>> Loren writes:
>> <<Jim Bell first proposed that the rapid appearance human culture was
>> evidence -- similar to the rapid appearance of first life and the rapid
>> appearance of phylla in the Cambrian era -- for God's intervention in
>> history. >>
>> That's not what I said. I said the *sudden* appearance of *modern man.* Jim
>> Foley misinterpreted this as the "rapid development of culture." I went to
>> great lengths to clarify this. In fact, when you posted an actual quote,
>> that's what I said. Now, the "rapid development" of human culture is a clue to
>> the KIND of man which suddenly appeared, but the length of time of the
>> development is not the issue.
Below is your initial quote, to which I responded. I don't think
interpreting "a great cultural outburst" as "rapid development of
culture" is a misinterpretation. I assume that your phrase "beginning
of man in the full biblical sense" was meant to refer to the sudden
appearance of modern man, but there was no way for me to know this; the
phrase is vague enough that it could mean anything.
>> On this basis, one can correlate the beginning of man in the full
>> biblical sense with the evidence of a great cultural outburst about
>> 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Below, it becomes obvious why Jim Bell is impressed by the sudden
appearance of modern humans:
>> Returning now to the sudden appearance of man, I'd like to quote Walker Percy,
>> who Jim Foley thankfully led me back to. Percy is probably a TE, as the
>> following passage indicates. I leave aside that issue, however, to focus on
>> two things: man's *sudden appearance* (as it relates to my "exploding
>> evidence" theory):
>> [long quote deleted]
>> What does this mean? It means, for one thing, that there occurred in
>> the evolution of man an extraordinary and *unprecedented* event which
>> in the scale of evolutionary time was as sudden as biblical creation
>> and whose consequences we are just beginning to explore. A fifty-four
>> percent increase in brain weight in a few thousand years is,
>> evolutionarily speaking, almost an instantaneous event.
It would be, if it had happened.
First of all, Percy talked about tens of thousands of years, you've
already chopped an order of magnitude off his timescale by saying it
took place in a few thousand years. Secondly, Percy's timescale is
itself way too short, maybe by another factor of 10. Archaic Homo
sapiens started appearing hundreds of thousands of years ago, fully
modern man about 100,000 years ago. Evolving from H.erectus to modern
H.sapiens may have taken as much as 500,000 years.
Unless you can find an anthropologist who agrees that this 50% increase
occurred in a few tens of thousands of years, I assert that Percy
doesn't know what he's talking about.
A couple of miscellanea from other posts by Jim Bell:
>> It also depends on the ability use language and symbols. Evidence for
>> this does not exist beyond 40,000 years ago or so. As the experts
>> explain, there is no such thing as a primitive language. It is an
>> all-or-nothing event. That event occurred recently in history.
There is no such thing as a primitive language *now, among Homo
sapiens*. None of your quotes gives any reason to believe that earlier
humans such as Homo erectus could not have had a more primitive form of
language. The fact that we start finding complex cultural artifacts
from 40,000 years ago does not prove that language arose at the same
time.
>> But this view seems at odds with the following:
>> "This capacity for language seems to be, in the evolutionary scale, a
>> relatively recent, sudden, and explosive development. A few years
>> ago, it was thought to have begun to happen with Homo erectus perhaps
>> a million years ago. Now, as Julian Jaynes at Princeton, among
>> others, believes, it appears to have occurred in Neanderthal man as
>> recently as the fourth glaciation, which lasted from about 75,000 to
>> 35,000 years ago." [Percy, "Is a Theory of Man Possible?"]
You treat this as if it was fact, when it is just one opinion, and
probably very much a minority opinion. I think most scientists would
attribute language to Homo erectus. After all they hunted and had stone
tools and fire, I find it very hard to believe that they did not have
some language.
In addition, we have the fossil evidence of Broca's region, nearly 2
million years ago. No, we can't *prove* it was associated with
language, but it's a reasonable inference. In short, we have no
evidence that language arose 40,000 years ago, and some evidence against
it.
Finally, I wouldn't use Jaynes as support for anything. He is not a
respected (or even unrespected) authority. I just snipped this from a
post by York Dobyns on the skeptic listserv:
It isn't just the "brainy" community that considers the book flakey.
I've attempted to explain Jaynes' thesis to cultural anthropologists;
it's a good way to give somebody a healthy belly laugh. Among numerous
problems with Jaynes' arguments:
-Anybody who thinks that hunter-gatherers live simple, routine lives
that can mostly be handled on nonconscious "automatic pilot" not only
has never tried the lifestyle, he hasn't bothered to research it.
-The Inca civilization, and its rather casual defeat by European
conquistadors, is adduced by Jaynes as a case of a bicameral civilization
and the inability of such to deal with the trickiness, flexibility, and
deceitfulness of fully conscious humans. Unfortunately, one of the primary
reasons for the ease of the Inca conquest was that their empire had just
been weakend by a generation-long civil war of precisely the sort Jaynes
claims to be impossible for a bicameral culture.
That's just off the top of my head, from memory. I think Jaynes' book
can, at best, be considered amusing fiction.
--Jim Foley Symbios Logic, Fort CollinsJim.Foley@symbios.com (303) 223-5100 x9765
* 1st 1.11 #4955 * "I am Homer of Borg! Prepare to be...OOooooo! Donuts!!!"