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We Have Always Been Transhuman
There is an absolutely stellar article in the New York Times about Dr. Richard Wrangham’s essay “Catching Fire.” Go read it now. If you finish it and want to know even more, like I did, go read the Slate review as well.
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COMMENTS
Posted by Abraham on 06/10 at 11:20 PM
I'm afraid I find Mr. Wrangham's theory anything but brilliant. It doesn't stand up to critical thinking.
He writes: "Apes began to morph into humans, and the species Homo erectus emerged some two million years ago, Mr. Wrangham argues, for one fundamental reason: We learned to tame fire and heat our food."
Who's the "We"? If "we" means humans, then the morphing took place before the taming of fire, making the taming of fire irrelevant to the evolution. If "we" means the apes (I realize he means "ape-like" creatures), then, assuming the centrality of fire-taming, there was no need to morph any more!
Posted by Abraham's uncle on 06/11 at 09:06 AM
It would seem that your logic is what doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
To be true (as in logical), this makes several assumptions that clearly are unscientific:
"If "we" means the apes (I realize he means "ape-like" creatures), then, assuming the centrality of fire-taming, there was no need to morph any more! "
Your idea of critical thinking is amusing.
Posted by NeeAnderTall on 06/11 at 03:44 PM
Anthropologists need to be on the lookout for the chimps' "Quest for Fire" scenario. Then we will know who is mankinds' heir.
Posted by NickC on 06/11 at 03:52 PM
This guy Wrangham's work has been around for a while (I've seen it cited as early as 2001). Things got dry where our ancestors were about 2 million yrs ago, so they adapted. That somehow included eating tubers and one dropping into a fire is not an unlikely first cooked meal. Then it becomes a good idea to figure out how to make a fire and do it again, and so on.
The thing about him saying this is the beginning of male-dominated culture is a bit questionable. Cooking women don't need more protection than non-cooking women. What probably happened was the less volume of food meant smaller pelvises for women, which meant a narrower birth canal, which meant a baby that had to grow more brain after birth, which took more looking after, which meant an advantage for men to spend more time helping the kids grow. This is the beginning of the pair-bond, and homo ergaster is when male bodies shrunk compared to other apes and hominids. So actually this invention of cooking is not the beginning of male dominance culture, just the changing of the society from group-dominated to a single male and female pair, i.e. the invention of the husband and wife. That's the idea, anyway.
@abraham: His point is that we formed what make up our human features starting with this moment. Before we started using fire and cooking food, we were not human in the sense that we had small brains, hair all over, etc., etc., that which morphologically and behaviorally distinguishes us from other apes. In an arid place there may have been enough natural fire that we started cooking by learning to eat the cooked food before "taming" fire over time. Just taming fire itself didn't make us human and we have never "stopped morphing" ever, but started the longer process.
Posted by Abrahams doddering aunt on 06/11 at 04:26 PM
Evolution is not a terminal process.
Posted by JoJo on 06/11 at 05:14 PM
so, at the risk of babbling ignorantly (I'm no grad student or science major for that matter, but I do read a bit)...I wanted to comment on your theory about culture, technology and evolution. I couldn't agree more. I've been pondering for awhile as to how culture must effect our sexual selection and hence our evolutionary path. If people alter themselves to appear more desirable than the attractiveness given to them genetically, is this not changing what may have been a more natural sexual selection? Richard Dawkins got me to thinking in the Ancestor's Tale (tail, lol) about the role memes may have played in our evolution. Can memes not be a form of technology and/or culture? The conveyance of an idea can change the course of evolution?
Cool stuff, glad I found your blog, I plan on bookmarking it and checking in from time to time.
thanks.
Posted by Abraham on 06/11 at 06:10 PM
Abe's Uncle: In my critique, I was not criticizing evolution at all, I was criticizing Wrangham's logic. You didn't address my argument at all, though you criticized me for it.
Posted by Kyle Munkittrick on 06/13 at 08:26 AM
@ NickC: I agree his male-dominated society stuff is a bit questionable. I don't know if your answer is any better either, not because your logic is faulty (it makes sense to me) but in that it's just so hard to know what it was like then. Also, we don't know which aspects of society were "male" and which were "female," so it's hard to say who did what.
@ JoJo: Thank you! I plan on doing some stuff with Dawkins and sexual selection fairly soon. What you're talking about, "memes as a form of technology and/or culture" is absolutely possible and Darwin, Dawkins, Dennett and feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz all discuss how. It's great. I'm drafting some stuff on that as we speak!
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