I'm currently bothered by how biology shapes us, and how it effects our personhood. Considering the manner in which biology works, it seems that life is just a medium for which DNA propagates itself. Our germ line happens to have benefited from both the creation of abstract intelligence and highly social behavior; though if mindless cannibalism would have contributed more to its continuance, exactly that might have happened. As far as biology is concerned, all that matters is that we live long enough to produe another generation of creatures that will perfrom exactly that function.
Being derived by biological evolutionary means, our behavior is in part dictated by these biologies. Perhaps the largest is the drive to couple and produce offspring, followed closely by eating and defecation. These have even informed culture to a large degree, though the last may not seem so (perhaps a discussion of the culture of defecation might be interesting). And because of these, we spend considerable energy following these, i.e. being animal, as opposed to contributing to the sum of the universe's culture and knowledge, being people. The latter, course, can be informed by the previous, and has produced a mass amount of work culturally interesting, but should be known as being human, and can only be understood from the context our particular animal-person.
Whilst these biologies may contribute to our humanhood, personhood, they may also detract. The upkeep needed to maintain ourselves as biological beings is of such a degree that only the wealthiest of persons in the world, which it seems would include myself (and as such fills me with guilt), get the opportunity to contribute considerably, or even insignificantly, to the canon of personhood.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Saturday, October 3, 2009
On the genera Pan and Homo
I always read things on the internet. It seems to be the major constituent of my leisure. Two articles from this week are the progenitors of this post. One is directly, this on the complexity of culture and astronomy displayed by the Lascaux cave paintings (from Environmental Graffiti) . The second, PZ Myers' take on the Ardipithecus ramidus fossil and its media coverage, led to Carl Zimmer's discussion on the same fossil, as well as the Wikipedia articles on the genus Pan, great ape language and Kanzi, the bonobo. These have me wondering when we became people.
It is thought that we became civilization with the Agricultural Revolution some ten thousand years ago. But the Lascaux paintings,a thoroughly prehistoric work, suggest otherwise. We had already devoted much of our intellectual capacity on star gazing, religion and artistic media and technique, at least another five thousand years earlier. Culture has obviously been thriving for much longer than history, and perhaps may have even existed on a geological scale.
However, culture isn't shared amongst our Homini brethren, though a multitude of other traits are. Specifically, language comprehension. Studies have been done for ages on Gorillas, Chimps and Bonobos, and a lot of them are conservatively inconclusive. However, as evidenced by Kanzi, it is possible for Bonobos who have learned language through immersion to comprehend sentences they have never heard uttered before, a hallmark of language comprehension. Similarly, communication in apes activates similar regions in our brain that we have deemed the language centers in humans.
I would hypothesize that our preexisting social brain centers were developed as our vocal organs developed; we utilized our new organs for communication and selection drove the development of language and the organs themselves.
Our last common ancestor with the genus Pan was some seven million years ago. Culture must have arisen somewhere during that time, but it might be possible that we might've been cultured beings for millions of years now. Because of the complex nature of language, it could be hypothesized that as language increased in complexity, the memes of culture could be more easily passed from one generation to the next. (Interestingly, complex learned behavior, culture, as also been shown to exist in Orca lineages, suggesting a second natural occurrence of culture on Earth. If it happened twice on Earth, it would easily happen else where in the universe, given the existence of intelligent life).
It seems plainly obvious—and sillily self-evident now—that people arise fairly early, and far before technology. We think that people have only existed since the dawn of technology, but we might have existed for nearly twice that amount of time, and perhaps far more.
I am beginning to feel that personhood has varying degrees, and that is the underlying proplem with the ethics of personhood.
It is thought that we became civilization with the Agricultural Revolution some ten thousand years ago. But the Lascaux paintings,a thoroughly prehistoric work, suggest otherwise. We had already devoted much of our intellectual capacity on star gazing, religion and artistic media and technique, at least another five thousand years earlier. Culture has obviously been thriving for much longer than history, and perhaps may have even existed on a geological scale.
However, culture isn't shared amongst our Homini brethren, though a multitude of other traits are. Specifically, language comprehension. Studies have been done for ages on Gorillas, Chimps and Bonobos, and a lot of them are conservatively inconclusive. However, as evidenced by Kanzi, it is possible for Bonobos who have learned language through immersion to comprehend sentences they have never heard uttered before, a hallmark of language comprehension. Similarly, communication in apes activates similar regions in our brain that we have deemed the language centers in humans.
I would hypothesize that our preexisting social brain centers were developed as our vocal organs developed; we utilized our new organs for communication and selection drove the development of language and the organs themselves.
Our last common ancestor with the genus Pan was some seven million years ago. Culture must have arisen somewhere during that time, but it might be possible that we might've been cultured beings for millions of years now. Because of the complex nature of language, it could be hypothesized that as language increased in complexity, the memes of culture could be more easily passed from one generation to the next. (Interestingly, complex learned behavior, culture, as also been shown to exist in Orca lineages, suggesting a second natural occurrence of culture on Earth. If it happened twice on Earth, it would easily happen else where in the universe, given the existence of intelligent life).
It seems plainly obvious—and sillily self-evident now—that people arise fairly early, and far before technology. We think that people have only existed since the dawn of technology, but we might have existed for nearly twice that amount of time, and perhaps far more.
I am beginning to feel that personhood has varying degrees, and that is the underlying proplem with the ethics of personhood.
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