网范文：“The Evolutionary Pathway to Imagination ”想象力的进化，英语毕业论文，在原始社会,好奇的原始人有实用工具,但缺乏与思维联系在一起,人类的自我意识进化,也许是他们的机灵和好奇的必然结果。这篇生物范文谈了人类想象力的发展。这种看法在时间和空间上是独立存在的。这个新的认同感的开端可能发生在大约201700年前,当我们的祖先开始直立行走,大脑几乎和我们的一样大。这种生物可以产生许多的自我意识,以及潜在的、模糊的变化。
其他灵长类动物可能有一些表面上的自我意识,但人类自我意识,并且能够代表这样的意识,似乎定性不同。退一步讲，代表赋予自由的思维过程。这是至关重要的发展自我概念。下面的范文进行详述。
What might have driven the engine of evolution to such a unique adaptation as that of human imagination? I suggest the following rough-and-ready account of a long complex process, as a likely sequence of events. In this account, complex questions of the nature and function of self and selfawareness will, of necessity, be simplified. In human evolution, there came a stage when big-brained, curious hominids, having practical tools but lacking those associated with mind, took an evolutionary pathway leading to human self-awareness and awareness of “other”, perhaps as the inevitable consequence of their smartness and inquisitiveness. This perception of one’s individual existence in space and time as separate and in potential opposition to other human existence and the rest of nature would become a driving force in the evolution of the human animal (BRONOWSKI 1977; DOBZHANSKY 1964; LANGER 1982, 1972).
The beginnings of this new sense of identity may have taken place about 200,000 years ago, when our moribund Homo erectus ancestors, with brains almost as large as our own, appeared to be dying out of boredom. What awareness and what thoughts, beyond the dull archeological evidence, might such brains have expressed? “Homo erectus appeared about 1.5 million years ago, and survived until several hundred thousand years ago… The brain was enlarged, at first by about 20 percent, to 900 cc, but eventually, in late Homo erectus, to 1,100 cc, or about 80 percent of modern human cranial capacity” (DONALD 1991, p112). Such a creature would be capable of considerable self-awareness, as well as glimmerings of change and of time beyond the current moment (MITHEN 1996).
Other primates may have some semblance of self-awareness, but human selfawareness, awareness of self in time, and the ability to represent such awareness, seems qualitatively different (DONALD 1991; BRONOWSKI 1977; LORENZ 1977). Being able to step back from what is represented confers a freedom to thought processes. This is crucial for the development of self concepts (DEACON 1997). DOBZHANSKY called this development “an evolutionary novelty; the biological species from which mankind descended had only rudiments of self-awareness, or, perhaps, lacked it altogether” (1967, p68). Preceding the development of human awareness of time and self “there arose, it seems, the need for a new, internally generated image, an executive agent to help coordinate action and thereby provide flexible responses to the unpredictable behavior of food, friend, and foe” (FRASER 1988, p489).
Although this evolutionary process must have been gradual, we can imagine that receptive ancestor who, in bending down to drink from a still pond, stops and gazes at herself, consciously moves her head and hand, and becomes aware of her power to do so. She then comes to recognize that beyond this new-found self lies a larger world of other, no part of which can she move without first grasping it. She may also become aware of some change in herself. Much of this precocious awareness is likely to die with her. Some of it will be passed on. She will have some communication ability that allows her to struggle with and crudely express such awareness. That awareness would also serve the human need FRASER describes and this too might lead hominids further in the direction of symbolic language (DEACON 1997).
There would be an iterative process involving self awareness and language acquisition. If that process begins with awareness of self, our receptive ancestor, in achieving some glimmer of it, takes a precarious step that will lead her children’s children (likely, hundreds or thousands of generations later, but quite rapidly in evolutionary terms) to nascent awareness of mortality. “Self-awareness has, however, brought in its train somber companions—fear, anxiety and death awareness” (DOBZHANSKY 1967, p68).
Undoubtedly, this awareness would also advance words and grammar of human language as the way to express it, as a parallel development to the earlier form of communication: calls and gestures (DEACON 1997). Evolution is unevenly slow. Human evolution seems marked by periods of “punctuated equilibrium”, by certain speciation events that cause dramatic changes (GOULD/ELDREDGE 1993). There might have been many such events and changes on the road to humanhood. Imagination, and language to express its products, would parallel those changes. Although this analogy can take us only so far, compare the awareness of mortality that would follow an awareness of self to the awareness of cold that would follow the most recent advance of ice. With increasing awareness of cold (and a less protective outer surface than hominids had during the previous ice age) would come discomfort, pain, and eventually, some disability in hunting and in other survival tasks.
Initially, nothing need have been done; individuals and tribes could suffer and survive. Nature would favor traits that increase the body’s ability to withstand cold. At some point in time, with increasing cold, the more successful hominids would have gone through certain adaptations of brain and behavior, would have developed sufficient smartness and dexterity to fabricate protective covering from animal skins (DOBZHANSKY 1964). Now consider awareness of mortality. With this too would come discomfort and pain of another sort, and eventually, this might lead to some disability: some apprehensive state of mind which might reduce effectiveness in hunting and in other survival tasks. As with the cold, initially, nothing need have been done; individuals and tribes could suffer with their painful emotions and survive.
Here too natural selection would be at work, favoring traits that might increase the brain’s ability to withstand the painful emotions, and thus, potentially debilitating fear would be reduced and those individuals would tend to be more fit in performing survival tasks. Fear is a powerful emotion leading to adaptations for physical protection. Fear of a kind for which physical survival precautions could not be taken would require a special kind of adaptation. I suggest that with increasing awareness, the more successful hominids would have gone through such adaptations (and have been the beneficiaries of other natural forces); they would thus develop smartness and dexterity of a different kind in order to “fabricate” the protection offered by embryonic beliefs and spiritual presences.
Imagination, I suggest, would be an adaptation in that evolutionary process. Further, this would tend to drive communication along the road of symbolic language. You can’t communicate religious search and discovery via calls and gestures—no matter how complex these calls and gestures might be. LANGER describes the evolution of awareness of mortality as a still incomplete process: “With the rise and gradual conception of the ‘self’ as the source of personal autonomy comes, of course, the knowledge of its limit—the ultimate prospect of death. The effect of this intellectual advance is momentous.
Each person’s deepest emotional concern henceforth shifts to his own life, which he knows cannot be indefinitely preserved… As a naked fact, that realization is unacceptable; there are few societies, savage or civilized, that admit it today” (LANGER 1982, p103). On that long road to awareness (which we are still traveling), hominids would become aware of changes in the environment and begin to detect what they would later come to know as life cycles. They would gain awareness of a time beyond the immediate moment. DONALD, in contrasting the awareness of time in humans to that of apes, writes: “Their lives are lived entirely in the present, as a series of concrete episodes, and the highest element in their system of memory representation seems to be at the level of event representation.
Where humans have abstract symbolic memory representations, apes are bound to the concrete situation or episode” (DONALD 1991, p149). In order to express time beyond the immediate moment, proto-humans had to have some conduit for such thought, some linguistic structure. In the iterative struggle to communicate such thought, previously developed calls and gestures indicating food, courtship, and other opportunities; predators, storms, and other dangers, this utilitarian communication would need to be extended into more conceptual domains, and into what would eventually become symbolic language. Such shifting of communication into symbolic language would facilitate further conceptual awareness, culminating in awareness of mortality: some crude “imagining” of the possibility of one’s own death.
There would now be a greater need for symbolic language, and, undoubtedly, a life and death struggle to achieve it. Although other animals have complex communicative behavior, even a simple language seems impossibly difficult. This poses a profound riddle in understanding the origin of language (DEACON 1997). A possible answer to this riddle might be found within the developing awareness of mortality and the emergence of imagination. “Imaginative discoveries” require just such a communication device as we have—language, with its set of vocabulary and grammar for communicating the abstractions of imaginative discoveries.
At a later stage: “Language and awareness of personal mortality brought with them the emergence of burial practices, rituals, and symbols related to the death experience, along with the origins of religions” (LANGS 1996, p131). “Once symbolic communication became even slightly elaborated in early hominid societies, its unique representational functions and open-ended flexibility would have led to its use for innumerable purposes with equally powerful reproductive consequences” (DEACON 1997, p349).
Accidentally and reluctantly aware early humans (such awareness, I argue, emerging as an impediment to survival) would be forced to consider first the possibility, then the likelihood, and then the yet unthinkable fact of individual death. Imagination, in its early development, although it would prove to be a vital aid in dealing with awareness of death, might also have exacerbated the awareness itself by making it more vivid: “in the evolution of mind imagination is as dangerous as it is essential” (LANGER 1982, p137). Good things hardly ever come easily or without a price tag. Imagining the possibility of one’s death was (and of course still is) an awesome and potentially debilitating awareness, a pervasive “danger” for the individual that cannot, as with specific threats to life, be guarded against. Survival now required something in addition to the satisfaction of physical needs: structures, devices, and processes, for the individual and then for the group, to ameliorate that difficult-to-live-with awareness. Initially, there might be little more than vague feelings of something wrong or threatening. At the very least this nascent awareness would lead to thoughts not conducive to happy hunting. How might that individual deal with such thoughts?()
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