But I do recall watching a Steven Pinker video on swearing, and in brief he mentions that “contations” of words are known to origin from the limbic system, wheras denotation comes from the regular parts. This is what makes something like turrets possible.

Anyway, I’ll post the rest of the article when I get back today…

<— I misspoke. I should have said neocortical. Sorry about the mistake.

Ron- you make some great points but I think you must have misinterpreted something I said. Yes, many hunter-gatherers have comparatively shorter workdays than agriculturalists, pastoralists or industrialists. Maybe I didn’t make it clear that when I mentioned the surplus of time (and food supply) I was talking about the birth of a leisure class (or at least the predeccessors of the leisure class- the priestly elites) and the infusion of wealth into religious practice. I think this is relevant to your consideration of the effects of totalitarian agriculture, but it is important to remember than hunting and gathering is a general term used to described varied lifestyles such as the simple HG of nomadic !Kung San or the complex HG of settled northwestern Native American populations who adapted their HG technology to exploit the rich resources of rivers and coasts (and had a very hierarchical society). I didn’t mean to suggest that agriculture predates religion, just that agriculture (and other more advanced modes than simple HG) opened the way for religions to become more complex, or to use the terminology you brought up, “codified.”

FIrstly, I’m well aware of the existence of symbolic culture in modern hunter-gatherer communities. But it appears that I did in fact address something that was not exactly what Ab had in mind. My bad.

Ab, a book I’d recommend is Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained. The book is an attempt at explaining the cognitive and social underpinnings of religion. It talks about mythical beliefs from a memetic perspective, asking what sorts of ideas are most likely to be developed, remembered, correctly communicated, and spread. It also talks about the cultural development of major religions. One interesting thing that he said was that fundamentalism did not result from there being firm ideas initially codified thousands of years ago which some people held and hold onto rigorously. According to him, early on our major religions were not codified and were more fluid. Codification came somewhat later as a result of imitators providing similar religious products and insodoing taking away some of the power and sources of income of preceding religious service providers. Boyer essentially says that religious codification was in good part an act of branding and copyright making. *These* are the officially recognized churches of X. *These* are the churches where you can get real recognized religious services. Pay no attention to the imposters down the street. In fact, they are evil. Give us your allegiance and money. Follow our directions.

One of the common necessary substrates of both language and religions as we know them are capacity/proclivity of humanity to infer mindedness. According to Boyer and other cognitive scientists, this capacity to infer mindedness has overgeneralized to the point where we sometimes infer intelligence in nonhuman and, indeed, inanimate referents. Combine this with selective memory biases (e.g., confirmation bias, spurious correlation inferences) and mysterious earthly phenomena and you can get people postulating witches as explanations for illness, gods of thunder, and so on.

Regarding the tangential issue I took on in my first posting – i.e., the development of Big Religion (lol) – the factors I’ve discussed – 1) totalitarian agriculture, settling, population expansion and colonizing, trade and commerce and the development of long-term societies as opposed to small traveling bands of nomads; and 2) religious branding and demonizing of cultural/spiritual competitors (as they represent competition for loyalty, obedience and income) – seem to be plausible prominent factors. The unity of the development of totalitarian earth conquest philosophy and early judeo-christianity, if Daniel Quinn is correct, can’t be minimized.

According to Quinn, the story of the garden of eden was probably written not by early judeo-christians (or their forebearers), but by their victims. In his book “Ishmael”, Quinn paints a compelling picture wherein the eating from the tree of knowledge (which, as we all know represents attempting to take on the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of (the) God(s)), the exile from the garden and having to toil the fields was a metaphor for the advent of totalitarian agriculture. Quinn says that when our ancestors stopped living as hunter-gatherers and started totalitarian agriculture which involves deciding which species live and die, they left the garden (so it was self-exile) and by their own volition, began toiling the fields. The garden of eden was simply nature as it was in the particular region of the Middle East they were all in. It provided a sufficient amount of life resources (food, water, etc) for a certain number of humans, and it wasn’t all that difficult to procure these resources. Further, there was no real such thing as “work”, it was argued, because the amount of effort needed was much lower, it was done at times selected by the people and it was done simply as a part of day-to-day living, with far less of a work-leisure differentiation.

Relatedly, Quinn and some anthropologists argue (not uncontestly, however) that studies have suggested that the hunter-gatherers of the time may only have had to engage in hunting and gathering for about 2-3 hours a day 7 days a week, which is obviously far less time than people in our world work, be they in Canada, America, Korea (where I am now), China, India, Russia, Spain or Australia. This is relevant to Barry’s point about religion emerging because people finally had time for such developments after the development of agriculture.

According to Quinn, many of our Hobbesian views regarding the “prehistoric” world (i.e., the world before 10,000 years ago, when totalitarian agriculture culture began) such as that there was a persistent threat of famine, of secumbing to disease, or to being eaten by a bear are grossly exaggerated. Regarding being preyed upon by predators, Quinn says that while this did happen, it wasn’t something that was a huge problem for humanity. He said that predators tended to go after other species more so than humans because humans, with our abilities/tendencies to develop weapons and work in intelligent teams, represent relatively risky targets.

Regarding food availability, t’s basic ecology that an ecosystem can support a certain number of individuals of a given species. Populations will equilibriate at right around the ecosystem’s holding capacity. There will always be some famine because generally speaking, populations tend to approximate the holding capacity. Part of the mythology of Totalitarian Agriculture/Judeo-Christianity was that humans are special, that we should not be at the mercy of nature but rather nature should be at our mercy. And so we should strive to control nature and to conquer it and be fruitful and multiply. Through totalitarian agriculture, humans were able to increase yields dramatically which enabled/caused population expansion, which further motivated expanding colonization and manipulation of nature, which has often produced a number of unforeseen and deleterious consequences.

I’ll close by saying that I do not know that what is written above is true and, with the exception of the cognitive sciences, I am not highly educated in the areas just discussed. But I found the arguments to be worthy of consideration.

I read a couple papers on this being observed in chimpanzees when I took linguistics. Infants being pressured by their mothers to walk for themselves instead of being carried modified their calls and cries to get the response they wanted from their mothers: to be picked up and carried. But the ability of a chimp to (consciously?) modify its mode of communication is no where close to the level of symbolic communication that the first Homo religio population would have to master.

“I do find it plausible to say though that symbolic culture showed up before we did.”

That is possible but the lack of an adequate archeological record stands in the way. Also the question depends on what you mean by “modern humans,” and whether or not neanderthalensis is counted as a subspecies of modern humans. Species are to some degree arbitrary, since there was no point in, for example, the process of hominization when members of generation F sub1 couldn’t have bred successfully (incest aside) with members of the parent generation.

Obviously human populations were much more variable in the past (I use human to refer to all prehistoric hominids in this context) and our current fossil record does not represent the full extent of that variability across time.

Elephants have been discovered to bury their dead, and they are very social animals. When it comes to distinguishing different species of prehistoric hominins, australopithecines and apes, who speciated frequently in rapid bursts on more than one occassion, puts a researcher at a loss because of the problem of the species concept. Both species concepts, the biological and ecological concepts, are based on observations of contemporary animals, and then applied prehistorically. In human paleontology alone there is endless debate between lumpers and splitters, and as a student of the subject I tend toward the lumper’s side of the argument. Speciation really is a relative concept. I know that probably sounds like a radical thing but it’s a real problem for constructing lineages of prehistoric human ancestors. So even if it possible to pinpoint the time frame during which this capacity evolved for symbolic communication (and I think we can agree that the same faculties are essential for religious thought), there would still be intense and possibly irreconcilable debates between over which species it evolved in first. After all, office politics are not an exact science, and it would be idealistic and naive to suggest that scientists never act in their own interests in contradiction of overwhelming evidence. Paleontology is messy field. One of my professors actually calls human paleontology “The Academic Mafia” for this reason.

There are also limits to what we can know about human prehistory. For example, we can’t know everything about how the brain of a specimen was organized from its fossilized skull. Cranial capacity is variable within species, and though we can know the shape of the brain we can’t know much about its internal organization, which is a better indicator of intelligence than size alone. A basis for language in human evolution must include neuroscience.

Also, a language as sophisticated as any human language doesn’t necessarily have to be oral. It could be a sign language, and this is one of the oldest theories concerning neanderthal communication. Although a sign language can be structurally as sophisticated as a spoken language, there are practical considerations when one takes into account the constant eye-contact required to exchange information, whereas a spoken language confers obvious advantages in dangerous environments such as the ones that big game hunters like neanderthals would have faced.

“One theory even posits the evolution of increasingly sophisticated pathways of neurological control over the limbic system.”
That seems really really unlikely, though I should probably hear out the theory before making up my mind about it. But what you suggested is exactly what I want to find out Barry, the relation between to evolution of language and religion – what components of these might be in our living cousins. I don’t find it very plausible to say they evolved in tandem, though language must surely have helped set the rules tighter. I do find it plausible to say though that symbolic culture showed up before we did.
That’s what I’m doing right now, just gathering some of the articles/books I’ve read suggesting signs of language in living animals. I’ll post the second part when I’ve done that. In the meanwhile, check out Tecumseh Fitch’s web page and the link about the descending larynx is deer.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wtsf/