[Xmca-l] Re: Laws of evolution and laws of history
Kindred, Jessica Dr.
jkindred@cnr.edu
Tue Jan 13 20:04:35 PST 2015
The dopamine rush of solving a problem together is not so much transcending biology as just kind of living up to it. That was fun.
________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] on behalf of mike cole [mcole@ucsd.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 10:53 PM
To: Andy Blunden; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Laws of evolution and laws of history
Bingo! I was not hallucinating!
Thanks a lot Jesica and Andy- I was just thumbing through my hardcopy and
stopped to send an email.
Do we interpret this as a belief that humans have transcended biological
evolution? Its in our capable hands now that we are no longer just apes.
Brrrrrr.
mike
On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 7:41 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> Jessica refers to:
>
> "Indeed, the struggle for existence and natural selection, the two
> driving forces of biological evolution within the animal world, lose
> their decisive importance as soon as we pass on to the historical
> development of man. New laws, which regulate the course of human
> history and which cover the entire process of the material and
> mental development of human society, now take their place."
>
> Andy
> PS, I am not the translator, Jessica, just the transcriber. René van der
> Veer and Jaan Valsiner did all the work, and I just scanned it to HTML.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>
>
> Kindred, Jessica Dr. wrote:
>
>> Mike, your paraphrased is very clearly ststed in Vygotsky's essay, The
>> Socialist Alteration of Man, especially in the second through fifth
>> paragraphs. I think this may be the source of the phrase you are looking
>> for, though clearly Vygotsky is riffing on Engels.
>> ________________________________________
>> From: xmca-l-bounces+jkindred=cnr.edu@mailman.ucsd.edu
>> [xmca-l-bounces+jkindred=cnr.edu@mailman.ucsd.edu] on behalf of Andy
>> Blunden [ablunden@mira.net]
>> Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2015 9:23 PM
>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>> Cc: Mikhail Munipov
>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Laws of evolution and laws of history
>>
>> Actually, I think that "the more that human beings become removed from
>> animals in the narrower sense of the word, the more they make their own
>> history consciously" is near as dammit what you are looking for.
>>
>> Engels of course lacked good information. Even in his day Vygotsky had
>> poor information. In "Ape, Primitive Man and Child", "primitive" is
>> taken to mean "non-literate", as it was for Luria in his Central Asian
>> expedition, and a great deal of emphasis is put on the origins and
>> development of *writing*. But writing only appears in Egypt c. 2,000 BCE
>> I think, in any case, in evolutionary time scales 5 minutes ago. The
>> development of writing is nothing to do with evolution of the species.
>> Vygotsky defines primitive man as follows:
>>
>> “This term is commonly used, admittedly as a conventional label, to
>> designate certain peoples of the uncivilized world, situated at the
>> lower levels of cultural development. It is not entirely right to
>> call these peoples primitive, as a greater or lesser degree of
>> civilization can unquestionably be observed in all of them. All of
>> them have already emerged from the prehistoric phase of human
>> existence. Some of them have very ancient traditions. Some of them
>> have been influenced by remote and powerful cultures, while the
>> cultural development of others has become degraded.
>> “/Primitive man, in the true sense of the term, does not exist
>> anywhere at the present time, /and the human type, as represented
>> among these primeval peoples, can only be called “relatively
>> primitive.” Primitiveness in this sense is a lower level, and the
>> starting point for the historical development of human behaviour.
>> Material for the psychology of primitive man is provided by data
>> concerning prehistoric man, the peoples situated at the lower levels
>> of cultural development and the comparative psychology of peoples of
>> different cultures.”(Preface, 1930, Italics in the original)
>>
>> And from the start, this chapter is framed as "cultural development" as
>> distinct from "evolutionary development." Chapter 1 on primates focuses
>> on the limited use of tools possible for apes, with the implication that
>> the cultural development around the emergence of labour, i.e., the
>> production of tools, was part of evolutionary development, prior and
>> leading up to the formation of homo sapiens sapiens. There is no chapter
>> covering the period between 2 million years ago and say `00,000 years
>> ago, where cultural and biological formation are interacting.
>>
>> According to Engels and others including Dewey, speech emerges
>> simultaneously with tools. Dewey makes the point that a tool is not a
>> tool until its use is institutionalised, linking social, symbolic and
>> tool-using activity together.
>>
>> Andy
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *Andy Blunden*
>> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>>
>>
>> mike cole wrote:
>>
>>
>>> So perhaps its just my bad memory, Andy. the issues remain central.
>>> THANKS for the appropriate links!
>>> mike
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 4:51 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
>>> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>>>
>>> There can only be two sources of this idea: Engels' "Part Played
>>> by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" (1876)
>>> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-
>>> played-labour/index.htm
>>> and the Introduction to "Dialectics of Nature" (1883)
>>> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch01.htm
>>>
>>> In the latter work, after explaining how freeing the hands by
>>> adopting an erect gait, led to the use of tools, meaning labour,
>>> and this led to the expansion of the brain, language and sundry
>>> other changes, and thus eventualy the emergence of human beings as
>>> a species. Then he says:
>>>
>>> "With men we enter /history/."
>>>
>>> In the earlier document, he says: "Labour begins with the making
>>> of tools" which Engels claims happened before the formation of
>>> modern homo sapiens, contributing to that formation rather than
>>> being a product of the formation of modern humans, and he narrates
>>> a story which continues from this point up to socialist revolution
>>> as if it were one continuous story, blurring over the distinction
>>> between evolution of the species and historical development of
>>> culture.
>>> The nerest we come to your quote is: "the more that human beings
>>> become removed from animals in the narrower sense of the word, the
>>> more they make their own history consciously." The "narrower
>>> sense" I presume means biological differentiation. So this could
>>> count for what you are looking for, Mike.
>>>
>>> Andy
>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> ------------
>>> *Andy Blunden*
>>> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>>> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> mike cole wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Colleagues--
>>>
>>> I seem to recall reading an idea, that I recall being
>>> attributed to Engels,
>>> that (rooughly) "more and more the laws of evolution are being
>>> replaced by
>>> the laws of history."
>>>
>>> Can anyone enlighten me either as to the source of this
>>> "quotation" or as
>>> to the source of my own confusion in this regard?
>>>
>>> mike
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science as an
>>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
--
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science as an object
that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
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