matter in motion" have we not reduced sensations to the "movement of matter"? Perhaps this will become clearer later.
Lenin now switches his attention from Mach to Richard Avenarius (1843 to 1896). His works appear to be out of print in English (if they were ever translated). [Trivia: his mother was Cacile Wagner, Richard Wagner's little sister.] Lenin quickly establishes Avenarius' idealist credentials with a quote from his Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Prolegomena to a Critique of Pure Experience): "We have recognised that the existing [thing] is substance endowed with sensation; substance falls away, sensation remains; we must then regard the existing as sensation, at the basis of which there is nothing which does not possess sensation." This is animism! The reason "substance" falls away is that we don't need it to explain the world. All we know is what we experience-- i.e., sensation. Avenarius coined the term "empirio-criticism" to describe his philosophy and his thought was the major influence on Mach.
Bogdanov (1873-1928) makes his first appearance in this section. A. A. Bogdanov was the nom de guerre of A.A. Malinovski. who at one time was the #2 Bolshevik after Lenin and a leader of the discredited Proletkul't movement after the revolution. He was an MD who founded the first blood transfusion and research institute in Russia. It is now called The Bogdanov Institute. He lost a power struggle with Lenin (the book we are studying was written to discredit him in the eyes of Bolsheviks) and turned to research. He used his institute to do blood experiments trying to halt aging and reverse the aging process. In fact, when Lenin died his brain was given to Bogdanov to study as well as his body to see if it could be reanimated. It couldn't. Bogdanov accidentally killed himself while doing a blood transfer experiment on himself. There is an interesting article about him on Wikipedia and in Volume 3 of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. He was a very interesting character who deserves to be better known.
Under the influence of Wilhelm Ostwald (a psychologist) as well as Mach and Avenarius, Bogdanov tried to update Marxist materialism by blending it with the thought of empirio-criticism. The result was his book Empirio-monism which is the object of Lenin's ire. It is however only mentioned in passing in this section. In fact Lenin even likes the quote from Empirio-monism that he reproduces here because the Machist Bogdanov ("from forgetfulness") formulates his new position using words that actually describe a materialist outlook, which is that sensation is "the direct connection between consciousness and the external world."
This gives Lenin the opportunity to set forth what he thinks is the major fallacy of Idealism. "The sophism of idealist philosophy," he says, "consists in the fact that it regards sensation as being not the connection between consciousness and the external world, but a fence, a wall, separating consciousness from the external world-- not an image of the external phenomenon corresponding to the sensation, but as the 'sole entity.'" This is, I think, the MAIN POINT of this section.
Lenin ends this section with some remarks on three other Machians whose Idealism he is going to deal with: the English philosopher Karl Pearson [1857-1936, better known as the founder of mathematical statistics], and the physicists Pierre Duhem [1861-1916] and Henri Poincare [1854-1912].
Next we will go over section 2 of Chapter One: "The Discovery of the World-Elements"
Chapter One Section Two "The Discovery of the World Elements" What are the "world elements" that Mach has supposedly discovered? In his Mechanics(1883) he wrote, "All natural science can only picture and represent complexes of those elements which we ordinarily call sensations.”
Lenin says Mach is confused, because in The Analysis of Sensations he says, "A colour is a physical object when we consider its dependence, for instance, upon the source of illumination (other colours, temperatures, spaces and so forth). When we, however, consider its dependence upon the retina ... it is a psychological object, a sensation.”
Here it seems physical and psychological objects are dissimilar. Lenin calls Mach's view an "incoherent jumble." It seems that Mach wants it both ways, but by having two sorts of objects, physical and a sensation, Mach has slipped into materialism despite his claim that there are only sensations and their complexes.
This is the viewpoint of natural science and materialism: "matter acting upon our sense-organs produces sensation." The empirio-criticists seem either unaware of their problem here, or just confused. Lenin quotes one of the most important followers of Mach and Avenarius, Joseph Petzoldt [ Ludwig Wittgenstein's teacher ] who wrote that "In the statement that 'sensations are the elements of the world' one must guard against taking the term 'sensation' as denoting something only subjective and therefore ethereal, transforming the ordinary picture of the world into an illusion."
This is really muddled and Lenin says he can't help "harping" about it. He tells the empirio-criticists that they must give up their world elements and "simply say that colour is the result of the action of a physical object on the retina, which is the same as saying that sensation is a result of the action of matter on our sense organs."
Lenin points out that in fact, as Mach and Avenarius grew older they began to modify their beliefs and materialist elements, as it were, forced themselves upon them. Here is the strong Machian position from Analysis of Sensations -- " It is not bodies that produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) that make up bodies."
But this view is somewhat modified. Avenarius, according to his disciple Rudolf Willy, ended up also accepting some form of "naive realism"-- i.e., the stance of regular people that there are real existing things outside our minds. And his biographer, Oskar Ewald, conceded that he ended with a contradictory system with "idealist" and "realist" positions. [NOTE: Academic philosophy generally prefers the word "realist". Lenin uses "materialist" in deference to Marx and Engels because he thinks it is more honest.]
Back to Bogdanov bashing: Bogdanov says he is not a Machian. He only took one thing from Mach. Yes, but what he took, Lenin says "is the basic error of Machism." And what is this basic error, the source of Bogdanov's "philosophical misadventures"? It is that "the external world, matter" is thought to be "identical with sensations."
Not only does he assert this, but he reproduces the equivocations and confusions of Avenarius et al when he writes in Empirio-monism that "insofar as the data of experience appear in dependence upon the state of a particular nervous system they form the psychical state of that particular person; insofar as the data of experience are taken outside of such a dependence, we have before us the physical world.”
I would like to insert here a note on the use of the term "metaphysics." In the period under discussion this was a term of abuse. Marxists referred to two groups as "metaphysicians"-- the idealists and the mechanical [i.e., non-dialectical] materialists. Dialectical Materialism (Diamat) was a "science." On the other hand idealists and agnostics (those neutral on the realism antirealism issue) called all the materialists "metaphysicians" for, as Lenin puts it, "it seems to them that to recognise the existence of an external world independent of the human mind is to transcend the bounds of experience." Lenin will deal with this later in his book.
For the present I think the main point of this section was to show that "What appeared to Bogdanov to be truth is, as a matter of fact, confusion, a wavering between materialism and idealism." This is due to the fact that "the amendment made by Mach and Avenarius to their original idealism amounts to making partial concessions to materialism."
Next up (Friday) we will deal with Section Three of Chapter One: "The Principal Co-ordination and 'Naive Realism."
11/17/2021 V. I. Lenin - Materialism & Empirio-Criticism. Commentary and Analysis (1/23). By: Thomas Riggins 0 COMMENTS
Picture This is a famous work of Lenin's which outlines what Marxist philosophy is all about. It was written over a century ago and we might ask ourselves what is still valid in this classic. Have new philosophical developments in the last hundred years or so made this work outmoded? I'm going to post some reflections on the book, section by section, and anyone who wants to read along and comment is welcome to do so. I hope to post three times a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday, starting today (Wednesday) with:
THE PREFACES: Why did Lenin write this book? He tells us because a number of people calling themselves "Marxists" have been attacking "orthodox" Marxism ("dialectical materialism") and calling it outmoded and wanting to supplement it with new ideas borrowed from bourgeois philosophy. This is still going today in the 21st century as well.
Engels is specifically attacked as being "antiquated" and his views on dialectics are said to be a species of "mysticism." None of the books that Lenin attacks are of much interest today and the names of the authors have mostly been forgotten. Perhaps you will recall the name of A.A. Bogdanov and certainly the name Lunacharsky will ring a bell as he later became the first Commissar of Enlightenment (Minister of Education) under the Bolsheviks.
Lenin is not opposed to criticism of the views of Marx and Engels. He mentions approvingly Mehring's critique of "antiquated views of Marx" which was undertaken from a dialectical materialist standpoint. Any historians out there reading this are encouraged to send in comments about just what these views were and where Mehring made them as Lenin does not discuss them in the Prefaces. Franz Mehring (1846-1919) was the author of the “classical” biography of Karl Marx (published in 1918 and which all good Communists have read and studied): Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (Karl Marx. Geschichte seines Lebens). This is the "most comprehensive and interesting historical study of Marx”—Louis Althusser.
Besides defending the "orthodox" view from "heretics", Lenin also wanted to know what drove ostensible Marxists to bourgeois philosophy. What, he asks, "was the stumbling block to these people" that made them desert the orthodox position.
Well, as I mentioned above, in our own day we have a similar problem. Engels is still attacked and efforts are made to cut Marx away from Engels and Well, as I mentioned above, in our own day we have a similar problem. Engels is still attacked and efforts are made to cut Marx away from Engels and make Engels some sort of hack. We also have ordinary language Marxists, existentialist Marxists, phenomenological Marxists, postmodern Marxists, etc., etc.
This coming Friday I'll look at "In lieu of an Introduction." I'm using Vol. 14 of the CW for the text. The book itself seems to be out of print. You should find a copy online (Lenin Internet Archive is the place to look). If you google "materialism and empirio-criticism" the first entry you get should be an on-line copy of the book so if you don't have a hard copy you can still read it.
Ленин живет в наших сердцах
Author Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association. Check out the following completed 'Commentary and Analysis' Series from Dr. Riggins:
Engels' Anti-Dühring Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder Lenin's State and Revolution Short's Mao: A Life
V. I. Lenin - Materialism & Empirio-Criticism. Commentary and Analysis (2/23). By: Thomas Riggins
11/19/2021 V. I. Lenin - Materialism & Empirio-Criticism. Commentary and Analysis (2/23). By: Thomas Riggins 0 COMMENTS
Picture "In Lieu of an Introduction"
It really is an introduction, about sixteen pages in which Lenin compares the so-called Marxists he is about to criticize to Bishop George Berkeley who is, wrongly I think, considered by many to have been a subjective idealist-- i.e., someone who thinks the existence of "external" objects is dependent on the human mind.
Lenin says, for example, "Denying the 'absolute' existence of objects, that is the existence of things outside human knowledge, Berkeley bluntly defines the view point of his opponents as being that they recognise the 'thing-in-itself.'"
This is an unfortunate sentence, using as it does both Kantian terminology eighty years in advance of its creation and substituting the term "human knowledge" for Berkeley's term "mind."
A few pages later, Lenin corrects himself with a more nuanced view of Berkeley's position. "Deriving 'ideas' from the action of a deity upon the human mind, Berkeley thus approaches objective idealism: the world proves to be not my idea but the product of a single supreme spiritual cause that creates both the 'laws of nature' and the laws distinguishing 'more real' ideas from less real, and so forth."
Actually, Berkeley is an objective idealist as he holds that the objects that we see existing in the world truly have an independent existence from human beings and the world could be just as it is even if there were no humans in existence. Lenin also believes this. What differentiates them is Berkeley has an extra entity which Lenin does not have-- i.e., a spiritual being "God" in whose Mind everything exists. Except for this, Lenin and Berkeley have pretty much the same world view (minus dialectics) when it comes to the "real" existence of the external world. Anyone who doubts this need only read "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous" [1713]. In his desire to smash his contemporary philosophical opponents, Lenin has come near to not giving Berkeley his due. He is much more sophisticated than the people Lenin is opposing.
Berkeley's philosophy of "to be is to be perceived" (esse est percipi) is wrongly thought to require that if p exists, then some human consciousness must be perceiving p. This is nicely expressed by Ronald Knox (1888-1957, Cf. Wikipedia)
There was a young man who said, "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad." REPLY Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd: I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours faithfully, GOD.
Better is Lenin's interpretation of the views of Hume and Diderot. His reading of Hume is filtered through Thomas Huxley (Darwin's bulldog -- a nickname due to his spirited defense of Darwin) and his 1879 book Hume from which he quotes: "'Realism and idealism are equally probable hypotheses' (i.e., for Hume). Hume does not go beyond sensations. 'Thus the colours red and blue, and the odour of a rose, are simple impressions.... A red rose gives us a complex impression, capable of resolution into the simple impressions of red colour, rose-scent, and numerous others.' Hume admits both the 'materialist position' and the 'idealist position;' the 'collection of perceptions' may be generated by the Fichtean 'ego’[all that is is the Ego-tr] or may be a 'signification' and even a 'symbol' of a 'real something.' This is how Huxley interprets Hume." This is more or less how Hume is still interpreted and he is also still very popular in English speaking philosophical fora and lurks in the background of modern bourgeois philosophical "materialism" and "realism."
In the same generation as Hume, Lenin appreciates the materialism of the French philosopher Diderot, and puts forth (in passing which I have capitalized) an important principle in the following quote. "And Diderot, who came very close to the standpoint of contemporary materialism (THAT ARGUMENTS AND SYLLOGISMS ALONE DO NOT SUFFICE TO REFUTE IDEALISM, AND HERE IT IS NOT A QUESTION FOR THEORETICAL ARGUMENT) notes the similarity of the premises both of the idealist Berkeley, and the sensationalist Condillac" (a French version of Locke from whom both he, Berkeley and Hume ultimately derive). We shall see later how important the passage I capitalized will become.
Lenin likes the way Diderot uses the example of a self-conscious piano to explain his views. Such a piano would be able to play on its own the "airs" played upon it. All the problems about the origin of our sensations-- internal, external, etc., Diderot is quoted as saying, would be solved by "a simple supposition which explains everything, namely, that the faculty of sensation is a general property of matter, or a product of its organisation."
Now to conclude. This little introduction was just to give some background before Lenin takes up the cudgel against the "Marxist" idealists of his own day. We shall see that they all, to a greater or lesser extent, are influenced by the ideas of the Physicist Ernst Mach (remembered today not for his philosophy but for the Mach number-- object speed divided by the speed of sound: Speed of sound = Mach1, Mach 5 = hypersound, supersonic— the “boom” a jet fighter makes when it it hits this speed). "For the present," then, Lenin says, "we shall confine ourselves to one conclusion: the 'recent' Machists have not adduced a single argument against the materialists that had not been adduced by Bishop Berkeley."
Next: Chapter One Section One "Sensation and Complexes of Sensations"
11/22/2021 V. I. Lenin - Materialism & Empirio-Criticism. Commentary and Analysis (3/23). By: Thomas Riggins 0 COMMENTS
Picture Chapter One "The Theory of Knowledge of Empirio-Criticism and of Dialectical Materialism Section One "Sensation and Complexes of Sensations" Lenin begins by stating the basic idea of the theory of knowledge (epistemology) of the two bêtes noires of empirio-criticism Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. This idea is, that what we experience when we experience "the external world" is what goes on in our own brain-- id est, the "elements" making up the "external world" are actually INTERNAL complexes of sensations.
Lenin says, "Mach explicitly states... that things or bodies are complexes of sensations, and that he quite clearly sets up his own philosophical point of view against the opposite theory which holds that sensations are "symbols" of things (it would be more accurate to say images or reflections of things). The latter theory is ”philosophical materialism.”
Lenin bases his view on that of Engel's in his work Anti-Dühring. Engel's uses the term Gedanken-Abbilder which Lenin translates as "mental images" or "mental pictures." "Picture" in German, however is das Bild (which can also mean "image") and since Engel's didn't use the term Gedanken-Bilder, I will not use "picture" but "image" (das Abbilder). Engels believes that really existing external things produce "thought-images" in the human brain. I like the German word used for the English "brainwave"-- i.e., der Gedankenblitz, pl., die Gedankenblitzen, literally "thought-wave, waves."
So the question, as I see it, is what is the relation of our Gedankenblitzen to the real world when we experience what we take to be an external world. Are they the reflections of external reality, or is external reality simply deduced and constructed out of the Gedankenblitzen? Lenin says, "Anybody who reads Anti-Duhring and Ludwig Feuerbach with the slightest care will find scores of instances when Engels speaks of things and their reflections in the human brain, in our consciousness, thought, etc. Engels does not say that sensations or ideas are 'symbols' of things, for consistent materialism must here use 'image', picture, or reflection instead of 'symbol', as we shall show in detail in the proper place." Well, we shall see. At this point, anyway, it would appear I could be a "consistent" materialist as long as I held that my Gedankenblitzen symbols were produced by actually existing external objects independent of the human brain. We will reconsider this when we get to the "proper place."
Lenin says that Mach goes on to explain that we have experiences of certain complexes of sensation that are so intense and consistent that we have become "habituated" (Mach must have gotten this term from Hume) to ascribe the origin of these experiences to an external reality. For Mach, this particular thought wave is no proof of an actually existing external world. We are not justified in going beyond the reality of our own sensations.
Remember Diderot and his piano from earlier? Lenin says that he represents "the real views of materialists." Which "views do not consist in deriving sensations from the movement of matter or in reducing sensations to the movement of matter, but in recognising sensation as one of the properties of matter in motion. On this question Engels shared the standpoint of Diderot." This is not clear to me. If sensation is a property of "matter in motion" have we not reduced sensations to the "movement of matter"? Perhaps this will become clearer later.
Lenin now switches his attention from Mach to Richard Avenarius (1843 to 1896). His works appear to be out of print in English (if they were ever translated). [Trivia: his mother was Cacile Wagner, Richard Wagner's little sister.] Lenin quickly establishes Avenarius' idealist credentials with a quote from his Prolegomena zu einer Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Prolegomena to a Critique of Pure Experience): "We have recognised that the existing [thing] is substance endowed with sensation; substance falls away, sensation remains; we must then regard the existing as sensation, at the basis of which there is nothing which does not possess sensation." This is animism! The reason "substance" falls away is that we don't need it to explain the world. All we know is what we experience-- i.e., sensation. Avenarius coined the term "empirio-criticism" to describe his philosophy and his thought was the major influence on Mach.
Bogdanov (1873-1928) makes his first appearance in this section. A. A. Bogdanov was the nom de guerre of A.A. Malinovski. who at one time was the #2 Bolshevik after Lenin and a leader of the discredited Proletkul't movement after the revolution. He was an MD who founded the first blood transfusion and research institute in Russia. It is now called The Bogdanov Institute. He lost a power struggle with Lenin (the book we are studying was written to discredit him in the eyes of Bolsheviks) and turned to research. He used his institute to do blood experiments trying to halt aging and reverse the aging process. In fact, when Lenin died his brain was given to Bogdanov to study as well as his body to see if it could be reanimated. It couldn't. Bogdanov accidentally killed himself while doing a blood transfer experiment on himself. There is an interesting article about him on Wikipedia and in Volume 3 of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. He was a very interesting character who deserves to be better known.
Under the influence of Wilhelm Ostwald (a psychologist) as well as Mach and Avenarius, Bogdanov tried to update Marxist materialism by blending it with the thought of empirio-criticism. The result was his book Empirio-monism which is the object of Lenin's ire. It is however only mentioned in passing in this section. In fact Lenin even likes the quote from Empirio-monism that he reproduces here because the Machist Bogdanov ("from forgetfulness") formulates his new position using words that actually describe a materialist outlook, which is that sensation is "the direct connection between consciousness and the external world."
This gives Lenin the opportunity to set forth what he thinks is the major fallacy of Idealism. "The sophism of idealist philosophy," he says, "consists in the fact that it regards sensation as being not the connection between consciousness and the external world, but a fence, a wall, separating consciousness from the external world-- not an image of the external phenomenon corresponding to the sensation, but as the 'sole entity.'" This is, I think, the MAIN POINT of this section.
Lenin ends this section with some remarks on three other Machians whose Idealism he is going to deal with: the English philosopher Karl Pearson [1857-1936, better known as the founder of mathematical statistics], and the physicists Pierre Duhem [1861-1916] and Henri Poincare [1854-1912].
Next we will go over section 2 of Chapter One: "The Discovery of the World-Elements"
Chapter One Section Two "The Discovery of the World Elements" What are the "world elements" that Mach has supposedly discovered? In his Mechanics(1883) he wrote, "All natural science can only picture and represent complexes of those elements which we ordinarily call sensations.”
Lenin says Mach is confused, because in The Analysis of Sensations he says, "A colour is a physical object when we consider its dependence, for instance, upon the source of illumination (other colours, temperatures, spaces and so forth). When we, however, consider its dependence upon the retina ... it is a psychological object, a sensation.”
Here it seems physical and psychological objects are dissimilar. Lenin calls Mach's view an "incoherent jumble." It seems that Mach wants it both ways, but by having two sorts of objects, physical and a sensation, Mach has slipped into materialism despite his claim that there are only sensations and their complexes.
This is the viewpoint of natural science and materialism: "matter acting upon our sense-organs produces sensation." The empirio-criticists seem either unaware of their problem here, or just confused. Lenin quotes one of the most important followers of Mach and Avenarius, Joseph Petzoldt [ Ludwig Wittgenstein's teacher ] who wrote that "In the statement that 'sensations are the elements of the world' one must guard against taking the term 'sensation' as denoting something only subjective and therefore ethereal, transforming the ordinary picture of the world into an illusion."
This is really muddled and Lenin says he can't help "harping" about it. He tells the empirio-criticists that they must give up their world elements and "simply say that colour is the result of the action of a physical object on the retina, which is the same as saying that sensation is a result of the action of matter on our sense organs."
Lenin points out that in fact, as Mach and Avenarius grew older they began to modify their beliefs and materialist elements, as it were, forced themselves upon them. Here is the strong Machian position from Analysis of Sensations -- " It is not bodies that produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) that make up bodies."
But this view is somewhat modified. Avenarius, according to his disciple Rudolf Willy, ended up also accepting some form of "naive realism"-- i.e., the stance of regular people that there are real existing things outside our minds. And his biographer, Oskar Ewald, conceded that he ended with a contradictory system with "idealist" and "realist" positions. [NOTE: Academic philosophy generally prefers the word "realist". Lenin uses "materialist" in deference to Marx and Engels because he thinks it is more honest.]
Back to Bogdanov bashing: Bogdanov says he is not a Machian. He only took one thing from Mach. Yes, but what he took, Lenin says "is the basic error of Machism." And what is this basic error, the source of Bogdanov's "philosophical misadventures"? It is that "the external world, matter" is thought to be "identical with sensations."
Not only does he assert this, but he reproduces the equivocations and confusions of Avenarius et al when he writes in Empirio-monism that "insofar as the data of experience appear in dependence upon the state of a particular nervous system they form the psychical state of that particular person; insofar as the data of experience are taken outside of such a dependence, we have before us the physical world.”
I would like to insert here a note on the use of the term "metaphysics." In the period under discussion this was a term of abuse. Marxists referred to two groups as "metaphysicians"-- the idealists and the mechanical [i.e., non-dialectical] materialists. Dialectical Materialism (Diamat) was a "science." On the other hand idealists and agnostics (those neutral on the realism antirealism issue) called all the materialists "metaphysicians" for, as Lenin puts it, "it seems to them that to recognise the existence of an external world independent of the human mind is to transcend the bounds of experience." Lenin will deal with this later in his book.
For the present I think the main point of this section was to show that "What appeared to Bogdanov to be truth is, as a matter of fact, confusion, a wavering between materialism and idealism." This is due to the fact that "the amendment made by Mach and Avenarius to their original idealism amounts to making partial concessions to materialism."
Next up (Friday) we will deal with Section Three of Chapter One: "The Principal Co-ordination and 'Naive Realism."
Labor rights and civil rights One intertwined struggle for all workers
“The true name of the 1963 “March on Washington,” the largest political rally of the civil rights movement, was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” One of the major organizers of the March, A. Philip Randolph, was a labor organizer. The March on Washington’s goals were as concerned with Black Americans’ economic well-being as they were with their social standing. The core tenets of the movement included prohibiting discrimination in public or private hiring, establishing a $2 minimum wage (equivalent to roughly $17 in 2021), and expanding the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to include the majority-Black occupations the Act excluded at the time.“
https://www.epi.org/blog/labor-rights-and-civil-rights-one-intertwined-struggle-for-all-workers/
Labor rights and civil rights One intertwined struggle for all workers
A person working eight hours per day with a one-hour round-trip commute—who sleeps for eight hours a night—spends over half of their waking life at, going to, or coming from their workplace. Aside from children, full-time students, and those who have lived long enough to collect Social Security benefits, Americans live their lives as workers. With the exception of the roughly 10% of U.S. workers who list themselves as self-employed1 and those who make their income from capital, that work takes place as employees.
Despite how much of American adult life is governed under employment agreements, most Americans also have little say over the terms of those agreements after they have been accepted. Most American workers are employed “at will,” meaning they can be fired by their employer at the employer’s discretion as long as the given reason does not violate federal law. If a worker is made to feel uncomfortable at work by a customer, or if the pace of work becomes stressful, or if conditions of their life change such that they need special accommodation, then in most cases solutions are up to the kindness of the employer to provide—there is nothing that requires them to do so.
Entering the workplace for most American adults can in that case represent an agreement to forfeit a degree of control over their lives in exchange for the wages necessary to live. If people do not have a voice in determining the pace and content of their time in the workplace, then in a real sense they lack control over the largest portion of their lives.
The core idea behind “civil rights” is that people should have the freedom to exist in political and social equality with one another. But under employment, an individual worker has a starkly unequal relationship with their employer. For workers to exist in the workplace without forfeiting their civil rights, they must be able to bargain on equal footing with their employers—that is, they need to have the ability to organize into unions among themselves. In this sense the movement for securing labor rights is not separate from the movement for securing civil rights—it is a fulfillment of those goals.
The civil rights movement in America lives in the national memory as a sustained series of efforts to end institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination throughout U.S. society. In action, much of the civil rights movement was concerned with improving labor conditions for Black workers, both so they could exist on equal footing with white workers and so they could better organize with their white counterparts to bargain with their employers.
The true name of the 1963 “March on Washington,” the largest political rally of the civil rights movement, was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” One of the major organizers of the March, A. Philip Randolph, was a labor organizer. The March on Washington’s goals were as concerned with Black Americans’ economic well-being as they were with their social standing. The core tenets of the movement included prohibiting discrimination in public or private hiring, establishing a $2 minimum wage (equivalent to roughly $17 in 2021), and expanding the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to include the majority-Black occupations the Act excluded at the time.
At that time, there was no separation between the ideas of civil rights and labor rights. It was understood that there could be no civic freedom without economic security. Today, many of our national narratives around the civil rights movement separate the struggle for the right to vote and the dissolution of segregated schools and lunch counters from that of raising the minimum wage and making it easier for workers to unionize, but this does a disservice to our history.
The historical opponents of civil rights legislation were and remain opposed to policies that improve economic conditions and bargaining power for Black workers, though that opposition is often stripped of its racial context. The strongest resistance against improving labor standards for the working class in the United States has emerged from states where the exploitation of Black labor grounds their strategy for economic development. States that fought against the Union in the Civil War are collectively the least likely to support unionization today—South Carolina, the first state to secede, has the lowest unionization rate in the country at just 2.9% of employed workers.
Slavery provided the foundation for the entire country’s wealth, but it was uniquely integral to the Southern economy and way of life. When that practice of violent labor coercion was outlawed nationwide after the Civil War, Southern planters adapted their economic strategy to remain as close to the old system as possible. Black workers were denied adequate wages and protections and were met with obstinate and violent resistance when they sought recourse.
Southern legislators saw that Black workers were largely carved out of the benefits of New Deal legislation passed in the 1930s through exclusions for domestic and agricultural workers—the occupations in which Southern Black workers were most heavily concentrated. Justification for these exclusions was not made in racially explicit terms. Rather, the argument was made that to extend the rights guaranteed through the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 would represent the end of Southern industry and the destruction of job opportunities for all Southern workers.
Whatever the justification, these exclusions meant that large swaths of Black workers were denied the protections of a national minimum wage and a 40-hour workweek. When the FLSA was finally amended nearly 30 years later to include those excluded agricultural workers after years of labor and civil rights activism, Black workers saw their incomes improve significantly, racial wage inequality fell, and there were no adverse effects on employment in the aggregate.
Conservative backlash to the racial and economic progress made during the 1960s sought to dismantle and defund institutions designed to protect Black workers and, crucially, to weaken the labor movement by making it difficult for workers to unionize. Anti-poverty programs were racialized and stigmatized throughout the United States, while anxieties around desegregation were being mobilized to weaken the labor movement in the South. An eroded social safety net makes it more difficult for workers to risk job loss by engaging in labor-organizing activities.
The struggle against racial oppression in the United States has always been aligned with the struggle against economic exploitation. Separating issues of racial equality from those of economic justice would abandon the civil rights movement’s core tenets.
Legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which seeks to empower workers with the freedom to hold fair union elections, represents a new step forward in the struggle toward achieving full civil and labor rights. By making it illegal for hostile employers to interfere with an election process, the PRO Act will allow workers who want a union to bring that form of democracy into their workplace. The expansion of the full rights of democracy to more people across more of their lives is the goal of the civil rights movement. Expanding the reach of unions should be seen as being in lockstep with this goal.
Note 1. Calculated using April 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) incorporated and unincorporated self-employed data as a share of the age 16+ labor force. https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab9.htm
Enjoyed this post? Sign up for EPI's newsletter so you never miss our research and insights on ways to make the economy
S
https://www.epi.org/blog/labor-rights-and-civil-rights-one-intertwined-struggle-for-all-workers/
Labor rights and civil rights One intertwined struggle for all workers
A person working eight hours per day with a one-hour round-trip commute—who sleeps for eight hours a night—spends over half of their waking life at, going to, or coming from their workplace. Aside from children, full-time students, and those who have lived long enough to collect Social Security benefits, Americans live their lives as workers. With the exception of the roughly 10% of U.S. workers who list themselves as self-employed1 and those who make their income from capital, that work takes place as employees.
Despite how much of American adult life is governed under employment agreements, most Americans also have little say over the terms of those agreements after they have been accepted. Most American workers are employed “at will,” meaning they can be fired by their employer at the employer’s discretion as long as the given reason does not violate federal law. If a worker is made to feel uncomfortable at work by a customer, or if the pace of work becomes stressful, or if conditions of their life change such that they need special accommodation, then in most cases solutions are up to the kindness of the employer to provide—there is nothing that requires them to do so.
Entering the workplace for most American adults can in that case represent an agreement to forfeit a degree of control over their lives in exchange for the wages necessary to live. If people do not have a voice in determining the pace and content of their time in the workplace, then in a real sense they lack control over the largest portion of their lives.
The core idea behind “civil rights” is that people should have the freedom to exist in political and social equality with one another. But under employment, an individual worker has a starkly unequal relationship with their employer. For workers to exist in the workplace without forfeiting their civil rights, they must be able to bargain on equal footing with their employers—that is, they need to have the ability to organize into unions among themselves. In this sense the movement for securing labor rights is not separate from the movement for securing civil rights—it is a fulfillment of those goals.
The civil rights movement in America lives in the national memory as a sustained series of efforts to end institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination throughout U.S. society. In action, much of the civil rights movement was concerned with improving labor conditions for Black workers, both so they could exist on equal footing with white workers and so they could better organize with their white counterparts to bargain with their employers.
The true name of the 1963 “March on Washington,” the largest political rally of the civil rights movement, was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” One of the major organizers of the March, A. Philip Randolph, was a labor organizer. The March on Washington’s goals were as concerned with Black Americans’ economic well-being as they were with their social standing. The core tenets of the movement included prohibiting discrimination in public or private hiring, establishing a $2 minimum wage (equivalent to roughly $17 in 2021), and expanding the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to include the majority-Black occupations the Act excluded at the time.
At that time, there was no separation between the ideas of civil rights and labor rights. It was understood that there could be no civic freedom without economic security. Today, many of our national narratives around the civil rights movement separate the struggle for the right to vote and the dissolution of segregated schools and lunch counters from that of raising the minimum wage and making it easier for workers to unionize, but this does a disservice to our history.
The historical opponents of civil rights legislation were and remain opposed to policies that improve economic conditions and bargaining power for Black workers, though that opposition is often stripped of its racial context. The strongest resistance against improving labor standards for the working class in the United States has emerged from states where the exploitation of Black labor grounds their strategy for economic development. States that fought against the Union in the Civil War are collectively the least likely to support unionization today—South Carolina, the first state to secede, has the lowest unionization rate in the country at just 2.9% of employed workers.
Slavery provided the foundation for the entire country’s wealth, but it was uniquely integral to the Southern economy and way of life. When that practice of violent labor coercion was outlawed nationwide after the Civil War, Southern planters adapted their economic strategy to remain as close to the old system as possible. Black workers were denied adequate wages and protections and were met with obstinate and violent resistance when they sought recourse.
Southern legislators saw that Black workers were largely carved out of the benefits of New Deal legislation passed in the 1930s through exclusions for domestic and agricultural workers—the occupations in which Southern Black workers were most heavily concentrated. Justification for these exclusions was not made in racially explicit terms. Rather, the argument was made that to extend the rights guaranteed through the National Labor Relations Act and Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 would represent the end of Southern industry and the destruction of job opportunities for all Southern workers.
Whatever the justification, these exclusions meant that large swaths of Black workers were denied the protections of a national minimum wage and a 40-hour workweek. When the FLSA was finally amended nearly 30 years later to include those excluded agricultural workers after years of labor and civil rights activism, Black workers saw their incomes improve significantly, racial wage inequality fell, and there were no adverse effects on employment in the aggregate.
Conservative backlash to the racial and economic progress made during the 1960s sought to dismantle and defund institutions designed to protect Black workers and, crucially, to weaken the labor movement by making it difficult for workers to unionize. Anti-poverty programs were racialized and stigmatized throughout the United States, while anxieties around desegregation were being mobilized to weaken the labor movement in the South. An eroded social safety net makes it more difficult for workers to risk job loss by engaging in labor-organizing activities.
The struggle against racial oppression in the United States has always been aligned with the struggle against economic exploitation. Separating issues of racial equality from those of economic justice would abandon the civil rights movement’s core tenets.
Legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which seeks to empower workers with the freedom to hold fair union elections, represents a new step forward in the struggle toward achieving full civil and labor rights. By making it illegal for hostile employers to interfere with an election process, the PRO Act will allow workers who want a union to bring that form of democracy into their workplace. The expansion of the full rights of democracy to more people across more of their lives is the goal of the civil rights movement. Expanding the reach of unions should be seen as being in lockstep with this goal.
Note 1. Calculated using April 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) incorporated and unincorporated self-employed data as a share of the age 16+ labor force. https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab9.htm
Enjoyed this post? Sign up for EPI's newsletter so you never miss our research and insights on ways to make the economy
S
Tuesday, March 29, 2022
3,750 year old cook book
proof of the recipe is in the eating:
"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question."- Karl Marx
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htARnZjxQGs
Ancient Babylonian Lamb Stew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IYYhoO-hiY
A 4000 Year Old Recipe for the Babylonian New Year
A Critical Reading of Wikipedia "Evolution"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics (phenotypes,traits ;bodily parts and behaviors ) of biological populations ( species: a population that produces fertile offspring ) over successive generations.[1][2] These characteristics (phenotypes ) are the expressions of genes (genotypes) that are passed on from parents to offspring during reproduction. Different characteristics tend to exist within any given population as a result of mutation, genetic recombination and other sources (?) of genetic variation.[3] Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or rare within a population.[4] The evolutionary pressures that determine whether a characteristic should be common or rare within a population constantly (constantly ?) change, resulting in the change in heritable characteristics arising (no , selected) over successive generations. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms ( there isnt variety in an indivdual; there is variety between individuals of the same species ) and molecules (dna molecules vary ) .[5][6]
The scientific theory of evolution by natural selection was conceived independently by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-19th century and was set out in detail in Darwin's book On the Origin of Species.[7] Evolution by natural selection was first demonstrated by the observation that more offspring are often produced than can possibly survive "
Charles Brown: This is a fallacy of formulation ; and it is the standard formulatiin ; even Darwin has it , though I think it's political by Darwin. More offspring are produced than can all survive LONG ENOUGH TO REPRODUCE ! All individual animals are mortal , so they all eventually "don't survive"; that is ,die. (There may even be some populations where all live long enough to reproduce !). At any rate , Darwin's idea is that some characteristics are selected for over others selected against; and that those selected for are selected for because they give an advantage in the struggle for existence (struggle to continue to exist before the inevitable demise; not die) over those selected against ; more individuals selected for will reproduce or reproduce more before they die , because they will have a longer average lifetime, and thereby probably have more opportunities to reproduce ( differential mortality determines differential fertility).
Sexual selection or being selected by the opposite sex because of some bodily or behavioral characteristic directly selects for more matings and therefore likely more fertile matings
CONTINUATION OF WIKIPEDIA ITEM This is followed by three observable facts about living organisms: (1) traits vary among individuals with respect to their morphology, physiology and behaviour (phenotypic variation), (2) different traits confer different rates of survival and reproduction (differential fitness) and (3) traits can be passed from generation to generation (heritability of fitness).[8] Thus, in successive generations members of a population are more likely to be replaced by the progenies of parents with favourable characteristics that have enabled them to survive and reproduce in their respective environments. In the early 20th century, other competing ideas of evolution such as mutationism and orthogenesis were refuted as the modern synthesis reconciled Darwinian evolution with classical genetics, which established adaptive evolution as being caused by natural selection acting on Mendelian genetic variation.[9]
All life on Earth shares a last universal common ancestor (LUCA)[10][11][12] that lived approximately 3.5–3.8 billion years ago.[13] The fossil record includes a progression from early biogenic graphite,[14] to microbial mat fossils,[15][16][17] to fossilised multicellular organisms. Existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped by repeated formations of new species (speciation), changes within species (anagenesis) and loss of species (extinction) throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth.[18] Morphological and biochemical traits are more similar among species that share a more recent common ancestor, and can be used to reconstruct phylogenetic trees.[19][20]
Evolutionary biologists have continued to study various aspects of evolution by forming and testing hypotheses as well as constructing theories based on evidence from the field or laboratory and on data generated by the methods of mathematical and theoretical biology. Their discoveries have influenced not just the development of biology but numerous other scientific and industrial fields, including agriculture, medicine and computer science.[21]
History of evolutionary thought
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics (phenotypes,traits ;bodily parts and behaviors ) of biological populations ( species: a population that produces fertile offspring ) over successive generations.[1][2] These characteristics (phenotypes ) are the expressions of genes (genotypes) that are passed on from parents to offspring during reproduction. Different characteristics tend to exist within any given population as a result of mutation, genetic recombination and other sources (?) of genetic variation.[3] Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or rare within a population.[4] The evolutionary pressures that determine whether a characteristic should be common or rare within a population constantly (constantly ?) change, resulting in the change in heritable characteristics arising (no , selected) over successive generations. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms ( there isnt variety in an indivdual; there is variety between individuals of the same species ) and molecules (dna molecules vary ) .[5][6]
The scientific theory of evolution by natural selection was conceived independently by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-19th century and was set out in detail in Darwin's book On the Origin of Species.[7] Evolution by natural selection was first demonstrated by the observation that more offspring are often produced than can possibly survive "
Charles Brown: This is a fallacy of formulation ; and it is the standard formulatiin ; even Darwin has it , though I think it's political by Darwin. More offspring are produced than can all survive LONG ENOUGH TO REPRODUCE ! All individual animals are mortal , so they all eventually "don't survive"; that is ,die. (There may even be some populations where all live long enough to reproduce !). At any rate , Darwin's idea is that some characteristics are selected for over others selected against; and that those selected for are selected for because they give an advantage in the struggle for existence (struggle to continue to exist before the inevitable demise; not die) over those selected against ; more individuals selected for will reproduce or reproduce more before they die , because they will have a longer average lifetime, and thereby probably have more opportunities to reproduce ( differential mortality determines differential fertility).
Sexual selection or being selected by the opposite sex because of some bodily or behavioral characteristic directly selects for more matings and therefore likely more fertile matings
CONTINUATION OF WIKIPEDIA ITEM This is followed by three observable facts about living organisms: (1) traits vary among individuals with respect to their morphology, physiology and behaviour (phenotypic variation), (2) different traits confer different rates of survival and reproduction (differential fitness) and (3) traits can be passed from generation to generation (heritability of fitness).[8] Thus, in successive generations members of a population are more likely to be replaced by the progenies of parents with favourable characteristics that have enabled them to survive and reproduce in their respective environments. In the early 20th century, other competing ideas of evolution such as mutationism and orthogenesis were refuted as the modern synthesis reconciled Darwinian evolution with classical genetics, which established adaptive evolution as being caused by natural selection acting on Mendelian genetic variation.[9]
All life on Earth shares a last universal common ancestor (LUCA)[10][11][12] that lived approximately 3.5–3.8 billion years ago.[13] The fossil record includes a progression from early biogenic graphite,[14] to microbial mat fossils,[15][16][17] to fossilised multicellular organisms. Existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped by repeated formations of new species (speciation), changes within species (anagenesis) and loss of species (extinction) throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth.[18] Morphological and biochemical traits are more similar among species that share a more recent common ancestor, and can be used to reconstruct phylogenetic trees.[19][20]
Evolutionary biologists have continued to study various aspects of evolution by forming and testing hypotheses as well as constructing theories based on evidence from the field or laboratory and on data generated by the methods of mathematical and theoretical biology. Their discoveries have influenced not just the development of biology but numerous other scientific and industrial fields, including agriculture, medicine and computer science.[21]
History of evolutionary thought
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)