I had trouble parsing part of this, so let me rewrite it in my own words:
There used to be a question of why there was 100ky of "anatomically modern humans" before there were "behaviorally modern humans." Recently, the evidence of behavioral modernity has been pushed back, so there no longer is a gap in time between anatomical modernity and behavioral modernity. But this gap was only the tip of the iceberg. It was a tidy way of talking about the mystery, but removing it doesn't remove the actual mystery; comparing anatomical modernity and behavioral modernity is a category error, because anatomical modernity is an endpoint, whereas behavioral modernity is a starting point. The brains got larger for millions of years, leveling off 150kyo, and then behavioral change accelerated, lots of new behavior starting then. But if the big brains lead to the modern behavior, why didn't the behavior accumulate for millions of years? This is the real mystery and moving modern behavior back 100k more years doesn't help address it.
I'm surprised that you have not even mentioned language, something which took evolution of the jaw, tongue, throat as well as brain and which would have revolutionized hominid culture. Have you read Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". I don't know if I believe Jaynes, but he made the importance of language clear to me.
> My thesis is that women discovered “I” first and then taught men about inner life. Creation myths are memories of when women forged humans into a dualistic species. That sounds fantastic, but we have to have evolved at some point (and it must have been fantastic). Further, weaker versions of the idea are still interesting. For example, I hold that snake venom was used in the first rituals to help communicate “I am.” Hence the snake in the garden, tempting Eve with self-knowledge. Even if those rituals do not figure in human evolution or our discovery of consciousness, it would be extraordinary if a psychedelic snake cult from the Paleolithic is remembered in Genesis as well as by the Aztecs. I’d watch that Netflix series!
> In several blog posts, I have developed what it would look like to discover “I, ” how it could have been communicated to others, why women would have been the vanguard, how it could evolve by degrees, and what sort of cultural and genetic marks such a process would leave. But these arguments are scattered across posts, and in the meantime, I’ve found more supporting evidence. For example, earlier, I mused that snake venom could have been used as a hallucinogen. It turns out that this is well documented in ritual settings, including among the architects of Western civilization.
> Epistemic status: Human origins are inherently speculative, and this is a passion project outside my area of expertise (psychology and AI). For this post, I’ve read maybe a dozen books and 100 papers. One way to think about this theory is interpreting data by asking, “How recently could humans have become sapient?” rather than using the institutional bias that seeks to push that date back as far as possible.
> The expulsion of Adam and Eve was the result of natural law, not a capricious god doling out contradictory commandments. Once Eve perceived herself as an agent and the voice in her head as her own, she could no longer dwell in blissful ignorance. She became responsible for her actions and aware of her mortality.
> (...) a snake tempts Eve to eat an apple, which is a rich source of rutin, a functional antivenom. Granted, the Bible itself does not mention apples. However, the Greeks do on several occasions.
> Snakes often appear next to functional antivenoms in myths about death, rebirth, and consciousness. This makes a lot of sense if their venom was ritualized as an entheogen. The object of the first religion would not have been literal death.
If AMHs are genetically identical with BMHs, I think the only reason why there is an intelligence gap is that there was some 'software upgrade' among the ancient humans, approx. 40k-60k years ago, roughly the time when humans landed in Australia. It was more of a cultural thing, instead of a physical/genetical thing. To be more specific, it can only be caused by the evolution of LANGUAGE. If we could have a chance to turn our lens a bit closer, it was very probable that the ancient language was way different than the more modern ones (from 40k-60 years ago afterwards). For example, can we really imagine a language without the pronoun 'I' (to symbolize 'self'), or a language without the concept of 'therefore' (to symbolize logical causality)? If that was possible, then the evolution of intelligence after the emergence of AMH can be taken as something like Operating System upgrade (We are now all very familiar with this, experiencing the automatic OS upgrade pushing from Big Tech companies like Apple/Microsoft), instead of CPU upgrade.
I appreciated these thoughts. I was struck by this: "If humans 'got smart' through some kind of feedback loop where sophisticated behaviors drove greater evolutionary or cultural selection for ever more sophisticated behaviors . . ."
I wonder whether it's necessary to link a feedback loop with selection at all. I'm thinking of the extended concept of mind in approaches related to embodied cognitive science, where "thinking" (both reflective and in the form of purposive action) is a dynamic between the brain and the environment in which it is living and acting. In those models, changes in the environment and changes in thinking are complementary, and restructuring the environment will, over time, restructure thinking--all independent of issues of genetic evolution and selection. As the social group inscribes more and more of its "thinking" in the lived social world, its actors' minds (not brains) are modified and make their own modifications in an incrementally new way. A feedback loop.
There was an ancient Chinese thinker named Xunzi who developed such a theory of human social evolution (although his version envisioned the initial structures of the social environment as being devised by a small number of sages who gained political power). His basic notion was that humans are distinct as a species primarily in their ability to formalize norms of behavior and inscribe their surroundings in ways that create a dynamic of constantly evolving cultural, technological, and economic institutions. "The human mind molds things not of its species to nurture its species," the term for 'nurturance' implying dynamic growth, not simply static sustenance. (Sorry for the intrusion of this theme, it just seemed such a neat parallel with the 'feedback loop' model.)
'The evolution and prehistory of Homo sapiens and its ancestors seems to weakly point against the “single discrete origin point for human intelligence” hypothesis.'
That must be the understatement of the entire article! Human uniqueness lies in the invention and use of complex tools, which depends on an integrated interplay of brain, hands (i.e. bipedalism), vocalisation (language) and socialisation. Clearly, this requires biological and cultural co-evolution, with a positive feedback loop creating a rapidly accelerating "upward spiral" (over perhaps hundreds of millennia, but still only a blink in geological time). Imagine the genetic mutations underlying all the necessary CNS re-wiring, and subtle distal anatomical changes!
Tool-making requires a concept of problem and solution, of before and after, of distant pasts and futures, of purposes and goals, i.e. teleologism -- and this underlies religious belief, an inevitable feature of all known human societies. If the rest of the world is here for our use and benefit, then we must also be here for someone else's purposes: QED. (I don't happen to believe that, but I can fully understand why many other people might.
My knowledge of human history pre-civilisation is very sparse but I see development like this:
1. Hominids start using tools. ~1 million years ago
2. Homo Sapiens start using much more sophisticated tools. ~100,000 years ago
3. Agriculture. ~10,000 years ago
4. Philosophy. ~2,500 years ago
5. Industrialisation. ~250 years ago
For these last three "great leaps forward" there was no significant change in humans genetically and yet there were huge gaps in time between them. It probably just takes a long time to consolidate past gains, then wait for the right conditions, before a new spark is struck.
The last significant genetic change likely happened between steps 1 and 2. I imagine looking at knapping provides the key, why did it take so long for improvements there (100 generations of knapping the exact same way?).
1. It's a mistake to think of computers as a technological breakthrough, it was facilitated by gradual improvements in mathematics, materials science, and engineering.
2. Based on this Rough Diamonds series about human intelligence that seems quite unlikely, it would also imply that some races of humans today lack those genetic advancements. Maybe they do but I think evidence points against it.
You probably already know what I mean, but I was suggesting agriculture was enable by cumulative changes in the genetics of domesticated plants/animals not changing ideas about how to produce food, so it's not really relevant to the topic of the history of cognition. Surely maths, material science and engineering all account as technology.
That means the history of big tech breakthroughs looks like:
1. Hominids start using tools. - required genetic changes to human intelligence.
2.more sophisticated tools.- required genetic changes to human intelligence.
3. Philosophy. - maybe required genetic changes to human intelligence.
4. Industrialisation. - maybe required genetic changes to human intelligence.
Yeah it's an unpalatable thought that not all extant groups of human have the same average cognitive abilities, but it would create a clear pattern.
I didn't know what you already meant so thanks for explaining.
Personally I see the adoption of agriculture as a lot more of a sudden change than a gradual one. Sudden adoption, over a generation or two, then gradual improvement (as with all things).
Personally I think a gradual transition seems a lot more likely. Hunter gatherers would supplement their diets with small amounts of farmed but genetically wild plants, then gradually increase the amount of farming as the genetics of their plants improves, either through deliberate selection or through some unconscious process, leading to better yields, a very slow process. I wouldn't have thought it's even possible to sustain yourself from purely farming wild plants.
The quick development of agriculture after ice age ended and the lack of evidence for nomadic farmers. Generation upon generation of nomadic farmers before they decide the grains are finally good enough for them to settle? I just don't see it.
With enough water (big rivers) it is likely possible to sustain a small community off wild grains. It is not as if hunting and gathering is impossible once you start farming, it just becomes much harder as you can no longer roam vast distances after the food. Trying to harvest planted crops will spending a lot of your time living away from them? I don't see how you keep animals or other humans from damaging your crops...
Thought capabilities were provided by space aliens, deciding to accelerate complexity of life to see how long it would take for the constructs to self-destruct.
Surely the development of complex speech must be an important factor. This enables cooperative action, social history, teaching of skills etc.. Thiswould have been a great evolutionary advantage.
I had trouble parsing part of this, so let me rewrite it in my own words:
There used to be a question of why there was 100ky of "anatomically modern humans" before there were "behaviorally modern humans." Recently, the evidence of behavioral modernity has been pushed back, so there no longer is a gap in time between anatomical modernity and behavioral modernity. But this gap was only the tip of the iceberg. It was a tidy way of talking about the mystery, but removing it doesn't remove the actual mystery; comparing anatomical modernity and behavioral modernity is a category error, because anatomical modernity is an endpoint, whereas behavioral modernity is a starting point. The brains got larger for millions of years, leveling off 150kyo, and then behavioral change accelerated, lots of new behavior starting then. But if the big brains lead to the modern behavior, why didn't the behavior accumulate for millions of years? This is the real mystery and moving modern behavior back 100k more years doesn't help address it.
yes, this seems right to me.
I'm surprised that you have not even mentioned language, something which took evolution of the jaw, tongue, throat as well as brain and which would have revolutionized hominid culture. Have you read Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". I don't know if I believe Jaynes, but he made the importance of language clear to me.
There's an interesting theory @ vectorsofmind.com.
> My thesis is that women discovered “I” first and then taught men about inner life. Creation myths are memories of when women forged humans into a dualistic species. That sounds fantastic, but we have to have evolved at some point (and it must have been fantastic). Further, weaker versions of the idea are still interesting. For example, I hold that snake venom was used in the first rituals to help communicate “I am.” Hence the snake in the garden, tempting Eve with self-knowledge. Even if those rituals do not figure in human evolution or our discovery of consciousness, it would be extraordinary if a psychedelic snake cult from the Paleolithic is remembered in Genesis as well as by the Aztecs. I’d watch that Netflix series!
> In several blog posts, I have developed what it would look like to discover “I, ” how it could have been communicated to others, why women would have been the vanguard, how it could evolve by degrees, and what sort of cultural and genetic marks such a process would leave. But these arguments are scattered across posts, and in the meantime, I’ve found more supporting evidence. For example, earlier, I mused that snake venom could have been used as a hallucinogen. It turns out that this is well documented in ritual settings, including among the architects of Western civilization.
> Epistemic status: Human origins are inherently speculative, and this is a passion project outside my area of expertise (psychology and AI). For this post, I’ve read maybe a dozen books and 100 papers. One way to think about this theory is interpreting data by asking, “How recently could humans have become sapient?” rather than using the institutional bias that seeks to push that date back as far as possible.
> The expulsion of Adam and Eve was the result of natural law, not a capricious god doling out contradictory commandments. Once Eve perceived herself as an agent and the voice in her head as her own, she could no longer dwell in blissful ignorance. She became responsible for her actions and aware of her mortality.
> (...) a snake tempts Eve to eat an apple, which is a rich source of rutin, a functional antivenom. Granted, the Bible itself does not mention apples. However, the Greeks do on several occasions.
> Snakes often appear next to functional antivenoms in myths about death, rebirth, and consciousness. This makes a lot of sense if their venom was ritualized as an entheogen. The object of the first religion would not have been literal death.
If AMHs are genetically identical with BMHs, I think the only reason why there is an intelligence gap is that there was some 'software upgrade' among the ancient humans, approx. 40k-60k years ago, roughly the time when humans landed in Australia. It was more of a cultural thing, instead of a physical/genetical thing. To be more specific, it can only be caused by the evolution of LANGUAGE. If we could have a chance to turn our lens a bit closer, it was very probable that the ancient language was way different than the more modern ones (from 40k-60 years ago afterwards). For example, can we really imagine a language without the pronoun 'I' (to symbolize 'self'), or a language without the concept of 'therefore' (to symbolize logical causality)? If that was possible, then the evolution of intelligence after the emergence of AMH can be taken as something like Operating System upgrade (We are now all very familiar with this, experiencing the automatic OS upgrade pushing from Big Tech companies like Apple/Microsoft), instead of CPU upgrade.
I appreciated these thoughts. I was struck by this: "If humans 'got smart' through some kind of feedback loop where sophisticated behaviors drove greater evolutionary or cultural selection for ever more sophisticated behaviors . . ."
I wonder whether it's necessary to link a feedback loop with selection at all. I'm thinking of the extended concept of mind in approaches related to embodied cognitive science, where "thinking" (both reflective and in the form of purposive action) is a dynamic between the brain and the environment in which it is living and acting. In those models, changes in the environment and changes in thinking are complementary, and restructuring the environment will, over time, restructure thinking--all independent of issues of genetic evolution and selection. As the social group inscribes more and more of its "thinking" in the lived social world, its actors' minds (not brains) are modified and make their own modifications in an incrementally new way. A feedback loop.
There was an ancient Chinese thinker named Xunzi who developed such a theory of human social evolution (although his version envisioned the initial structures of the social environment as being devised by a small number of sages who gained political power). His basic notion was that humans are distinct as a species primarily in their ability to formalize norms of behavior and inscribe their surroundings in ways that create a dynamic of constantly evolving cultural, technological, and economic institutions. "The human mind molds things not of its species to nurture its species," the term for 'nurturance' implying dynamic growth, not simply static sustenance. (Sorry for the intrusion of this theme, it just seemed such a neat parallel with the 'feedback loop' model.)
'The evolution and prehistory of Homo sapiens and its ancestors seems to weakly point against the “single discrete origin point for human intelligence” hypothesis.'
That must be the understatement of the entire article! Human uniqueness lies in the invention and use of complex tools, which depends on an integrated interplay of brain, hands (i.e. bipedalism), vocalisation (language) and socialisation. Clearly, this requires biological and cultural co-evolution, with a positive feedback loop creating a rapidly accelerating "upward spiral" (over perhaps hundreds of millennia, but still only a blink in geological time). Imagine the genetic mutations underlying all the necessary CNS re-wiring, and subtle distal anatomical changes!
Tool-making requires a concept of problem and solution, of before and after, of distant pasts and futures, of purposes and goals, i.e. teleologism -- and this underlies religious belief, an inevitable feature of all known human societies. If the rest of the world is here for our use and benefit, then we must also be here for someone else's purposes: QED. (I don't happen to believe that, but I can fully understand why many other people might.
My knowledge of human history pre-civilisation is very sparse but I see development like this:
1. Hominids start using tools. ~1 million years ago
2. Homo Sapiens start using much more sophisticated tools. ~100,000 years ago
3. Agriculture. ~10,000 years ago
4. Philosophy. ~2,500 years ago
5. Industrialisation. ~250 years ago
For these last three "great leaps forward" there was no significant change in humans genetically and yet there were huge gaps in time between them. It probably just takes a long time to consolidate past gains, then wait for the right conditions, before a new spark is struck.
The last significant genetic change likely happened between steps 1 and 2. I imagine looking at knapping provides the key, why did it take so long for improvements there (100 generations of knapping the exact same way?).
It's a mistake to think of agriculture as a technological breakthrough, it was facilitated by gradual improvements in domesticated crops/livestock.
Also I'm not sure it's safe to assume there weren't significant genetic changes between 3-4 and 4-5.
1. It's a mistake to think of computers as a technological breakthrough, it was facilitated by gradual improvements in mathematics, materials science, and engineering.
2. Based on this Rough Diamonds series about human intelligence that seems quite unlikely, it would also imply that some races of humans today lack those genetic advancements. Maybe they do but I think evidence points against it.
You probably already know what I mean, but I was suggesting agriculture was enable by cumulative changes in the genetics of domesticated plants/animals not changing ideas about how to produce food, so it's not really relevant to the topic of the history of cognition. Surely maths, material science and engineering all account as technology.
That means the history of big tech breakthroughs looks like:
1. Hominids start using tools. - required genetic changes to human intelligence.
2.more sophisticated tools.- required genetic changes to human intelligence.
3. Philosophy. - maybe required genetic changes to human intelligence.
4. Industrialisation. - maybe required genetic changes to human intelligence.
Yeah it's an unpalatable thought that not all extant groups of human have the same average cognitive abilities, but it would create a clear pattern.
I didn't know what you already meant so thanks for explaining.
Personally I see the adoption of agriculture as a lot more of a sudden change than a gradual one. Sudden adoption, over a generation or two, then gradual improvement (as with all things).
What makes you think that?
Personally I think a gradual transition seems a lot more likely. Hunter gatherers would supplement their diets with small amounts of farmed but genetically wild plants, then gradually increase the amount of farming as the genetics of their plants improves, either through deliberate selection or through some unconscious process, leading to better yields, a very slow process. I wouldn't have thought it's even possible to sustain yourself from purely farming wild plants.
The quick development of agriculture after ice age ended and the lack of evidence for nomadic farmers. Generation upon generation of nomadic farmers before they decide the grains are finally good enough for them to settle? I just don't see it.
With enough water (big rivers) it is likely possible to sustain a small community off wild grains. It is not as if hunting and gathering is impossible once you start farming, it just becomes much harder as you can no longer roam vast distances after the food. Trying to harvest planted crops will spending a lot of your time living away from them? I don't see how you keep animals or other humans from damaging your crops...
https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/742639/fevo-09-742639-HTML/image_m/fevo-09-742639-g001.jpg
Thought capabilities were provided by space aliens, deciding to accelerate complexity of life to see how long it would take for the constructs to self-destruct.
Surely the development of complex speech must be an important factor. This enables cooperative action, social history, teaching of skills etc.. Thiswould have been a great evolutionary advantage.