[Xmca-l] Re: human etc

[Anthony Barra]

Very interesting, David - thanks.   So is that a No or a Yes?  I kind of
can't tell.

Anthony

On Sun, Aug 9, 2020 at 5:11 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike Cole has criticized Vygotsky on exactly this point: in "The Socialist
> Alteration of Man" (and in other texts), he seems to think that
> phylogenesis doesn't exactly stop but it is carried on by artificial means,
> as if development were kind of shunted from a slow track to a much faster
> one, e.g. by socialist eugenics. It's certainly true that the Soviets
> believed in a phylogenesis by intelligent design, although they attributed
> that design to the socialist future and not to the Creationist past. It is
> also true that their distinction between phylogenetic development and
> sociogenetic development is a little too sharp for anything but rhetorical
> accuracy (it is partly developed in opposition to Social Darwinism). But I
> think that the main theatre for intelligent design was supposed to be
> political economy, and not biology. In that field, the Soviets were
> over-optimistic, or perhaps they simply didn't or couldn't understand the
> part of Capital where Marx reminds us of the difference between a sloppy
> architect and a really talented honeybee: the former, but not the latter,
> has mastered language and can raise his structure in imagination and in
> words before blundering on into steel and concrete.
>
> One of the things you learn drawing the human figure in art school is that
> the medievals didn't know how to draw children: Giotto's pictures of Christ
> show him as a shrunken adult. It really isn't until the Renaissance that
> painters figure out that an adult is about seven heads tall and a child is
> only about four heads tall. We sometimes think of the Renaissance as being
> a "return to the Greeks", but in fact it was Giotto and his colleagues who
> were slavishly following Aristotle. The Greeks had apparently written that
> the ideal height of a person was seven times the distance from the bottom
> of the chin to the top of skull and fashioned their gods accordingly. But
> if you dig up skeletons from that time, particularly those of the slave
> class, you find that they are only five or six heads tall. So the gods that
> people had in mind back then were actually idealized versions of the
> slave-owning class--putting flesh on the skeleton of your boss. Or, if you
> prefer, they were doing their own version of science fiction, because today
> we are on the average the stature of a Greek god (which is why we think
> that their fantastic versions of human height are actually 'realistic').
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
> Outlines, Spring 2020
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!VJOSPAYKLOmIcfdq-6DpUH6Ccmsg-W8W-0RGaev2aG4d_lcIIRHMhpMIqWrxbkV9a_kQ6w$ 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!TuLHcPCurn3Tt7a-dwWNUjD96PkWT_X-aGLLq2cVMX068SIKfKA88_DDQLgPFR4glb6neA$>
> New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works* *Volume
> One: Foundations of Pedology*"
>  https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!VJOSPAYKLOmIcfdq-6DpUH6Ccmsg-W8W-0RGaev2aG4d_lcIIRHMhpMIqWrxbkVEwm9Mbg$ 
>
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!TuLHcPCurn3Tt7a-dwWNUjD96PkWT_X-aGLLq2cVMX068SIKfKA88_DDQLgPFR43nyNT3w$>
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2020 at 3:04 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Does human phylogenesis end?  Like, is there a dividing line or
>> stop-point between human development and whatever version or branch comes
>> next?
>>
>> I was going to look this up but figured I'm better off just posing the
>> question here. (A favor to anyone who answers: try to talk to me like I'm
>> ignorant here -- because that would be correct!)
>>
>> Related: here's a fun and very interesting show that plays around with
>> future (and not-so-future) possibilities of human development:
>> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Million__;!!Mih3wA!VJOSPAYKLOmIcfdq-6DpUH6Ccmsg-W8W-0RGaev2aG4d_lcIIRHMhpMIqWrxbkVeg0Qx_w$ 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Million__;!!Mih3wA!S6RpUe7tKXHgEfQnhGveZQV1LbA1OhhVvxCcLctUKHrBssGuvvKrFmGHo0VrzlmuKZy1Ug$>
>>
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> Anthony
>>
>
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