Re: The Origins of Human Society
- From: Bob Kolker <nowhere@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:12:52 -0500 (EST)
Spanish Paranoia wrote:
"Every educated person since Darwin has labelled himself an
'evolutionist'. But a real evolutionist must apply the idea of
evolution to his own forms of thinking. Elementary logic, founded in
the period when the idea of evolution did not yet exist, is evidently
insufficient for the analysis of evolutionary processes. Hegel's
logic is the logic of evolution. Only one must not forget that the
concept of 'evolution' itself has been completely corrupted and
emasculated by university professors and liberal writers to mean
peaceful 'progress'. Whoever has come to understand that evolution
proceeds through the struggle of antagonistic forces; that a slow
accumulation of changes at a certain moment explodes the old shell and
brings about a catastrophe, revolution; whoever has learned finally to
apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself, he is a
dialectician, as distinguished from vulgar evolutionists"
Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism
This is not evolution in the Darwinian sense. This is based on some
whackdoodle neo-Lamarckian idea of inherent devlopment and perfection.
The Marxists had to believe something like this. It was the only way to
create a Altruistic Man capable of sustaining the Socialist State to Come.
Over the past two decades, there has been a revolution in archaeology
and palaeontology, leading to the view that the earliest tool-makers,
while more intelligent than apes, were involved in essentially
primate-style social and reproductive relationships. Admittedly, humans
were co-operatively hunting large game animals by at least 500,000
years ago. But archaeologists have found no evidence for art, ritual or
other "symbolic" behaviour at such early dates. Most archaeologists are
now agreed that even large-brained humans such as the Neanderthals were
not leading a recognisably human or "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle. The
dominant view is that anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa
around 130,000 years ago and then, some 60,000 years later, rather
suddenly spread across the world in an explosive process known as the
"human revolution". It was during the earliest stages of this
revolutionary process that symbolic art, ritual and language emerged.
The homo saps hit on a Good Trick which has served them well for over
70,000 years. The homo saps discovered Object Oriented social
processing, based on abstraction. It is not an obvious trick at all, but
it sure worked! The Neanderthals were still using machine language.
Bob Kolker
.
- References:
- The Origins of Human Society
- From: Spanish Paranoia
- The Origins of Human Society
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