What if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is inaccurate? What if the way you live now affects the life expectancy of your descendants? Evolutionary thinking is having a revolution . . .

Oliver Burkeman The Guardian, Friday 19 March 2010 Article history
Epigenetics suggests your lifestyle could affect the lifespan of your grandchildren. Photograph: Zena Hollyway/Corbis

The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There’s a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.

The scientists are baffled, until a Christian member of the team dimly recalls something and rushes to fetch a Bible. He thumbs through it until he reaches the Book of Joshua, chapter 10, in which Joshua asks God to stop the world for . . . “about a full day!” Uproar in the computer lab. The astronomers have happened upon proof that God controls the universe on a day-to-day basis, that the Bible is literally true, and that by extension the “myth” of creation is, in fact, a reality. Darwin was wrong – according to another creationist rumour, he’d recanted on his deathbed, anyway – and here, at last, is scientific evidence!

Inevitably, those of us who aren’t professional scientists have to take a lot of science on trust. And one of the things that makes it so easy to trust the standard view of evolution, in particular, is amply illustrated by the legend of the Nasa astronomers: the doubters are so deluded or dishonest that one needn’t waste time with them. Unfortunately, that also makes it embarrassingly awkward to ask a question that seems, in the light of recent studies and several popular books, to be growing ever more pertinent. What if Darwin’s theory of evolution – or, at least, Darwin’s theory of evolution as most of us learned it at school and believe we understand it – is, in crucial respects, not entirely accurate?

Such talk, naturally, is liable to drive evolutionary biologists into a rage, or, in the case of Richard Dawkins, into even more of a rage than usual. They have a point: nobody wants to provide ammunition to the proponents of creationism or “intelligent design”, and it’s true that few of the studies now coming to public prominence are all that revolutionary to the experts. But in the culture at large, we may be on the brink of a major shift in perspective, with enormous implications for how most of us think about how life came to be the way it is. As the science writer David Shenk puts it in his new book, The Genius in All of Us, “This is big, big stuff – perhaps the most important [discoveries] in the science of heredity since the gene.”

Take, to begin with, the Swedish chickens. Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks’ “gene expression” – the way certain genes are turned “on” or “off”, bestowing any given animal with specific traits. The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring.

The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material – strands of DNA – is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature’s traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn’t news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what’s news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn’t, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans.

One study, again from Sweden, looked at lifespans in Norrbotten, the country’s northernmost province, where harvests are usually sparse but occasionally overflowing, meaning that, historically, children sometimes grew up with wildly varying food intake from one year to the next. A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man’s grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren’s lifespans, years before your grandchildren – or even your children – are a twinkle in anybody’s eye.

It might not be immediately obvious why this has such profound implications for evolution. In the way it’s generally understood, the whole point of natural selection – the so-called “modern synthesis” of Darwin’s theories with subsequent discoveries about genes – is its beautiful, breathtaking, devastating simplicity. In each generation, genes undergo random mutations, making offspring subtly different from their parents; those mutations that enhance an organism’s abilities to thrive and reproduce in its own particular environment will tend to spread through populations, while those that make successful breeding less likely will eventually peter out.

As years of bestselling books by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others have seeped into the culture, we’ve come to understand that the awesome power of natural selection – frequently referred to as the best idea in the history of science – lies in the sheer elegance of the way such simple principles have generated the unbelievable complexities of life. From two elementary notions – random mutation, and the filtering power of the environment – have emerged, over millennia, such marvels as eyes, the wings of birds and the human brain.

Yet epigenetics suggests this isn’t the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply “offering up” a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were “obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them”. As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn’t right about how giraffes’ necks came to be so long. But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. “Today,” notes David Shenk, “any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can . . .”

Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it’s not the only one. We’ve learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection – meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that’s introduced from elsewhere. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. The researchers Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfield conclude that, on average, a bacterium may have obtained 10% of its genes from other organisms in its environment.

To an outsider, this is mind-blowing: since most of the history of life on earth has been the history of micro-organisms, the evidence for horizontal transfer suggests that a mainly Darwinian account of evolution may be only the latest version, applicable to the most recent, much more complex forms of life. Perhaps, before that, most evolution was based on horizontal exchange. Which gives rise to a compelling philosophical puzzle: if a genome is what defines an organism, yet those organisms can swap genes freely, what does it even mean to draw a clear line between one organism and another? “It’s natural to wonder,” Goldenfield told New Scientist recently, “if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level.” In natural selection, we all know, the fittest win out over their rivals. But what if you can’t establish clear boundaries between rivals in the first place?

It is a decade since the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig Palmer published The Natural History of Rape. In the book, they made an argument that – however obnoxious at first glance – seemed, to many, to follow straightforwardly from the logic of natural selection. Evolution tells us that the traits that flourish down the generations are the ones that help organisms reproduce. Evolutionary psychology argues that there’s no reason to exclude psychological traits. And since rape is indeed a trait that occurs all too frequently in human society, it follows that a desire to commit rape must be adaptive. There must be a genetic basis for it – a “rape gene”, in the words of some media stories following the book’s publication – because, in prehistoric times, those men who possessed the tendency would reproduce more successfully than those who didn’t. Therefore, the authors concluded, rape was – to use a loaded term that has been getting Darwinians in trouble since Darwin – “natural”.

Understandably, the book was hugely controversial. But by the time it was published, there was nothing all that radical about the idea that natural selection might be able to illuminate any and every aspect of human behaviour. Evolutionary psychology, in the hands of various practitioners, sought to explain why militarism is so prevalent in human societies, or why men tend to dominate women in so many hierarchical organisations. If the field seems less politically charged these days, that is only because it has permeated our consciousness so deeply that it has become less questioned.

For much of the late Noughties, a week never seemed to pass without one new book or news story attributing some facet of modern-day life to the evolutionary past: men were more prone to sexual jealousy than women because a woman who conceives becomes unavailable for imminent future acts of reproduction; men preferred women with waist-to-hip ratios of 0.7 because of natural selection. It explained music and art and why we reward senior executives with top-floor corner offices (because we evolved to want a clear view of our enemies approaching across the savannah). Leftwing and feminist critics did frequently misinterpret evolutionary psychology, imagining that when scholars described some trait as adaptive, they meant it was morally justifiable. But that was how many such findings – often better described as speculations – came to be believed. We’re not exactly saying it’s right for, say, men to sleep around, evolutionary psychologists would observe with a knowing sigh, but . . . well, good luck trying to change millennia of evolved behaviour.

Far more than biologists, evolutionary psychologists bought in to the ultra-simple version of natural selection, and so they stand to lose far more from advances in our understanding of what’s really been going on. They were always prone to telling “just-so stories” – spinning plausible tales about why some trait might be adaptive, instead of demonstrating that it was – and numerous recent studies have begun to chip away at what evidence there was. (That waist-to-hip ratio finding, for example, doesn’t seem to hold up in the face of international and historical research.) And now, if epigenetics and other developments are coming to suggest that environment can alter heredity, the very terms of the debate – of nature versus nurture – suddenly become shaky. It’s not even a matter of settling on a compromise, a “mixture” of nature and nurture. Rather, the concepts of “nature” and “nurture” seem to be growing meaningless. What does “nature” even mean if you can nurture the nature of your descendants?

This is one central argument of Shenk’s new book, subheaded Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong. All our popular notions about talent and “genetic gifts”, he points out, start to collapse if the eating habits of Tiger Woods’s ancestors, for example, might have played a role in Woods’s golfing abilities. (Woods always crops up in discussions on the origins of genius; more recently, he has started cropping up in evolutionary psychology discussions about whether promiscuity is inevitable.)

“What all this evidence shows is that we need a much more subtle and nuanced understanding of Darwinism and natural selection,” Shenk says. “I think that’s inevitably going to happen among scientists. The question is how much nuance will carry over into the public sphere . . . it’s really funny how difficult it is to have this conversation, even with a lot of people who understand the science. We’re stuck with a pretty limited way of viewing all this, and I think part of that comes from the terms” – such as nature and nurture – “that we have.”

Among the arsenal of studies at Shenk’s disposal is one published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience, involving mice bred to possess genetically inherited memory problems. As small recompense for having been bred to be scatterbrained, they were kept in an environment full of stimulating mouse fun: plenty of toys, exercise and attention. Key aspects of their memory skills were shown to improve, and crucially so did those of their offspring, even though the offspring had never experienced the stimulating environment, even as foetuses.

“If a geneticist had suggested as recently as the 1990s that a 12-year-old kid could improve the intellectual nimbleness of his or her future children by studying harder now,” writes Shenk, “that scientist would have been laughed right out of the hall.” Not so now.

And then there is Jerry Fodor, the American philosopher. I started reading What Darwin Got Wrong, the new book he has co-authored with the cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, one morning, along with that day’s first coffee. A few pages later, as the coffee kicked in, I grasped with astonishment what Fodor had done. He hadn’t just identified evidence that natural selection was more complicated than previously thought – he’d uncovered a glaring flaw in the whole notion! Natural selection, he explains, simply “cannot be the primary engine of evolution”. I got up and refilled my cup. But by the time I returned, his argument had slipped from my grasp. Suddenly, he seemed obviously wrong, tied up in philosophical knots of his own creation. I alternated between these two convictions. Was Fodor’s critique so devastatingly correct that his critics – Dawkins, Dennett, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn, and many others – simply couldn’t see it? Had he actually managed to . . . but then it slipped away again, vanishing into mental fog.

I called Fodor and asked him to explain his point in language an infant school pupil could understand. “Can’t be done,” he shot back. “These issues really are complicated. If we’re right that Darwin and Darwinists have missed the point we’ve been making for 150 years, that’s not because it’s a simple point and Darwin was stupid. It’s a really complicated issue.”

Fodor’s objection is a distant cousin of one that rears its head every few years: doesn’t “survival of the fittest” just mean “survival of those that survive”, since the only criterion of fitness is that a creature does, indeed, survive and reproduce? The American rightwing noisemaker Ann Coulter makes the point in her 2006 pro-creationist tirade Godless: The Church of American Liberalism. “Through the process of natural selection, the ‘fittest’ survive, [but] who are the ‘fittest’? The ones who survive!” she sneers. “Why, look – it happens every time! The ’survival of the fittest’ would be a joke if it weren’t part of the belief system of a fanatical cult infesting the Scientific Community.”

This argument, perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive, not least because it is a reasonable criticism of some pop-Darwinism. In fact, though, it’s entirely possible for scientists to measure fitness using criteria other than survival, and thus to avoid circular logic. For example, you might hypothesise that speed is a helpful thing to have if you’re an antelope, then hypothesise the kind of leg structure you’d want to have, as an antelope, in order to run fast; then you’d examine antelopes to see if they do indeed have something approximating this kind of leg structure, and you’d examine the fossil record, to see if other kinds of leg died out.

Fodor’s point is more complex than this, although it’s also possible that it is not really a point at all: several reviews of the book by professional evolutionary theorists and philosophers have concluded that it is, indeed, nonsense. As far as I can make out, it can be summarised in three steps. Step one: Fodor notes – undeniably correctly – that not every trait a creature possesses is necessarily adaptive. Some just come along for the ride: for example, genes that express as tameness in domesticated foxes and dogs also seem to express as floppy ears, for no evident reason. Other traits are, as logicians say, “coextensive”: a polar bear, for example, has the trait of “whiteness” and also the trait of “being the same colour as its environment”. (Yes, that’s a brain-stretching, possibly insanity-inducing statement. Take a deep breath.) Step two: natural selection, according to its theorists, is a force that “selects for” certain traits. (Floppy ears appear to serve no purpose, so while they may have been “selected”, as a matter of fact, they weren’t “selected for”. And polar bears, we’d surely all agree, were “selected for” being the same colour as their environment, not for being white per se: being white is no use as camouflage if snow is, say, orange.)

Step three is Fodor’s coup de grace: how, he says, can that possibly be? The whole point of Darwinian evolution is that it has no mind, no intelligence. But to “select for” certain traits – as opposed to just “selecting” them by not having them die out – wouldn’t natural selection have to have some kind of mind? It might be obvious to you that being the same colour as your environment is more important than being white, if you’re a polar bear, but that’s because you just ran a thought-experiment about a hypothetical situation involving orange snow. Evolution can’t run thought experiments, because it can’t think. “Darwin has a theory that centrally turns on the notion of ’selection-for’,” says Fodor. “And yet he can’t give an account – nobody could give an account – of how natural selection could distinguish between correlated traits. He waffles.”

Those of us baffled by this argument can take solace in the fact that we’re not alone. The general response to Fodor among evolutionary thinkers has been a mixture of derision and awkwardness, as if one of their previously esteemed colleagues had entered the senior common room naked. Says Dennett, via email: “Jerry Fodor’s book is a stunning demonstration of how abhorrence of an idea (Jerry’s visceral dislike of evolutionary thinking) can derange an otherwise clever thinker . . . a responsible academic is supposed to be able to control irrational impulses, [but] Fodor has simply collapsed in the face of his dread and composed some dreadfully bad arguments.” What Darwin Got Wrong, Dennett concludes, is “a book that so transparently misconstrues its target that it would be laughable were it not such dangerous mischief”.

It would be jawdroppingly surprising, to say the least, were Fodor to be right. A safer, if mealy-mouthed, conclusion to draw is that his work acts as an important warning to those of us who think we understand natural selection. It’s probably not a bankrupt concept, as Fodor claims. But nor should laypeople assume that it’s self-evidently simple and exhaustively true.

The irony in all this is that Darwin himself never claimed that it was. He went to his deathbed protesting that he’d been misinterpreted: there was no reason, he said, to assume that natural selection was the only imaginable mechanism of evolution. Darwin, writing before the discovery of DNA, knew very well that his work heralded the beginning of a journey to understand the origins and development of life. All we may be discovering now is that we remain closer to the beginning of that journey than we’ve come to think.

Further reading
• From Time magazine, an excellent piece on epigenetics: http://bit.ly/5Kyj5q
• The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, by David Shenk, is published by Doubleday. What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is published by Profile, price £20
• For more on “horizontal evolution” see New Scientist: http://bit.ly/4zzAsr
• Also from New Scientist, more on the role of viruses in evolution: http://bit.ly/bD4NLC

“Do materialists really think that language just ‘evolved’, like finches’ beaks …?” – AN Wilson, ‘Why I believe again’ New Statesman April 6 2009

“We are annoying to the leopard because our ancestor stole fire from theirs” – South Amerindian story

What kind of animal are humans? To the crude materialist we are, according to taste, chiefly animal; bundles of needs, habits and reactions; savage or simple. To the spiritual believer, animal matter required something extra, something originally separate, to become human. Is human culture then just another kind of animal behaviour? What does it mean to trace humanity’s development from nature to society? What is the ‘missing link’ between natural history and anthropology? If animals communicate, and they do, is there anything special about human language?

Darwin’s dog
In the Descent of man, Charles Darwin argues that many capacities of human beings have their origin in the basic abilities of animals – to communicate, to feel affection for one’s young, entailing self-sacrifice, and to appraise the immediate environment.

He takes as an example something close to home: “My dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly disregarded by the dog, had anyone stood near it. As it was, every time that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked.” No doubt, the dog was confused, understanding that the movement, as Darwin puts it, “indicated the presence of some strange living agent”. The dog had learnt that the movement was linked to a presence, perhaps a member of Darwin’s family, the sound being similar to a woman’s crinoline skirts. Yet the cause of the noise was invisible.

Darwin adds that this presumption of invisible life may be the animal source of ancient people’s belief in spiritual agencies: that is, attributing agitation in the world to a human-like presence with “the same passions, the same love of vengeance or simplest form of justice, and the same affections they themselves experienced”.1

The human then starts with the same capabilities as other animals. Frederick Engels, in his classic Origin of the family, sketches out human development in terms of the freeing of hands. At one time, certain apes began walking upright, so freeing their hands to grasp – not only in gathering food, but also in the use of tools. Human groups fished, then hunted, following rivers then stalking prey. Another stage produced the bow and arrow and the beginnings in some areas of settlement.²

In the century since Engels wrote, conjecture about these developments has been greatly refined and the role of sexuality and language acknowledged as part of the process.

Between 4.5 million and 2 million years ago, evidence has been found in Africa of small-brained apes walking upright. These are assumed to have come down from the trees permanently, perhaps in response to climate change and a search for food. Their teeth were stronger, useful for chewing tougher foods, such as meat. These apes were classified as Australopithecines. During the Pleistocene period – one million years ago – they became homo erectus, early human. These primates from the Middle Pleistocene had skulls that were like a narrow dishpan turned upside down, while a later branch – homo sapiens – had skulls like an inverted bowl. Remains of this round-headed creature have been found in Java, China, east and north Africa. Another branch of hominids found from this period are the Neanderthals, who later died out (see below).

From the late Lower Pleistocene, simple tools are found with animal bones. These were sticks shaped to dig up roots and stalk small game animals. They had been cut by sharpened flint pieces, which were later tied to the sticks and became hand axes. Spears appear later that can bring down a horse, ox or deer. Similar tools though have been found that were not worn away by use. These could be sacred objects. Meanwhile, the skulls found near them indicate a brain of modern size. Dated 100,000 to 60,000 years ago, these skulls are found among evidence of practices such as the burying of the dead and the building of boats.

Hunting large animals with spears implies teamwork, while the use of sacred symbolic objects indicates myth-making, the passing on of knowledge. Somehow, the upright ape had developed the custom of working in groups, using tools and passing on an understanding of the world.

How had this change occurred?

Sex and sociability
Most species reproduce enough offspring to ensure survival of their genes because the male is alerted as to when the female is ovulating and ready to conceive. Chimps and baboons, for example, have an obvious reddening of the sexual parts.

Like other primates, our animal ancestors could have lived either in promiscuous groups or in subgroups or ‘harems’ controlled by a dominant male. The ape ancestor of humans was probably clear about when the female was ovulating. It has recently been suggested, however, that at some point a female must have been born that had the signs of ovulation concealed. Mating with these females, males in promiscuous groups could not be sure which offspring were theirs. One effect of this would be to stop the usual practice of primates, which is to kill off the children of other males.

Concealed ovulation may have meant in effect that offspring belonged to everyone. Such ambiguity of parenting might make for closer groups all round – more sharing of food and more affection and solidarity between adults and children. These more sociable groups would have had a survival advantage. Flexible female mating might also have encouraged both females and male to copulate just for pleasure, mutual pleasure. The appearance then of mutual sexual pleasure and promiscuous parenting could be the source of human solidarity.3 Force would not have achieved the bonding necessary. Whatever practices of male dominance, incest taboos or monogamy conventions followed, in the beginning was sexual communism.

Intelligence agent
These sociable creatures began to develop something else: transmittable intelligence or language. In Prehistory of the mind, Steven Mithen allies the physical and social growth of early humans with the kind of intelligence he speculates developed at different times.4 The perceptiveness of post-erectus homo sapiens was in many ways indistinguishable from animals. As with other mammals, they were familiar with the appreciation of climate and danger. To this was added an expertise in hand tools like stone-cutting implements. For communication, it is likely that these early humans used a simple set of sounds, like animals, to give commands or warnings – ‘keep away’, ‘fruit here’, ‘large prey ahead’.

Animals use communication for many purposes: marking territory, warning adversaries, courtship. In his work on primate groups, anthropologist Robin Dunbar focuses on the purpose for apes of one particular form of physical communication.5 While living in groups, apes convey information to and about each other by grooming – picking out fleas and lice from each other’s bodies. Whom one chooses to give this attention to, for how long and whom you let watch – these function as social messages, affirming relationships, as well as getting rid of dirt.

Dunbar reckons that any one primate spends 30% of their time grooming others. It is his proposition that, as group size increased, and relationships grew more complicated, spoken language developed as a supplement to physical interaction. Even simple ‘chattering’ speech communicates better and faster to others than massage: conveying liking, mood and defining a common enemy or rival.

In close-knit groups, the best at such grooming would be those sensitive to the moods of others, communicating when required, appealing to emotional states, sensing ‘bad moods’. Those who could infer ‘social knowledge’ about other minds and their intentions, as well as defining who to dislike and exclude, could have acquired an evolutionary advantage. ‘Reading’ and defining others may even have made some individuals leaders.

Furthermore, following Dunbar, it is Mithen’s contention that it was this rudimentary language, these particular sounds – words – that began to act as a ‘vehicle’ for mixing the different intelligences, technical and environmental, acquired in the life of the group. Once created, these names for interpersonal concepts – like/dislike, hostile/friendly – became transferable to other relations in the rest of the physical world. The sky, like a person, is treated as readable: signs of ‘discontent’ in the sky are not only comprehensible as climatic changes, but as a ‘bad mood’ or hostile other, contributing to a ‘cosmic analysis’ of a human-like presence that inhabits the sky.

This may have been followed by rituals to placate the sky, a sort of cosmic grooming – rituals which then bond members of the society together. These ‘modern humans’ can feel that little bit more confident with the world and each other – ‘knowledgeable’ – by using their special sounds that are applicable to the state of persons and applying them to the state of things. But why were these sounds transferable in this way? How, in other words, did they work as symbols?

Standing for something else
Charles Peirce defined a symbol or sign, which could be a word, a sentence or a picture, as something that stands in the comprehension of somebody for something else in some respect or capacity 6 The words ‘dog’ or ‘bitch’ can thus equally stand for a canine. Peirce called the thing that stands for something, the representamen and what it stands for, the object or ground – its idea. The way it is understood in the mind of another was the interpretant – when you say ‘cheese’, you may be thinking Cheddar, while I may take it as Brie.

A representamen can be of three kinds. It can be an ‘icon’: that is, it resembles its object in some way – a cartoon or a photograph can both be a portrait. A sign can also be an ‘index’, physically connected with its object – no smoke without fire. Lastly, it can be a ‘conventional’ symbol, only understood within the interpreting mind as part of a particular code – ‘dog’ is part of English, while ‘un chien’ is French: they are part of different codes. Visual signs can belong to different codes, according to context: on the beach, a red flag may signal danger; on a demonstration, solidarity. Once you have a material representamen or sign, you have something that can be detached, transferred, applied.

It is with this power of detachability that language goes from being rudimentary communication to developed creation, to metaphor, where a word for one thing can stand for another. With this the sociable ape begins to construct what anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called “the science of the concrete”7 – a perception of the world as being similar to the human being.

In this ‘science’, understanding of interpersonal relations, of intentions and actions, is applied to the events of the natural world. Like Darwin’s dog, we intuit an invisible presence. The cosmos is felt to be inhabited by something similar to people – spirits, the supernatural, gods – whose actions explain the world. For instance: why are leopards fierce towards humans? Because, says one South Amerindian tribe, they are annoyed at us. Our ancestor, the first human, was once the servant of the leopard, tending the fire that belonged to the beast. One day the ancestor stole the fire and ran off to start human society. There has been an understandable antagonism ever since.

Not only words, but also their combination in a sentence, suggest the action of people on others and the world. Noam Chomsky in his work on linguistics argues that causation and ‘embeddedness’ form the deep structure, the generative grammar,8 of all sentences. Though word order may differ in different societies, these ways of connecting noun and verb are universal: ‘We are annoying to the leopard because our ancestor stole fire from theirs’; ‘The Big Bang sent out various elements which became the universe and created water and hence life on this planet’; ‘Chimp 1 made chimp 2 feel friendly enough to allow them to go food-gathering together’.

According to Chomsky, 8 awareness of these ways of formulating things is a deep part of our memory – hard-wired in our brains, as it were – just as the skills of grasping are an inherent possibility of our hands. With the casual and connective relations in sentences, narrative becomes a tool for mapping the world. So began art and science: the fabrication of models to understand things. A general intelligence appears – first as superstitious knowledge, but still a cosmic analysis nevertheless, not just gestures between bodies.

Synthesis
This is a qualitative change, and, if you like, the missing link. However, it is no snapshot. Between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, homo sapiens sapiens appears. With a detachable material manifestation – signs – their understanding of personal motivation is applied to things: the concept of annoyance applied to the leopard, the concept of anger to the sky. These were then embedded in narratives resulting in a universe filled with cause and motivation.

Lévi-Strauss comments that this form of thinking is mythical, but just as logical as later science, given the appreciation of other people and the behaviour of other parts of the cosmos. Relating to the spirits in things; placating them with ceremonies; imitating them in pictures and dances; contacting them in trances and intoxications; constructing narratives that explain and categorise – all rely on the characterisation of the world gained through analogy between things and people. Not only is the modern human born in Africa, but culture itself comes out of African animism. Once these ‘models’ of the universe begin to be made, humans then have the opportunity to differentiate between true and false. So begins belief, science, criticism.

This new technology of signs proved decisive. In the area now known as Europe, the most recent hypothesis about why Neanderthals declined and humans flourished is due to this difference.9 Between 35,000 and 24,000 years ago, the former were outbred by humans because humans maintained supportive cultural bonds connecting groups over a vast area, as evidenced by widely found artefacts like sculptures of lion-headed men and basic musical instruments. The Neanderthals may have had comparable tools and even hardier physiques, but the humans had a better form of solidarity, through words, art and music: ‘religion’ (from re + ligare: to bind).

If you want to celebrate our ancestors’ distinctive survival skills: beyond any knife or bowl, look to one of those chunky female statuettes, often called Venuses or earth goddesses, with their divine rolls of fat, carried from Asia into Europe as the Neanderthals became extinct. Humans survived, through drought and ice age, because they sang to the fat lady.

In summary then, one branch of primates due to natural conditions evolved an upright posture and efficient hands, which promoted improved tool use. At one point, these animals become promiscuous in childbearing, which encouraged teamwork. On the basis of these differences, the species homo, the sociable ape, acquired various techniques and knowledges, which were then combined in a general intelligence embedded in language. This communication by transferable symbols, starting from a rudimentary level, attained concepts of causation and connection – generative grammar – by making analogies between interpersonal understanding and natural events. Homo sapiens became a maker not only of things, but also of symbols: homo fabricator.

As Darwin commented, “If it be maintained that certain powers such as self-consciousness, abstraction, etc are peculiar to man, it may well be that these are the incidental results of other highly advanced intellectual facilities: and these again are the result of the continued use of a highly developed language.”10

Design issues
If we are just animals, then constructive change is an idle dream. Apes do not discuss what a good life is: they just live (often by force); apes do not discuss how one should treat apes. If we are mainly spirits, then maybe the superior spirits – the pure spirits, rather than us – should decide what the good society is, which is probably something that exists only where they live, in a realm that has no connection with the matter of which we are made.

The different philosophies and legends thrown up by class history show that fabrications need not be true, and benefit everyone, to be effective. Their hold on the minds of homo fabricator has been described as ‘fetishism’, similar to the worship of a fetish, a doll containing a spirit. “In that world,” Marx comments, “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relations both with one another and the human race.” He applies this not only to early belief, but also to acceptance of the political and social present: “So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.”11 We still take too many human creations, from economic relationships to constitutions, written and unwritten, for living necessities.

Yet the inadequate constructions of yesterday always exist on sufferance. The sociable ape’s urge to fabricate, to redesign, is still with us, if only as a survival skill. The growing interest in self-determination and justice heard in many forms today prevents any easy deference to the established. Many more people too are questioning the unforeseen effects, social and ecological, of our inventions. It remains to be seen whether this expanded awareness can go all the way to a full diagnosis of the problem rather than rest satisfied with treatment of symptoms.

Of course, there is a fear of ‘redesign’. We have the utopias of the 20th century, whether ‘communist’ or ‘free market’, to discomfort us. This is part of the caution about our constructions: that they may backfire on us. However, though we may no longer aspire to be gods, neither are we cattle. We may not ask people to be perfect, but we do ask them to be accountable. We must continue then to evaluate mistakes and test new proposals, asking the right questions, and construct a greater space for the very process of evaluation itself, all over the world. Criticism is sacred.

Why should the adventure of the fabricating ape be over? We have made our bed and we can change it.

Notes
C Darwin The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex (1871), part 1, chapter 2.
F Engels The origin of the family, private property and the state (1884).
J Diamond Why is sex fun? The evolution of human sexuality London 1997.
S Mithen The prehistory of mind London 1996.
RIM Dunbar, ‘Co-evolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences No16, 1993.
CS Peirce Peirce on signs: writings on semiotic (1991).
C Lévi-Strauss The savage mind 1966.
N Chomsky Language and problems of knowledge: the Managua lectures (1988).
BBC2 The incredible human journey May 24 2009.
C Darwin op cit p105.
K Marx Capital Vol 1, chapter 1, section 4, London 1954, p77

The figurine originates from a red-brown, clayey silt at the base of about one meter of Aurignacian deposits.The Venus lay in pieces next to a number of limestone blocks with dimension of several decimeters. The find density in the area of the Venus is moderately high with much flint knapping debris, worked bone and ivory, bones of horse, reindeer, cave bear, mammoth, ibex, as well as burnt bone.

Radiocarbon dates from this horizon span the entire range from 31,000 – 40,000 years ago. The fact that the venus is overlain by five Aurignacian horizons that contain a dozen stratigraphically intact anthropogenic features with a total thickness of 70 – 120 cm, suggests that figurine is indeed of an age corresponding to the start of the Aurignacian around 40,000 years ago.

Although much ivory working debris has been recovered from the basal Aurignacian deposits at Hohle Fels and the nearby site of Geißenklösterle, this sculpture is the first example of figurative art recovered from the basal Aurignacian in Swabia. The discovery of the Venus of Hohle Fels refutes claims that figurative representations and other symbolic artifacts first appear the later phases of the Swabian Aurignacian.

The Venus shows a range of entirely unique features as well as a number of characteristics present in later female figurines. The Venus of Hohle Fels lacks a head. Instead an off-centered, but carefully carved ring is located above the broad shoulders of the figurine. This ring, despite being weathered, preserves polish suggesting that the figurine was worn as a pendant. Beneath the shoulders, which are roughly as thick as they are wide, large breasts project forward. The figurine has two short arms with two carefully carved hands with visible fingers resting on the upper part of the stomach below the breasts.

The Venus has a short and squat form with a waist that is slightly narrower than the broad shoulders and wide hips. Multiple deeply incised horizontal lines cover the abdomen from the area below the breast to the pubic triangle. Several of these horizontal lines extend to the back of the figurine and are suggestive of clothing or a wrap of some sort. Microscopic images show that these incisions were created by repeatedly cutting along the same lines with sharp stone tools.

The legs of the Venus are short and pointy. The buttocks and genitals are depicted in more details. The split between the two halves of the buttocks is deep and continues without interruption to the front of the figurine where the vulva is visible between the open legs. There can be no doubt that the depiction of oversized breast, exentuated buttocks and genetalia result from the deliberate exaggeration of the sexual features of the figurine. In addition to the many carefully depicted anatomical features, the surface of the Venus preserves numerous lines and deliberate markings.

Many of the features, including the emphasis on sexual attributes and lack of emphasis on the head, face and arms and legs, call to mind aspects of the numerous Venus figurines well known from the European Gravettien, which typically date between 22 and 27 ka BP. The careful depiction of the hands is reminiscent of those of Venuses including that of archetypal Venus of Willendorf, which was discovered 100 years earlier in summer of 1908. Despite the far greater age of the Venus of Hohle Fels, many of its attributes occur in various forms throughout the rich tradition of Paleolithic female representations.

The new figurine from Hohle Fels radically changes our view of origins of Paleolithic art. Prior to this discovery, animals and therianthropic imagry dominated the over two dozen figurines from the Swabian Aurignacian. Female imagry was entirely unknown. With this discovery, the notion that three dimensional female imagry developed in the Gravettian can be rejected. Also the interpretations suggesting that strong, aggressive animals or shamanic depictions dominate the Aurignacian art of Swabia, or even Europe as a whole, need to be reconsidered. Although there is a long history of debate over the meaning of Paleolithic Venuses, their clear sexual attributes suggest that they are a direct or indirect expression of fertility. The Venus of Hohle Fels provides an entirely new view of the art from the early Upper Paleolithic and reinforces the arguments that have been made for innovative cultural manifestations accompanying the rise of the Swabian Aurignacian.

While many researchers, including Nicholas Conard, assume that the Aurignacian artworks were made by early modern humans shortly after their migration into Europe, this assumption can neither be confirmed or refuted based on the available skeletal data from the Swabian caves.

The Venus of Hohle Fels forms a center piece for a major exhibit in Stuttgart entitled Ice Age Art and Culture, which will run from September 18, 2009 – January 10, 2010.
Journal reference:

Nicholas J. Conard. A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian deposits of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany. Nature, 2009; 459 (7244): 248 DOI: 10.1038/nature07995
Adapted from materials provided by Universitaet Tuebingen, via AlphaGalileo.

The problem with Darwin’s theory of natural selection is that it over-focuses attention on the small. What of the possibility of invisible macro factors that stand beyond the action of the small-scale. Everything in the debate suggests something is being missed. But what is that? It is like gravitation in Newton’s time (no direct comparison is implied): something invisible and macro (in the sense of defying the point contact in the small of static or impulsive forces), a field, was required to make sense of the data, and Newton was able to proceed despite the charge that such fields where a violation of scientific method.

An unflinching belief that science can explain everything about evolution becomes its own ideology

By Douglas Todd, Vancouver SunApril 4, 2009

There are two major obstacles to a rich public discussion on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and what it means to all of us.

The most obvious obstacle is religious literalism, which leads to Creationism. It’s the belief the Bible or other ancient sacred texts offer the first and last word on how humans came into existence.

The second major barrier to a rewarding public conversation about the impact of evolution on the way we understand the world is not named nearly as much.

It is “scientism.”

Scientism is the belief that the sciences have no boundaries and will, in the end, be able to explain everything in the universe. Scientism can, like religious literalism, become its own ideology.

The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology and Ethics defines scientism as “an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of natural science to be applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities).”

Those who unknowingly fall into the trap of scientism act as if hard science is the only way of knowing reality. If something can’t be “proved” through the scientific method, through observable and measurable evidence, they say it’s irrelevant.

Scientism is terribly limiting of human understanding. It leaves little or no place for the insights of the arts, philosophy, psychology, literature, mythology, dreams, music, the emotions or spirituality.

In general, scientism leaves little or no place for the imagination, which Albert Einstein, after all, said is “everything.”

Many people have been falling into the trap of scientism this year as commentators, including myself, have examined the legacy of Darwin, whose book, On the Origin of Species, was published 150 years ago.

While I am not at all persuaded by Creationists who believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, I also have trouble with those who claim science can only support the atheistic proposal that evolution is a result of pure chance.

Such people maintain orthodox science cannot contemplate the possibility that the evolutionary process may include elements of purpose. This is an example of scientism.

One of the scientists who appears to illustrate this view is Patrick Walden, who works at the TRIUMF Cyclotron Laboratory on the University of B.C. campus.

Walden had a punchy opinion piece published in Monday’s Vancouver Sun in which he began by applauding my proposal that public schools and universities expose more students to Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

While I greatly appreciate Walden’s willingness to step out of the confines of academia and take on the role of public intellectual, I disagree with the second part of his commentary.

Walden was bothered by my recommendation that the education system and the media help the public learn there is more than one operative theory of evolution — that there are at least 12.

Walden assumed I was challenging the general validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution. I wasn’t.

I think the proposal that humans evolved over billions of years from simpler life forms is a no-brainer.

However, I don’t believe either Darwin or neo-Darwinists have yet devised a complete picture of how evolution happens, or what drives it.

I detected more than a hint of scientism when Walden declared that neo-Darwinism (which he called “the modern evolutionary synthesis”) is the only theory accepted by respectable scientists.

Walden said four of the other scientific theories of evolution outlined by Phipps in his article in EnlightenNext journal, including biologist’s Lynn Margulis theory of cooperation, are mere “additions” to neo-Darwinism.

Beyond that, Walden said the other seven proposed theories of evolution, some of which included philosophical and spiritual perspectives, are nothing more than “pseudo-scientific speculation.” As such, he said, “they are nonsense.”

In other words, Walden, whose viewpoint represents that of many

scientists, appears to believe that any discussion of evolution that does not uphold chance as the only driving force is ridiculous.

This is blinkered.

It defaults to atheism. And it assumes incorrectly that what we believe, and the way we live, is always based on provable “facts,” which do not include conjecture, speculation or imagination.

Science has always had a speculative component, as we see with theories about quantum physics and the Big Bang and evolution.

Arguing that any theory about what drives evolution that is not essentially neo-Darwinistic is “nonsense” reflects blindness to the insights that have been offered by philosophy, cosmology and metaphysics, let alone the arts.

In addition to suggesting Walden’s approach reflects scientism, I would also say it is a manifestation of “disciplinolatry,” which is the conviction that one academic discipline contains everything that needs to be known about a subject.

Walden attempts to mock the idea that philosophy and even spirituality could be considered when trying to understand what fuels evolution. He acts as if I am arguing for Madame Blavatsky’s 19th-century esoteric theories (and her anti-Semitic views) to

replace Darwin in public school science classes.

By creating this red herring, Walden ignores the great 20th-century thinkers who have embraced evolutionary theory while offering innovative non-atheistic understandings about how it happens.

They include Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Marshal McLuhan, John Cobb, Ken Wilber, Charles Birch and countless other scientists and philosophers who are not as easy to write off as the eccentric Blavatsky.

The truth is that many scientists are slowly becoming more open to at least discussing the possibility that elements of purpose, not just chance, are inherent in the evolutionary process.

They include the noted biologist Lynn Margulis, the first wife of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, and their science writer son, Dorion Sagan.

Walden appears to think highly of Margulis as an evolutionary theorist. But he fails to appreciate Margulis is willing to expand her mind beyond scientism.

Margulis and Sagan took part this year in an interdisciplinary conference on evolution with philosophers, scientists and theologians at the Vatican.

They have also contributed to books with spiritually inclined scientists and philosophers, including Back to Darwin: A Richer Account of Evolution (Eerdmans), edited by John Cobb.

Back to Darwin says the lively exchange Margulis and Sagan join in on in the book “presents a holistic case for evolution that both theists and nontheists can accept.”

I would like to think Margulis and Sagan would also be willing to have some of the 12 theories of evolution discussed in public schools — if not in biology classes, at least in courses on the history of science or the philosophy of science, as well as in classes on philosophy, world religions and metaphysics.

The general theory of evolution has been widely accepted by both atheists and thinkers with spiritual sensitivities.

Everyone would agree, however, that evolution is also a theory that is incomplete.

When more evolutionary scientists open up to the insights of philosophers and those from other disciplines, I believe their beloved theory will itself evolve. It will become more complex and more elegant.