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The Darwinian Dilemma In considering natural selection and the human mind, a difficult problem for DARWINISM has been this: given that a utilitarian, unconscious brain is good and sufficient for processing sensed information and using it for survival tasks, what evolutionary pressure, what survival advantage, can be associated with sensory distortion and conscious mind? What were the stages of evolutionary transition leading to the human mind? “The task of reconstructing the steps through which humans must have passed in their evolutionary transition is so difficult that many have chosen to ignore the problem. One extreme approach, which some may take as a counsel of complete despair, is to proclaim a discontinuity in evolution when it comes to the human mind” (DONALD 1991, p21). DONALD goes on to elaborate the problems. “No convincing geographic or climactic conditions could have produced enough selection pressure to account for the emergence of modern humans. Hominid culture was already able to cope with a variety of climates. Although climate may have played some role, other forces must have been at work” (p209). DONALD then suggests that “the evolution of humanity is likely to have been driven at the level of cultural change” (p209). But why? “What change could have broken the constraints on mimetic culture with such a vengeance, leading to the fast-moving exchanges of information found in early human culture” (p211)? Materialists have not been able to explain this evolutionary transition. As SEARLE describes it, “materialists have a problem: once you have described all the material facts in the world, you still seem to have a lot of mental phenomena left over. Once you have described the facts about my body and my brain, for example, you still seem to have a lot of facts left over about my beliefs, desires, pains, etc” (1997, p43). At least some of these left over facts are accounted for via a God-seeking mind. “The mind is almost as hard to define as the soul”, writes JOS. As he describes the confusion within psychological theories of the mind, “it has gone from describing varieties of religious experience to censuring them, from phrenology to scanning brain and DNA, and at last—coming full circle—to explaining belief in DARWINIAN terms. Psychology is a journey from the arts to the sciences and back again” (JOS 1997, p13). On such a journey, I suggest, there is an evolutionary “bridge” to be found connecting imagination and religious behavior to the rest of adaptive behaviors. Neither anthropologists nor evolutionary psychologists have put forward a viable theory that shows why imagination and conscious distortions of sensory experience might have been more adaptive then the mindless utilitarian brain that predated them. “The brain is the ultimate lying machine” (JOS 1997, p13). Why should natural selection favor such a machine: in particular, why should it favor something that distorts reality, and hence, lies to itself? Further, nature tends to be lavish. If mind is a good survival device, why don’t we find it elsewhere? Why are there no precursors of mind to be found in the rest of the animal world? (DEACON 1997; DONALD 1991; LORENZ 1977). These questions have been thorns in the side of evolutionary explanations of mind. One problem has been to explain natural selection’s favoring of structures unexpressed in overt behavior: consciousness, imagination, and also, quite prevalent if not universal among early Homo sapiens, schizophrenia. Could schizophrenia, which (JAYS 1976) suggests to be a vestige of ancient mind, have come into being as an adaptation for sensing spiritual guidance, and for finding a guiding spiritual voice? Looked at in terms of physical survival, these inner devices would be disadvantageous. What survival advantage could there be in fantasizing and in distorting reality? Steven PINKER suggests that we need not bother with such difficult or impossible to answer questions. He says that “we should expect to find activities of the mind that are not adaptations in the biologists’ sense. But it does mean that our understanding of how the mind works will be woefully incomplete or downright wrong unless it meshes with our understanding of how the mind evolved” (PINKER 1997, p174). Just so. I argue that these questions can be answered: not only how the mind works, but why. I suggest that long before discovering grain and settling in the fertile crescent to harvest it, humans had reached an evolutionary stage where “not by bread alone” was the modus operandi. A stage was reached where, driven by the search for supernatural support, mental considerations began to play a role in human survival, sometimes in opposition to physical considerations. Humans might, on occasion, decide to go hungry, to do (or not do) something which then resulted in hunger. They might, with the development of magic or religious belief, decide to fast, to ritualistically sacrifice food, to suffer hunger, for the sake of their mental well-being, which had come to be an important part of their total well-being and of human survival. PINKER titles a section of How the Mind Works, “The Smell of Fear”, in which he lists ancient and still common fears: snakes and spiders, and “large carnivores, darkness, blood, strangers, confinement, deep water … The common thread is obvious. These are the situations that put our evolutionary ancestors in danger… Fear is the emotion that motivated our ancestors to cope with the dangers they were likely to face” (PINKER 1997, p386). In this he lumps human fears with those of other animals. He does not distinguish “of mice and men”, of that human apprehension put forward in Robert BURNS poem To a Mouse; “The present only toucheth thee; But och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward, tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!” PINKER does not mention apprehensions: fear of future sickness or future death, fears not based on current dangers. He speaks of phobias, many of which, he suggests, we share with other animals. “The world is a dangerous place, but our ancestors could not spend their lives cowering in caves” (PINKER 1997, p388). True. But shouldn’t an overview of how the mind works include human apprehensions? Fear of eventual death, fear of dangers not in the workable environment, fears which could only be offset by imagined sources of protection, these fears only can be disadvantageous and potentially debilitating to the individuals lacking imagination. There is nothing “right” that they can do under those circumstance, but there is much they can do that is wrong for their survival. There are innate functional properties of the phenomenon of fear which evolution delivers ready made; “the individual must accept them as he must the form of his cranial bones… actively avoiding or fleeing from dangers offers the individual better prospects of survival than passivity. It does, however, also contain the possibility of doing the wrong thing” (LEYHAUSEN 1973, p250). The functional properties of human fear, of course, were and are highly complex in nature, and beyond the scope of this . One large topic, untouched here, is the relationship between fear and aggression (BECKER 1973; LEYHAUSEN 1973). However, it does seem reasonable to conclude that for the hominid lacking imagination, fear of an unavoidable danger, would surely increase the possibility of his doing the wrong thing—which, in the instance of a devitalizing fear, would include doing nothing in a situation that calls for action. There have been some five million generations in the evolution of primates, increasingly aware of themselves as prey, and developing neurological structures to increase their security. Consider Homo sapiens, late in that stage of evolution, when, superimposed on those structures for security, there developed apprehensions, an awareness of mortality and an awareness of themselves as a kind of prey for which there seemed no way to increase security. Without the power of imagination, such awareness, I suggest, would be an impediment. Individuals encumbered with fears for which precautions could not be taken would be less successful. I suggest that an individual with such apprehension would be more hesitant in hunting big game, and less willing to take the necessary risks. The individual beginning with such fear would be less fit in making a living. The hunter who starts out hungry but apprehensive would tend to be less successful than one who starts out merely hungry. In the aggregate, entire tribes of such hungry but fearful hunters would tend to be less successful. What adaptation could be developed in response to such fear? Who would now be fittest to survive? Natural selection might favor “lesser-brained” individuals who, still secure in their ignorance, lacked awareness of impending death. Instead, a genetic spark might somehow appear, natural selection might somehow “stumble upon” a brain companion of sorts: a device or process whose function would be to hunt out, via images, ways and means of mitigating the debilitating fear.() 网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文作品权归所有；未经官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯作品权现象，保留一切法学追诉权。() 更多范文欢迎访问我们主页 当然有需求可以和我们 联系交流。-X()，英语论文范文，英语论文题目 |
