网范文：“The Prehistoric Background ”虽然没有明确的证据表明人类是如何进化的,我们知道很多对于大脑进化,在新的结构是怎样生长的,对于大脑处理信息的环境中变得更聪明。这篇社会范文讲述的是想象力是如何进化的。但这种信息智能化不能解释,人类想象力的发展,诸如精神体验。人类拥有更聪明的大脑,在生存斗争中,显然是有用的。人类用它们创建一个改变世界的图像然后存储为精神的图像，英语论文范文，实际上并不存在。
之前获得的想象力,动物容易操作性条件反射。随着时间的推移,我们的祖先发明了对于环境的学习能力的方式，远远超出单纯的试验和错误的行为。下面的范文进行详述。
Although there is little clear evidence for how “Homo religious and Its Brain” evolved, (HOLMES 1996, p441), we do know quite a bit about how prereligious brains evolved, how new structures grew around older ones, and how animals housing larger brains grew smarter in processing information from their environment. But such informational smartness, nuts-and-bolts-survival smartness, need not lead to, and certainly does not explain, the development of human imagination and such things as spiritual experiences; they are different kinds of things.
Humans, together with the evolution of bigger and smarter brains, obviously useful in the struggle for survival, evolved with an addition to that system: a companion device whose usefulness is not obvious (DONALD 1991; MITHEN 1996). It is a device that gained awareness of itself and its fate, and then developed structures and processes: conceptual thought and symbolic language, to bear the weight of that awareness, to make sense of the world, to discover “meaning” in it, and hence, to make fragile, finite existence more bearable (LANGER 1982). Humans use them to ascribe “purpose” to a seemingly indifferent environment, to ameliorate frightening sensory information, to countermand unacceptable empirical evidence, and to create an altered image of the world which is then stored as mental images of what is not actually present, of what has not been actually experienced (LORENZ 1977; LANGS 1996).
Before gaining imagination, the actions of our ancestors were, undoubtedly, operant behaviors, responses to stimuli that operate on the environment. DENTT calls such lower-order animals, creatures susceptible to operant conditioning: Skinnerian Creatures (1995, 1978). In time, our ancestors developed the ability to learn about the environment in ways far beyond mere trial and error behavior. DENTT speaks of creatures like ourselves that “have two environments, the outer environment in which they live, and an ‘inner’ environment they carry around with them… we are talking of the evolution of (inner) environments to suit the organism, of environments that would have survival value in an organism” (1978, p77).
DENTT further explains: “the inner environment is simply any internal region that can affect and be affected by features of potential behavioral control systems” (p79), an environment in which advanced creatures ask, “what they should think about next” (1995, p378). Having such an inner environment, hominids, as they evolved towards human self-awareness, observing the violent end of a young comrade, the weakening and deterioration of an older one, the long sleep without an awakening, from all this, a new kind of behavioral response would begin to emerge. There would be a need for new and different survival adaptations.
As awareness emerged, perhaps in dreams, first the gnawing feeling, then the shocking thought, must have taken hold: “This may happen to me”. Later, the more awesome extension of thought: “Death is a common happening. This will likely happen to me”. A less dramatic but quite likely scenario is that proto-humans came to that thought gradually over generations of increasing melancholy, moving toward depression, encountering death with a growing awareness of mortality and a feeling of helplessness. They would look at dead comrades and feel some- thing bad, dangerous, even ominous, without knowing just what or why.
They might have been prey to psychosomatic illness while in the very process of developing psyche! They might engage in unproductive searches for the cause of their feeling the physical presence of something bad or dangerous, the cause of this new kind of fear. “Evolution has bred into the members of every animal species a rate of production of fear which corresponds to the average degree of endangerment in which the species must live and survive” (LEYHAUSEN 1973, p254). With most animals, production of fear is limited to present dangers: dangers that can be guarded against. Some animals are faced with incessant danger: “An animal of this kind can better afford to go without food or sleep for a whole day or even longer, or to miss a mating, than to relax its constant alertness for five minutes…
As long as the endogenous production of fear roughly matches actual endangerment and the overall harmony of the instinct system which has been won in the process of evolution is maintained, then for the organism concerned this is only right” (LEYHAUSEN 1973, p254). Constant alertness could not be “right” for humans faced with nascent fears of dying, even if its initial negative effects were minimal. Human survival was already precariously balanced (MITHEN 1996). Natural selection could not provide any stateof-the-art flight or fight adaptation. Some adaptation quite new in nature was required if the species was to survive. Indeed, only one species, of those who might have had nascent awareness of mortality, perhaps the only one to develop imagination, did survive.
Of such fear and “subjective emotional experiences” LEYHAUSEN speculates: “the relationship between the propensities or instincts of fear and the experience of fear as seen from the view of the ethologist are unavoidable… in part still hypothetical and insofar represent an appeal for the development of a research program designed to test them” (1973, p255). In regard to genetic differences, from atrophy to hypertrophy of fear: “If hypertrophy has affected the production of fear, we get the whole range from the overfearful to the serious case of anxiety neurosis, where the minimum level of the automatic production of fear has shifted considerably farther ‘upward’ and thus does not fall victim to atrophy from disuse even when there is a complete lack of adequate releasing situations.
The person affected is therefore constantly under pressure from the strongest appetences for fear, looks for and finds a ‘substitute object’, and since this is, of course, not the real cause of his fear, in this instance no habituation to stimulus or decline in stimulus-specific sensitivity can set in” (LEYHAUSEN 1973, p267). Over generations, with increasing awareness of changes and then a glimmering awareness of time itself, individuals must have struggled with increasing nonspecific fears before grasping the specific (if yet unthinkable) fear: “Death can happen to me”. Such nascent feelings and thoughts may have occurred in many forms before taking root in the soil of mind as a specific fear of death. Earlier, an individual sense of life would be somewhat diffuse and impersonal: not strongly felt as a single being (LANGER 1982).
Gaining self-awareness, the individual would gain an increasingly specific fear of death of self. Full awareness of a personal death is still evolving as we enter the 21st century. In the early stages of its evolution, neurological structures and language to express such thought, as well as the thoughts themselves, most likely would develop in parallel: the need and the adaptation to serve that need. There are many aspects of this growing awareness that must be considered here. For one, human groups during the periods considered here were small: some few dozen individuals (perhaps as many as ten dozen) living together as sub-groups sharing a common space (MITHEN 1996). Bonds of friendship would tend to be strong; individuals would be mentally as well as physically important to each other. Picture now, as awareness was developing, one of a myriad of events: the death of one individual after some period of suffering, with the others trying to give aid.
The dead body likely would be salient for some time before burial or other disposal. The others would struggle to come to terms with the event. Two comrades might share looks, tears, and moans; they might then, somehow, create a way of remembering and communicating their sharing the event. In time there would be a symbolic representation of the event that would be stored in nascent memory and retrieved later, around some similar event. I suggest that, in the iterative process, the development of imagination and its cultural expression would be advanced. In considering how you and I differ from our ancestors in facing death, these two matters should be considered first. We do not often look on death; we have language to share, culture and imagination with which to filter thoughts when we do look. There are comforting religious beliefs, but even for those who reject such, there are cultural supports to lean on.
Considering the controversy over the respective roles of genes and memes in evolution (BOO/SMITH 1998), a useful analogy with the development of imagination may be that of the development of fire. There is the matter of creating the initial sparks for ignition: genetic, and then the matter of fuel to expand and keep it going: social–cultural material. With regard to my thesis here, both the initial spark of awareness of the problem of mortality, and the initial spark of imagination offering a “solution”, would seem, of necessity, to be genetically based. By one or another sudden variation or more gradual change to that part of the brain beyond my knowing, imagination would begin with a genetic spark. Given that spark, the “fuel” would come from the need and social–cultural material at hand.
With a growing awareness of mortality, I suggest, would come debilitating apprehension. In order for those individuals to function and survive, that awareness, as with current mortality awareness, would need to be managed (PYSZCZYNSKI/GREENBERG/ SOLOMON 1997). Such awareness would tend to be most debilitating for a creature lacking even the ability to commiserate with others: the linguistic ability to express such apprehensions. I suggest that it was such social needs, more than any direct survival need, which led and sped the evolution of those mental processes we loosely call “mind”, partly individual in nature and partly communal processes: evolution of individual structures and abilities, as well as complex social organization. “Knowledge of the inevitability of death gives rise to the potential for paralyzing terror which would make goal directed behavior impossible” (PYSZCZYNSKI/GREENBERG/SOLOMON 1997, p2).
How could an increasingly smart but bare-brained creature lacking cultural support come to terms with the emerging sense or feeling that he or she, as all others in the tribe, might die? FREUD in considering this question writes, “what primitive man regarded as the natural thing was the indefinite prolongation of life—immortality. The idea of death was only accepted late, and with hesitancy. Even for us it is lacking in content and has no clear connotation” (FREUD 1950, p76). The human senses were well-equipped to sense and perceive the natural world, the local environment in which to hunt and gather, to find a place to sleep secure from leopard and other predators.
But how were early humans to secure themselves from this most pervasive and awesome predator? Undoubtedly, from its first glimmer, it would be a problem they would focus on. During the long hours of night, awake and in dreams, there would be few if any more vital matters of thought. How were they to avoid that sleep without end, that change of warm and vital flesh into something cold and unresponsive? Dead bodies would be salient; death itself, quite likely would be viewed as something caused by unseen predators. Nothing appeared in the sensed environment that offered a defense against these predators, nothing that the brain and its information sensors could discover. Another sensor was needed to look beyond the others, to perceive a more distant or hidden world that might offer such defenses. Needed too was the ability to share perceptions of such a world with others in the tribe, and hence, a brain with long term memory devices for storing the products of imagination.
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