Sure, or even the mammal brain. It’s which ever parts of the brain are required to recognize that we are surrounded by “objects”.
Really? How so?
Mostly?
Good question. Just as I don’t think mankind emerged on the scene fully equiped with religion, beliefs, superstitions, complex abstract concepts, etc. neither should I think mankind emerged with a fully developed language. However, while we might have to talk about the evolution of memes making its way to religion on the scale of several thousand years, we might be able to get away with talking about the evolution of language on the scale of one individual’s lifetime. A baby would certainly not be born with a full vocabulary and mastering over the grammar of a language, but we might suppose that the baby will slowly develop a language, gradually invent words, on the way to becoming an adult. Man might be equiped with the compulsion to invent language in response to being in social groups. Man may be inherently driven to communicate with his peers, and the result of this compulsion may be the development of a language, one that gets sufficiently fleshed out within one’s life time.
And if this is the case, I would suspect it would be a collaborative effort. The community would share in the development of language, learning to use the same terms and sounds to denote a thing or a concept every time they hear it from someone else.
That’s possible. We know that if a baby is born into a community that already has a fully developed language, the baby will naturally pick up on the language during the first few years of its life. But what if the baby were born into a community without language? Who would the baby learn words from? Would the baby feel compelled to invent his own words (I know babies will sometimes invent their own words; my daughter invented ‘dity’–it was her generic word for pointing at things and saying ‘look at this’!) And if so, would he invent them fast enough to have a fully developed language by the time he reached adulthood? And how much would this depend on the cooperation of the community–that is, for every word invented, the community coops that word and agrees (implicitely) to use it in their language.
Well, I will say that information tends to get distorted as it gets communicated and passed on. It’s like the game of telephone again. When we look to our past, we see how far removed religious and superstitious beliefs can become from concrete empirical experience. Take transubstantiation for example: Christianity would have us believe that the bread and wine served during the Eucharist literally become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Yet there is no reason that a man who is observing this sacrament for the first time (say a primitive man who we brought from the past) would say that the bread and wine literally became flesh and blood. Religion, which is the culmination of the passing on of memes, resulting in distortion, comes to furnish us with beliefs and convictions that are completely cut off from empirical experience–sort of throwing us into a delusional world, the intoxicating effect of which makes drunkards of us all.
Perhaps for the psychic and the clarivoyant?
Another good question! When they tell us that mankind in his current genetic form emerged 200,000 years ago, this really has to be taken with a grain of salt. The fact is, evolution doesn’t take giant leaps and then plateau for a good long while (like 200,000 years); it’s a steady ongoing process–sometimes making giant leaps, other times changing gradually and slowly. At least, this is what I’m told. So over the course of the last 200,000 years, there has been change and diversification. The only reason they mark 200,000 years ago as the dawning of mankind is because we like to think of ourselves as one unified species–the same animal–and so we need a way of answering the question: when did we first evolve? I do believe a major branching of our ancestors’ species (some kind of primate) occurred 200,000 years ago–a giant leap in evolution–which gave rise to what we would call our “human” ancestors, so it’s as convenient a point as any other to label the “dawning” of mankind, but it would be an oversimplification to say that’s the last time in our history when our genes went through a significant change. Since then, in fact, we’ve gotten different races, different eye and hair colors, different mental disorders like ADD. Thomas Hartman writes that the ADD genes (which I have BTW) evolved around 40,000 years ago (imagine that, around the time of religion’s emergence), and what he calls the “farmer” gene (as opposed to the “hunter” gene–that is, ADD) evolved around 10,000 years ago, accounting for the aggricultural revolution and the advent of civilization. And yes, having ADD myself, I do feel like part of a small few trudging through the treacherous waters of the rest of mankind.
Well, if my theory of meme evolution is correct, a new world religion the likes of which we have never seen before is inevitable.