The Winding Path

Previously I wrote a brief overview of Merlin Donald’s paper which paints a picture of how our culture and our brain co-evolved. I also raised a question of what it might mean for the future. Now I’m going to give you an overview of Donald’s theory which actually details how that co-evolution may have happened. To try to give you a clearer picture I’m drawing on some of what Donald wrote in his book, Origins of the Modern Mind, in which he fully defined his theory.

It’s a theory which drew on the work of people from many fields including neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and comparative biology. The crux of the theory is that our cognitive-cultural evolution went through three transitions; each new stage involving a new way of mentally representing reality. It’s important to note that each stage builds on top of the previous, retaining all the advantages so that the last stage also includes all the previous ones.

Episodic Culture

This stage involved the ability to mentally represent complex events, including social ones, but with a very limited capacity to voluntarily express those representations. And while complex events could be understood, they could only be understood in a very situation-specific way. Modern apes are at this stage¹. An example of the limitations of this stage can be found in apes’ use of sign language. Apes can be taught how to sign, but they seem to only be able to use signs in the contexts in which they’re taught. However, humans can learn to apply the same sign in any context in which it could conceivably be relevant (and even when not relevant. Just think of how we’re coming up with new uses for old words all the time).

Mimetic Culture

The first transition brings us to a mimetic form of culture. It happened about 2 million years ago with the emergence of Homo erectus, who were the first of our ancestors to show clear evidence of an advanced, tool-using society. While some who came before do show evidence of tool-use, it wasn’t as systematic and widespread as it was with Homo erectus. Donald argues that our ancestors must have undergone a significant evolutionary adaptation at around that time, citing various sources as evidence including fossil records, cultural relics such as tools, and comparative anatomical evidence. The result of the adaptation was a form of representation which included the ability to model actions. This form of culture gets it name from that modeling ability; mimetic skill, or mimesis, which is the ability to consciously act in a way which conveys a message. Donald suggests that our ancestors still weren’t able to communicate verbally, but they now possessed enough nonverbal ability to allow individuals to share their knowledge of skills, such as tool-making, through various forms of behaviour including gestures, whole-body movement, facial expressions, eye movements, etc.

Mythic Culture

The second adaptation happened less than 400,000 years ago with the emergence of Homo sapiens, our closest ancestors. The adaptation was the ability to speak (and of course understand speech). This stage involved many cultural achievements including clothing, building shelter, transporting heaving objects, a huge variety of tools and weapons, social and religious activities involving elaborate rituals including dancing, masks and costumes. It was the latter achievement from which this form of culture gets its name; our ancestors could now form an understanding of the world which integrated everything that they experienced into a narrative form. They could construct and communicate those stories far more effectively than they could before, not just because of the advantages speech provide, but also because of the improvements to memory and thinking that came along with speech.

Theoretic Culture

The third, and to this point the last (though not necessarily the final) transition was not a biological one. It involved the use of tools to get our representations out of our heads, allowing us to manipulate them in more ways than ever possible before. By moving our ideas outside our heads those concrete representations became part of our cognitive processes. Our “thoughts” now also exist in various forms of written language, but also as every other kind of representation that technology allows, from graphs to photos to video, as well as music and other forms accessible to our other senses. Most importantly, along with this new form or representation came a new form of thinking; theoretical thought. This form of thought allows a much greater scrutiny of reality, and much more accurate representations than were possible at previous stages.

So there you have a brief outline of Donald’s proposed theory. It’s important because it provides a framework for understanding and further examining our current culture and cognition, the various ways in which we view the world, how that differs from culture to culture, and what might change in the future as our culture continues to develop. If you’d like to learn more I highly recommend picking up Origins of the Modern Mind.

Related entries:

• How did our mind and brain evolve?
• How do we process complex social interactions?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Over at edge earlier this month they published an article by Jonathan Haidt entitled “Moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion”.

He gives a comprehensive analysis of what morality is, summarised by this definition:

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

Haidt uses that definition, and his analysis of morality, to argue how atheists, while attempting to bring rigorous scientific reasoning to their analysis of religion, are significantly influenced by their own moral psychology.

Haidt argues that

every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing

but suggests that people can lose sight of that wisdom when their or their opponent’s ideologies are attacked.

I agree, we might forget that those ideologies can provide some benefit. But I also think that many don’t realise those benefits can be provided without having to adopt those ideologies. Where adopting those ideologies also requires adopting their failings, surely we’re not expected to ignore those failings, considering them all part of the package?

Haidt also says

surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.

The comments on PZ Myers’ blog provide anecdotal evidence that not everyone who attends church is happy doing so, including Keith’s story of the waiter who noted that the church-going Sunday lunch crowd is often surly and don’t tip well. This example can be used to highlight one of the problems with anecdotal evidence. It considers a smattering of cases which tend to agree with each other, leading to a perception which is not necessarily anything close to what would be seen if all possible cases were considered. This is why scientists do studies with large, randomised samples. Could all the happy church-going families have gone home for their Sunday lunch together? Might the waiter have been more aware of surly customers who don’t tip well?

So if we don’t look to anecdotal evidence, but we still need to take a close look, where do we look? We non-scientists generally don’t have the skills and resources to look as closely as necessary to be able to reach a firm conclusion. But there are scientists who can, and have. Anton Mates had a look at the results and said:

In support of this view, pretty much all the studies I’ve seen on the subject (such as those summarized here) find that regular religious attendance is correlated with happiness and health and giving. This has, so far as I can see, absolutely nothing to do with religious belief, other that in some cultures belief is a strong motivator for attendance. Studies such as this one provide evidence that belief, in itself, is a negative factor–countries with higher rates of belief also have higher rates of early mortality, homicide, STDs, abortions, and so forth.

I’m all for learning from religion, and for the benefit religious beliefs can provide individuals and society, but I’m not in favour of adopting it entirely, warts and all, for the sake of those positives. Particularly when all of those positives can be had without adopting those beliefs. We can learn from the ancient Greek gods, or the Norse gods, or any other gods now bereft of worshipers, without adopting all the practices which those gods required and which their worshipers willingly performed. Why should current gods and religions be approached any differently?

But I don’t believe Haidt is saying they should be approached differently. His final two sentences show he is simply warning against taking opposing ideologies to similar extremes:

A militant form of atheism that claims the backing of science and encourages “brights” to take up arms may perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process.

I certainly agree to that. We don’t need to stamp out religion entirely. But I see no good in yielding to any form of harmful ideological dogmatism, religious, scientific, moralistic, or otherwise.

Here are some more responses to Haidt’s article