Category Archives: Biocultural Evolution

Issues and Ideas about Our Intertwined Biological and Cultural Inheritance, Environments, and Identities

Stories Without Words

Anthropology and Philosophy, Biocultural Evolution
Phylogenetic relationships among extant anthropoid primate lineages, including Old World monkeys, apes, and humans. Evolutionarily derived features hypothesized to distinguish embodied niche construction in the nested great ape-hominin and hominin-only clades, respectively, are highlighted in the text boxes lower right. CC-BY 2014.
by Aaron Jonas Stutz

Awareness means slightly different things in different situations. We become aware of a pattern or change in our immediate surroundings, via sensory cognition. We become aware of patterns or changes over time through an interaction among sensory experience, emotional experience, and memory. And we become aware of abstract notions and imagined possibilities through mindful experiences: dreams, sudden awareness of dramatic fears or comic surprises, or learned, disciplined introspection. All of these forms of awareness involve our central nervous systems amping up physiological and cognitive activity in response to (external or internal) stimulus. But we usually don’t think about these diverse awareness processes together … let alone how they might interact with one another to shape more complex, hard-to-grasp phenomena like consciousness.

Those interactions among awareness processes are probably VERY SIGNIFICANTLY recursive for us. Awareness of intestinal discomfort or simply heightened awareness gained from greater oxygenation with a faster heartbeat and vasodilation could come from a sudden exciting memory, from an extrasomatic stimulus, or from a learned association between the perceived environmental feature and the constructed memory. In turn, the sustained awareness committed to introspection and decision-making can mediate bodily discomfort or excitement, leading to less agitation and more efficient interaction with the extrasomatic environment in the future. It may also have a cascading effect on associations with anxiety-related memories, altering how we related to our past, how we associate learning with earlier experiences. Continue reading Stories Without Words →

Action as Embodied Narrative

Anthropology and Philosophy, Biocultural Evolution, Human Sociality, Culture, and Power

Or, The Anthropology and Psychology of Doing Nothing … and Then Doing

Painting, Smoking, Eating. By Philip Guston, 1972. From wikipaintings.org.

In our recursive, never-ending engagement with the world (and thus, with each other … and with ourselves), we humans generally create our own resolve about how that world is supposed to be.

And we do that by convincing ourselves that we can heroically make clear sense of muddled situations.

Should I add another spoonful of sugar to my tea? Or should I turn my concern for health and longevity into fast principle? Should I give into small desires, or should I always moderate? Objectively, reasonable people can provide arguments that on the balance, it’s better to treat yourself, at least once in a while … but maybe, it’s actually better not to, it’s actually better to develop stronger mind-body discipline.

In other words, this is a simple case–as professors so often say, encouraging their students to dare to pose critical questions–of there being “no one right answer.”

To be sure, most of us find that in the real-time emotional experience of moments–those seconds and minutes under which we maintain acute cognitive attention on a given situation–we may strongly resolve to act according to one answer or the other. Making that embodied decision through action makes us feel good.

Continue reading Action as Embodied Narrative →

We’ve Seen Our Carrying Capacity … And It Is Us

Biocultural Evolution, Contemporary Identities, Human Sociality, Culture, and Power
An extraordinarily simple model of how human population grows in feedback with our environmental carrying capacity was introduced by Joel E. Cohen in 1995. Shown here by the orange curve, the model allows us to interpolate the pattern of demographic change between historical estimates of global population in 1 CE (ranging between ca. 200-400 million) and the registration of our global census size reaching 7 billion in 2012. Note how the Cohen model curve fits the historical estimates much better than a comparable interpolation based on a traditional logistic growth model with a fixed environmental carrying capacity. Moreover, the Cohen model is consistent with UN population projections of slowing population growth through 2100 CE. It is expected--based on recent trends of falling fertility--that human population will fall somewhere between 6 and 17 billion in the year 2100, involving stalled or negative population growth.
An extraordinarily simple model of how human population grows in feedback with our environmental carrying capacity was introduced by Joel E. Cohen in 1995. Shown here by the orange curve, the model allows us to interpolate the pattern of demographic change between historical estimates of global population in 1 CE (ranging between ca. 200-400 million) and the registration of our global census size reaching 7 billion in 2012. Note how the Cohen model curve fits the historical estimates much better than a comparable interpolation based on a traditional logistic growth model with a fixed environmental carrying capacity. Moreover, the Cohen model is consistent with UN population projections of slowing population growth through 2100 CE. It is expected–based on recent trends of falling fertility–that human population will fall somewhere between 6 and 17 billion in the year 2100, involving stalled or negative population growth.

Nearly twenty years ago, the mathematical ecologist Joel E. Cohen published a landmark book scientifically evaluating the question, “How many people can the Earth support?” In a companion article in the journal Science, Cohen introduced and explained what he called a mathematical cartoon of human population change. He made two very simple suggestions about how we should alter our assumptions concerning the relationship between our population size and the ecosystem resources that feed its growth. First, Cohen said, don’t worry first and foremost about absolute physical limits to key resources–of fresh water or arable land, say. Second, worry more about the social relationship between the number of people and the efficiency of economic production.

Mathematically, this involves a minor change in notation. We’ll get to that in a moment, but it is worth noting that it is almost absurdly simple.

Let’s consider the traditional model that Cohen wanted to update. The classic logistic growth model represents how finite resources will limit a population’s growth–specifically when there is a constant population level, denoted by the letter K, at which that population’s aggregate extraction, consumption, and impact on resources is in equilibrium with the wider ecosystemic renewal of those resources. K–or the population’s ecological carrying capacity–is known as the largest size the population can reach while leaving just enough material, nutrients, and energy to sustain demographic replacement in the next generation. In nature, a population at this ecological limit would not literally be in perfect harmony from one generation to the next. But it is an equilibrium level to which slight fluctuations in population growth or decline will return. What did Cohen change? He suggested that we should no longer see K as a constant. Rather, we should see carrying capacity as a factor that changes over time. Thus, he suggested designating carrying capacity as a mathematical function of time, K(t), which would vary in a mutually causal relationship with population change.

Continue reading We’ve Seen Our Carrying Capacity … And It Is Us →

Anthropology and Philosophy IV

Anthropology and Philosophy, Biocultural Evolution, Teaching-Learning-Thinking
The production of kolam designs is traditionally done by women in Tamil Nadu, India, to welcome guests while beguiling and trapping evil spirits. Alfred Gell, in his ground-breaking work on the anthropology of art (1998), notes that the hierarchical and sometimes-fractal structure of the kolam design exerts agency on social beliefs and practices that constitute household formation, the family's connection to wider society, and cosmological conceptions of order and chaos. Thus, artistic products stand in an asymmetrically reciprocal, non-nested hierarchical relationship to the beliefs and practices that exert agency on these products. Photo cropped from user Arulraja's contribution to wikipedia.org, "Kolam in front of the House during House warming in Tamil Nadu."
The production of kolam designs is traditionally done by women in Tamil Nadu, India, to welcome guests while beguiling and trapping evil spirits. Alfred Gell, in his ground-breaking work on the anthropology of art (1999), notes that the hierarchical and sometimes-fractal structure of the kolam design exerts agency on social beliefs and practices that constitute household formation, the family’s connection to wider society, and cosmological conceptions of order and chaos. Thus, artistic products stand in an asymmetric, partially reciprocal, non-nested hierarchical relationship to the beliefs and practices that exert agency on these products.
Photo cropped from user Arulraja’s contribution to wikipedia.org, “Kolam in front of the House during House warming in Tamil Nadu.”

The Material Process of Being in–and through–the Symbolic Matrix

This post is the next-to-last in my five-part series on Anthropology and Philosophy. Of course, the general theme of how these two disciplines have and may interconnect is rather open-ended. I’ve chosen to focus on particular issues that really strike me as highlighting:

  1. parallel trends between disciplinary specializations and between the disciplines that could productively be drawn together–e.g., insights into the open-endedness and consequent, inevitable logical inconsistencies of both formal and everyday logical representation systems;
  2. issues and insights from anthropological research that can benefit philosophical inquiry–e.g., Rappaport’s (1979) argument that in complex self-regulating systems, the most relevant Aristotelian level of causality is that of formal cause, underscoring the relationships among the system components; and
  3. how the theme of biocultural connections can further contribute to a broader, interdisciplinary understanding of human existence and experience.

This post deals partly with the second theme. This is really a post about how the late British anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998) elegantly clarified and expanded the applicability of philosopher C.S. Peirce’s ideas to understanding human interaction with and agency in the world. Yet, this is more than just a summary of Gell’s own ideas, as they also inspire a more profound biocultural synthesis. Thus, this post also covers the more general–and admittedly ambitious–third theme, which is also the focus of a manuscript that I’m preparing for submission to a special issue of the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, dealing with “the future of embodied cognition.”

The main point of this post is that human linguistic communication is not only richer in embodied experience than we usually acknowledge, but it is also more thoroughly shaped and constrained by symbols and their indexical interconnections than scientific accounts of human social interaction usually assume.

Continue reading Anthropology and Philosophy IV →

Who’s a Freak?

Anthropology and Philosophy, Biocultural Evolution, Contemporary Identities, Teaching-Learning-Thinking

What to make of our ancestors and distant relatives, separated from us in time and space? Do we emphasize our connections, symbolically tying us to something bigger–and even potentially boundariless, conceptually defying the impossibility of the close contact from which we build our daily relationships with loved ones and friends? Or do we see those only distantly related to us as an unambiguous–and unambiguously negative–counterpoint to our selves and our locations? … As in, “Thank heavens we’re us and not them, here and not there!” Or, “At least we’re not freaks like them.”

Continue reading Who’s a Freak? →