Monday, March 01, 2010
Brian Switek reports on recent archeology of a chimpanzee tool assemblage dated between 4300 and 2200 BP. We will definitely have to give up the idea that culture is uniquely human, unless perhaps we accept a contention that culture equates to language. What goes out the door with culture in this case? Historicity?
How natural is nature, I wonder. Has the concept passed its best-by date? And if we have to rework what it means to be a natural phenomenon, what sense do make of culture? Does an inhuman science even make sense, or must it remain fundamentally contradictory? A parahuman science?
In what ways are wild chimpanzees participants in our culture? What claims do they naturally have? Egalitarianism?
Labels: chimpanzees, culture, history, natality, physis, tools
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Adrien Meguerditchian emailed me some recent articles to allay my skepticism about evidence of handedness in nonhuman primates. One is in press, Meguerditchian et al., "Captive chimpanzees use their right hand to communicate with each other: Implications for the origin of the cerebral substrate for language," Cortex (2009), doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2009.02.013. The other one is Adrien Meguerditchian and Jacques Vauclair, "Contrast of hand preferences between communicative gestures and non-communicative actions in baboons: Implications for the origins of hemispheric specialization for language," Brain & Language (2008), doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.10.004. Meguerditchian's case is bolstered by the recent research. Longtime readers of this blog, nevertheless, will suspect that my skepticism is not easily shaken. In fact, however, I am leaning away from the belief that handedness is uniquely tied to human vocal speech. I remain uncertain about it. My skepticism in no way presupposes any closure on the question of evolutionary substrates for the pattern of lateralization evident in sapiens.
Labels: baboons, chimpanzees, chirality, gesture, hands, humans, language, Meguerditchian, primates
Thursday, October 01, 2009
The panthropologists need to explain Ardi. It's not that Ardi can't be explained by any possible panthropology, but the fossil evidence must be dealt with, which in this case means, among other things, dealing with an affirmation of great diversity among the hominoidea, hominidea, and to put a fine point on it, the hominini. Check out Nature's report on the unveiling of the oldest hominid fossil, Ardipithecus ramidus. Key takeaway: "humans did not evolve from ancient knuckle-walking chimpanzees, as has long been believed. The reports, in Science, illuminate how early phases of humans evolved along a separate lineage from the last common ancestor shared by early hominids and extinct apes."
The news staff at Scientific Blogging also stresses this point:
Until now, researchers have generally assumed that chimpanzees, gorillas and other modern African apes have retained many of the traits of the last ancestor they shared with humans—in other words, this presumed ancestor was thought to be much more chimpanzee-like than human-like. For example, it would have been adapted for swinging and hanging from tree branches, and perhaps walked on its knuckles while on the ground.
Ardipithecus challenges these assumptions, however. These hominids appear to have lived in a woodland environment, where they climbed on all fours along tree branches—as some of the Miocene primates did—and walked, upright, on two legs, while on the ground. They do not appear to have been knuckle-walkers, or to have spent much time swinging and hanging from tree-branches, especially as chimps do. Overall, the findings suggest that hominids and African apes have each followed different evolutionary pathways, and we can no longer consider chimps as "proxies" for our last common ancestor.
Labels: apes, Ardipithecus ramidus, chimpanzees, evolution, humans
Monday, September 07, 2009
From the Summary of Cultural transmission of tool use in bottlenose dolphins:
Cultural diversity within a single population has rarely been documented. In non-human primates, the only comparable case of a subculture within a population appears to be the grooming hand-clasp of chimpanzees in Mahale, Tanzania. In contrast with non-human primates, where culture has been demonstrated by using regional comparisons between populations, the observed vertical transmission of culture with a matriline of a single population creates a different spatial pattern. Thus, the operational definition of culture used in primatology does not capture cases as described in our study. We propose, therefore, to extend this definition to "include traditions that are habitual in some but not other individuals with overlapping home ranges, within the same population, where genetic and behavioral data are inconsistent with those individuals having acquired the behavior genetically."
Labels: chimpanzees, culture, dolphins, primates, tools
Consuetudinal tool use, evidenced in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), and humans, is probably a synapomorphy of the family Hominidae (see van Sheik et al. (1999), "The Conditions for Tool Use in Primates: Implications for the Evolution of Material Culture," Journal of Human Evolution, 36: 719–741; the article's hypothesis is that social tolerance is a condition for the development of material culture (i.e., consuetudinal tool use)). How strong is the evidence, then, that "an unprecedented level of behavioral developmental plasticity" is a hominini (Pan/Homo) synapomorphy (van Sheik (2004), "Book Review of Behavioural Diversity in Chimpanzees and Bonobos, Journal of Human Evolution, 46: 517–518)?
The possibility that consuetude represents a phyletic elaboration of plasticity doesn't preclude the tracing of our understanding of plasticity back to a primitive consuetutindal tribalism ("phylism"). We face a dilemma. The natural history of plasticity, like the natural history of reflexive consciousness, appears to leap out from the physis that precedes it. We can no more reasonably deny that an understanding of plasticity arises from human experience than we can deny phyletic origins of plasticity. A revolution has occurred at some point, to choose a metaphor, or, to choose another, the birth ("nature") of something new on earth, something rather paradoxical. However, vestiges of a parthenogenic fantasy may constrict our thinking here. Reciprocally, fantasial thoughts about plasticity appear to be constrained by the tribe, operating through a sphere of shared affects which steer the thinker back from frontiers of knowledge. We need to know how flexible plasticity is—and generally how plasticity works, what it does—before we can profitably determine that x or y degree of plasticity (supposing developmental plasticity admits of degrees, which there is some basis for if one looks at, for example, weaning times, or the period it takes to learn rudimentary locomotive skills, not to mention consuetudinal tool use) represents an unprecedented level of plasticity among Hominidae, Primates or, indeed, Animalia.
Labels: apes, chimpanzees, culture, development, evolution, humans, orangutans, plasticity, tools
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Nachmanovitch turns to Winnicott on play:
Like other manifestations of the Muse, the child is the voice of our inner knowing. The first language of this knowing is play. In this light, psychiatrist Donald Winnicott came to clarify the aim of psychological healing as "bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play. . . .It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self."
(p. 50)
How do we speak the first language of inner knowing? Playfully, creatively. With toys. Making toys of words and things. But if the language would have to be created isn't the knowingness then of the inner knowing thrown up in the air—don't worry, Fido will catch you. Sooner or later Fido will remember having thrown you up into the blue, inner knowing. Galumphing, in the sense anthropologist Stephen Miller attributes to the word. We galumph the whole person into discovery: "Oh, there's something I've thrown up in the air. It kind of looks like me." Now, does one really galumph though without ever letting the limbs touch the ground? Making a toy of our gait, as chimpanzees appear to do. Frequently I find myself talking with my inner chimpanzee. We like to galumph together.
Labels: chimpanzees, muses, Nachmanovitch, play, Winnicott
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Ape Gestures and Language Evolution, by Amy Pollick and Frans B. M. de Waal. From the discussion of the results:
Our data strongly support the gestural flexibility hypothesis according to which our closest primate relatives use brachiomanual gestures more flexibly across contexts than they do facial expressions and vocalizations. Gestures seem less closely tied to particular emotions, such as aggression or affiliation, hence possess a more adaptable function. Gestures are also evolutionarily younger, as shown by their presence in apes but not monkeys, and likely under greater cortical control than facial/vocal signals (see Introduction). This observation makes gesture a serious candidate modality to have acquired symbolic meaning in early hominins. As such, the present study supports the gestural origin hypothesis of language.
Labels: apes, bonobos, chimpanzees, cortex, de Waal, evolution, gesture, humans, language, noesis, Pollick
Monday, August 27, 2007
Is empathy grounded in the play of signs? I'm putting the question to Jesper Hoffmeyer even though others (Donald Favareau, for instance) have already expanded on his work and reformulated the problem. Hoffmeyer remains, however, an exemplar of the semiotic point of view on empathy. He sees empathy as a therapeutic response to a uniquely human existential terror stemming from the thought that one could be replaced, a thought that creates a split between an emotionally whole self and an emotionally neutral player who is free to contemplate his or her mortality (Signs of Meaning in the Universe, p. 132). He says:
The interchangability of the players implies an emotional and cognitive relationship between them. Human beings could never have learned to put themselves in someone else's psychological place if they had not already learned to see themselves reflected in that other person, to see the other person as a creature just like them.
The terror and the empathy go hand in hand and language is their medium. In actual fact it was not humanity, much less erectus, who engendered them. It was a little child. Lacan's reflection theory holds the key: the mutual empathy between mother and child provided the protection necessary to cope with the unleashing of the awful isolation inherent in the idea of "not."
(pp. 132-133)
Phenomena like atruism in chimpanzees suggest that either chimpanzees are more intellectually capable than Hoffmeyer gives them credit for (calling into question the uniqueness of the existential terror of imagining oneself as interchangable), even though they lack language. Such phenomena might also call into question the notion that empathy emerges as response to a kind of cognition. We needn't turn to the behavioural studies of primates however in order to philosophically question this premise. Kojima, for instance, talks about the ontic meaning of the other being present to us immanently prior to any perspective that would allow for an exchange of viewpoints, and he speaks of an ontological anticipation of alterity that precedes any introjection of one's own being into other bodies. Favareau might tell us that such ontological anticipations are also a kind of neurological interpretation (and therefore also "cognitive"), but I wonder if instead we might question the semiotic nature of empathy.
If empathy is semiotic in anything like a Peircean sense, it would seem to involve multiple interpretants. The stubbed toe affects its owner and any empathetic witnesses at once. I can't say whether Peirce ever provided a satisfactory account of empathy or compassion, but the very idea of com-passion challenges my understanding of the idea that sign relations are purely triadic. Sign relations in empathy appear to be tetrahedral, at the least. I see meaning in the relationship between interpretants, but I don't know what semiotic model would be capable of exploring it.
I've quoted Jean-Luc Nancy before as saying:
Meaning is the exhibition of the foundation without foundation, which is not an abyss but simply the with of things that are, insofar as they are. Logos is dialogue, but the end of dialogue is not to overcome itself in "consensus"; its reason is to offer, and only to offer (giving it tone and intensity), the cum-, the with of meaning, the plurality of its springing forth.
(Being Singular Plural, pp. 86-87).
Now I want to ask whether meaning is always meaning towards something, or more simply meaning something. (A secondary question concerns whether meaning is always for somebody–I'll leave that aside for the moment.) Is meaning towards a thing qualitatively the same as meaning towards another person? Nancy invites us to roam in a region of meaning between singularities. Can this meaning of the with also be thought of as a meaning towards, or would that necessarily imply a kind of foundation that Nancy rejects? I'm not sure.
All told the semiotic depiction of empathy feels a little cold to me. Perhaps there are senses in which empathy is grounded in the play of signs, but I'm having a hard time envisaging a semiotic approach that doesn't obliterate the meaning of the other or, alternatively, the meaning of being with others. What sense of meaning, if any, does the phenomenon of empathy call for?
Labels: chimpanzees, compassion, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kojima, meaning, Nancy, Peirce, uniqueness